Unraveling

“Discernment requires affective maturity, inner quiet, and an ability to attend to one’s interior life.” – Kevin O’Brien, The Ignatian Adventure

“You just have to sit still and listen… Feel better? That’s what nature does.” – Grandma Tanaka, Hoppers

The other day, a particularly large splinter got deeply wedged into the side of my right index finger (I was handling a birdhouse; new hobby, more on that later). Initial attempts to remove it failed, so I left it alone, but it bothered me the whole next day. Most of the time I couldn’t tell it was there, but every time I bent my finger just so, that whole area would prick with pain.

The obvious solution was to ask my physician husband to take care of it, but after seeing him struggle with central lines in med school, I’ve generally preferred to do procedures myself (you trust your non-dominant hand more than Daddy? one of our kids exclaimed. Er, yes). And so I magnified my vision (which at this incipiently-presbyopic age meant taking off my glasses), grabbed a pair of jeweler’s forceps, and went digging after the splinter.

The whole process was uncomfortable enough that I found the only way to do it was if I disassociated myself from my finger. It wasn’t really my finger; I would block out the pain; I would pretend it belonged to a patient and I had to do whatever was needed to remove it. After what felt like way too many tries, I managed to slide it out. Voila! I could be one of those spies in the movies who cut out their trackers!

Looking back, the effects of the cancer treatment that started fall of 2024 and lasted all of 2025 became wedged like a splinter under the surface of my consciousness. I began the whole thing suffused with a fervent naiveté, filled with good intentions and optimistic determination. Then I became deeply tired and cyclically depressed. Eventually treatments eased up, but life whooshed in to fill every cranny of space and energy that opened up.

By the end of last year, the splinter was showing itself. I had finished two surgeries, six rounds of chemo, eleven rounds of immunotherapy, and started hormone pills without significant side effects. But instead of celebrating, I felt burned out. I should have felt happy to be alive, surely, or thankful my disease wasn’t worse! But instead I felt only a generalized numbness and a desire to withdraw from the world.

My husband finally told me to take a solo retreat at a nearby Ignatian center. The great thing about these centers is that if you’re alone, people assume you’re on a silent retreat. They tape your key to a window, lay out your meal in a small room away from the crowds. They leave you alone. It was heaven: for three whole days, I did not have to speak a word to anyone. No one asked me for anything. No one poked me with needles. I did not have to pretend to be fine or happy with whatever was happening to my body or whatever I had to do for work or the kids.

I began to realize that, on some level, I had disassociated in order to survive. When your body, and by extension your sense of physical reality, is no longer reliable, you separate from it. You no longer inhabit yourself the same way. And then there was the matter of getting through life, despite being at times unpredictably and uncontrollably tired or down or plagued by any number of idiosyncratic but noticeable side effects—you learn to push through whatever you are feeling to function.

But now, I allowed myself to unravel. I realized that even over a year later, I had not really accepted my new body; I was still mad and sad that my old one had gone. I was angered by the sense of having aged before my time. And I gave myself permission to feel that way, without rationalization or consolation. I wrote it all out. I penned a goodbye to my old body. I told my new body, okay, I’m here with you now. I enacted a private ritual to mark the moment.

Mostly, I sat outside, for hours at a time. I looked up at the expanse of sky, the layered hills on the horizon. I noticed the birds and the deer and the leaves on the trees. I noticed the inscriptions on the benches—one read, Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place, 2 Chronicles 7:15. Always there was the sense of sacred space and of others who had been there. I thought of that prayer by Thomas Merton: My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me… But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you… And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I looked at my life and decided that the gift I wanted to give myself was the ability to choose what I wanted to do. I had lost agency over my body, and then by default over my schedule, as I went right back to everything I had been doing pre-cancer in an effort to take up the slack. But actually, I had a choice. Isn’t life about saying a thousand no’s for the sake of those few precious yes’s? I decided to divest. And I found that as I said my no’s, people ubiquitously responded with compassion and understanding.

For the past seventy-five days since the retreat, I have journaled every day, usually while sitting in our backyard patio for extensive periods of time. We’ve turned the space that used to be filled with redwood branches into a garden full of flowers and ferns, citrus trees and osmanthus bushes. There is a quietly bubbling fountain. There are feeders and houses for the dozen or so species of birds that flock to the space. I’ve been following journaling prompts from The Ignatian Adventure, but mostly I let myself process whatever I may be feeling. I imagine that the warmth of the sun on my skin is the love of God filtering through to my senses.

It is strange how much of the healing comes after the treatment has ended. I must have been too tired earlier to fully process all that was happening. Or maybe some things you can only see in solitude over time, in the kind of space that must be made and entered into.

A pair of chickadees are nesting in the birdhouse. They’ve lined the nest with hair conveniently donated from our dog and cat, and are nearly always inside now. We are all anticipating the possibility of fuzzy baby chickadees one of these days. The splinter is out, new life is on the horizon, and until then I’m happy to sit and wait and watch.