A Memoir About Cancer and a Journey

I read a lot of memoirs. I read a lot of memoirs about people with diseases. But when I read Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad, I was still surprised that I was reading so much about a woman’s journey through cancer and not more about her actual journey after cancer.

The cover features a picture of a woman, possibly her, and a dog sitting on a VW type bus and the description stated something about the road trip she took after her cancer diagnosis and treatment. …

They say denial ain’t just a river, but 2020 has been flooded with it. From COVID debunkers to a president who won’t concede the election, 2020 is the crazy man at the podium who refuses to admit his hair dye is running down his temple.

But I don’t even mean all of those obvious dismissals. I have seen myself avoid the truth in much more personal ways this year. It shows up in the things I don’t see, like the piles of manila files that were stacked on the kitchen table for months. They were a reminder of how, like…

Is the pandemic a blip on the radar? Or will it have long-term lasting effects on the way we live? At a time when we can’t seem to agree on anything, it’s no surprise that we’re divided on predictions of how it will all pan out.

Half of Americans think our lives will change in major ways and half think things will return to normal, according to Pew Research Center. Race, age, political affiliation, income, gender, and where we live changes our belief in whether or not life will be different for us after the pandemic:

• 57% of younger adults…

Did you know it has been 20 years since the decade of the brain? The Decade of the Brain, from 1990–1999, was an initiative by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health “to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research.”

During this decade and since, understanding of the brain advanced. Before, we thought that the adult brain stopped growing and changing after its initial development. …

I started reading The Opposite of Certainty, a memoir by Janine Urbaniak Reid, because it’s another story about someone with a brain tumor. This time it was the author’s young son. I’m an astrocytoma survivor and I think I’ve read every book there is on brain tumors trying to find myself in the story. Even as I tried, I never quite found the same story, until now.

Maybe the person I read about didn’t really have a brain tumor, but had cancer instead. Or maybe they had a stroke, like my dad, who acted like a different person after his…

As a writer, words are important to me. I usually write quickly, but still choose my words carefully. When I type, my cursor usually doesn’t just go one way. It goes forward and backward as I write and rewrite, making sure to choose the words I really want to say. When I choose the wrong word, I pick another one.

In the wake of the uprisings following George Floyd’s death, words matter more than ever. A group of artists are showing that now in an area hit by destruction.

Just as the pandemic was beginning in February, my husband and I traveled to Laos and Cambodia. It seems like a lifetime ago now when there was so much uncertainty. As we talked to local drivers and tour guides, they talked about this potential threat. As a driver took us to the airport through the teeming streets of Siem Reap, Cambodia, to the outskirts where it seemed the hotels just stopped, he spoke about what it could do to his livelihood if tourism was affected.

Speech class was part of my high school curriculum. Our teacher made her grading system clear. I don’t remember how speeches were graded, though probably some mix of content and performance. What sticks in my mind after all these years, were the consequences for not preparing your speech. If you missed a speech, you received 20 zeroes.

I remember the teacher standing in front of the class reiterating this fact, “You will receive 20 zeroes,” in a perfectly enunciated speech. …