Notebook At large
Donnelly, Daria
AT LARGE Our editor in Cambridge, Massachusetts On Ash Wednesday 2002,1 was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer that weakens the immune system and eats the bones. The chaplain at...
...Though researchers have not yet found a cure for myeloma, it responds to an ever-increasing array of treatments...
...Some forms, like mine, are recognized...
...Cancer, as some of you know from experience, has a bracing effect...
...It has taken a year to draft this notice of my illness, and to work out and announce my new roles at Commonweal...
...The colleagues who called, came, prayed, and cheered me on...
...Shabbat Shalom...
...Fortunately, treatment came even more swiftly...
...Still, I won't kid you: people do die from multiple myeloma, everywhere, still...
...the one who on a Friday night knocked with a warm challah and said simply, "I have heard of your troubles...
...Richard Al-leva, who stepped in to write one of my Children's Books columns...
...Bishops: You ought to get vigorous Catholics into those hospitals with sacraments and expressions of that wisdom...
...Simply because, in the words of the poet Sam Hazo, "It's so damn / good to read what keeps alive / what's dearest to a man...
...The sacrament-bearing pastor...
...Sternum damage precluded lying flat in bed...
...Daria Donnelly...
...My life now literally depends upon the public policy that shapes my medical care, and the conditions in which my caregivers work...
...The fathers and mothers of my son's friends who provided him outings...
...The chaplain at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, put ashes on my head and said, "Remember you are dust...
...Readers may not know that in an earlier life I was a university poetry professor: nineteenth-century American, mainly...
...Travel by other means...
...Co-Poetry Editor...
...It does change energies and horizons...
...I am happy to be associated with such an enterprise-one that recognizes that even in the private struggle of one person to stay alive and see her children grow, the commonweal is implicated...
...The therapies I am still undergoing are demanding, both of energy and of time...
...What I really need to explain here is my new role and new titles at the magazine...
...Translation: I do what I can, when I can...
...My getting sick increased my attention to the everyday heroism of refugees, the depressed, the arthritic, the mourning, the lonely, all those who know how good it is simply to get through a day...
...Many of you know exactly what I mean when I say, You have no idea how much you count on your longevity until it is threatened...
...What can I contribute...
...Commonweal, an able diagnostician, continues to address these ills...
...Others are barely noticed...
...Which brings me to my second title...
...It also wakened my shamefully rusty sense of the cen-trality to the gospel of mercy and healing and (at her best) to the church...
...Even with the limitations and distractions, I am able and want to be part of the great work that is Commonweal...
...I have joined Poetry Editor Rosemary Deen to bring you beautiful poems...
...What do I care about...
...All those graces are integrated in my work for Commonweal...
...the one who provides acupuncture, gratis...
...And my family, especially my husband Steve and our two beautiful children...
...A flattering fiction, as, in truth, I do a good imitation of Emily Dickinson...
...And it depends on the society that has so generously rushed to my aid...
...My family could not have gotten through this year without our neighbors, and our friends and associates from school, work, church, and synagogue...
...The neighbor who took my son to find out he had, not the strep I feared, but appendicitis...
...Thus, I am At Large...
...Affliction is all around us...
...Why poetry...
...Still...
...Illness, like conversion, does not change personality...
...But I go on...
...My struggle with myeloma has been taking place just as my country and my church are experiencing, diagnosing, and treating very dramatic ills: terrorist mass murder and child abuse...
...Stay put...
...All those extra "mothers" (from Trinidad, Hawaii, Maine, L.A., New York, and Medford, Massachusetts) who lifted and carried and cooed at my daughter (I can only coo...
...It makes me seem out and about, maybe even hard to find...
...It depends on the mercy of God, a mystery about which my church has considerable wisdom to offer...
...That Friday I had a bone-building infusion and the first of many other life-saving pills, injections, and chemotherapies...
...I love the title...
...For me, nothing would do in the face of that shock except prayer, the sacraments, a good poem (Hopkins at 1 a.m., and nursery rhymes at every bone marrow extraction), the children's writer Alan Garner (his collected essays, with their uncannily accurate descriptions of sickness and the imagination, was the only book beside the missal that I could read for months), and friendship...
...The friend who negotiates Boston's infamous streets so I can go hassle-free to physical therapy every Tuesday...
...Thanks to a triweekly infusion, my bones are much improved, but they won't be regularly riding the Boston-to-New York Acela train anytime soon...
...At forty-three, and six months postpartum, I had two broken ribs, two, possibly three crushed vertebrae, severe osteoporosis of the spine, and a pelvis so weak that I was losing my ability to walk...
...I was swiftly returning unto dust...
...I keep it light...
...That's testimony to how absorbing illness and healing are- and to how reticent I feel in light of the whole genre of illness writing...
...Joyous labor indeed...
...Fortunately this is less so as I get better: I'm now a vigorous and newly curly-haired woman with a cane, and that's mostly because it beats wearing a "Fragile" sign...
...The women laden with meals...
...Among them: the woman who brought me the Eucharist and sacramentals every week for the nine months I could not go to church...
...I remain an ardent reader of poems written in many places and ages, including today...
...Talk about the ring of truth...
...I'm still cheerful, and still slovenly at my desk...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 8
