Online Books > Eve Coleman: Living, Dying and Cancer

My Computer Writing

In retrospect, I think the most important thing Kaye did for me was to encourage me to write about what was happening to me. She knew I had determined that I would find a way to live with cancer long before I knew there was a vocabulary to describe what I was attempting. I had determined that I would think of my "new life" as a kind of journey of self-discovery and hope long before I knew that a man named Frederick Buechner had written a book called, The Sacred Journey . And I had determined to call my book, A Gathering of Stars and Songs and Faces, Fragments of a Life long before I discovered, through Susan Hull, the following quote:

You may in the privacy of the heart take out the album of your own life and search it for the people and places you have loved and learned from yourself, and for those moments in the past-- many of them half forgotten--through which you glimpsed, however dimly and fleetingly, the sacredness of your own journey.

Frederick Buechner

The Sacred Journey

My journey of self-discovery and hope had taken me to places I thought I could no longer travel, both in the real and in the metaphoric sense. I had fought my way up rugged terrain, out of the pit which was clinical depression. Even though I teeter sometimes on the brink of that deep hole, occasionally losing my footing for a time, I try to remain on the high ground. My journey out was too difficult to chance the trip again.

As for more tangible trips, I had traveled to Boston and Maine with my family and my IV antibiotic bag. I had traveled, alone with my daughter Jennifer to the outer edges of Prince Edward Island and found peace as we drove our rental car around the island, going to the western cliffs of the remote Acadian country overlooking the...Yes, I had traveled far.

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