Letting the Sweetness of Life in

and the best way I've ever learned to improve my writing

In the early 2000s, I took writing classes from Priscilla Long, author of the essential writing book, The Writer’s Portable Mentor, and the best writing teacher I’ve ever studied with. One assignment that changed my writing forever was selecting a short essay by a master writer as a model, and using their structure, write an essay using your material.

If the piece you chose has nine paragraphs, you also write a piece with nine paragraphs. If the first paragraph lists facts about the author’s subject, you also list facts about your subject. If the second paragraph is a historical story, you find one about your subject.

But you don’t stop there. Try to copy what the author is doing on a sentence and word level, too. If she uses a list sentence, a compound sentence, fragment, see if you can, too. An adverbial clause, a specific noun, or a muscular verb? Mimic that with your content.

Eventually, your piece will want to burst out and become something different but try to stick with the form you chose for a full draft.

You can find this exercise and short pieces to mimic in both editions of Priscilla’s book.

Below is the piece I wrote in class. I used Mute Dancers by Diane Ackerman. I have never shared this writing before — I thought I lost it — but I stumbled upon it recently and reading it through, thought, “This very much fits with our theme of it’s not too late.”

I’ve been writing about death lately — next issue will be about clothes and jewelry, and how getting out of my ratty old yoga pants helped me accept my mom more.

I have so few pictures of me and my dad together sorry for the blurry image but check out his farmer tan!

I.

There is a story my father told my entire life. It is 1964. I am two and he is forty-three.

We live on Park Lane in Bloomington, Indiana, and every morning when my mother releases me from my crib, I bump down the stairs in my night diaper. I crawl across the kitchen tile and down two more stairs to the half-bath off the family room, where my father prepares to shave. Dad reaches down and seats me on the closed toilet seat, where, according to legend, I raptly watch him moisten his morning stubble, measure out the Old Spice shaving cream, and carve precise paths through the aromatic snow to reveal Daddy cheeks. Smooth. Ready for my kiss. Dad always finishes this story with, “Your mother must have put you up to it.” He shakes his head in wonderment. “You came every morning.”

II.

My dad and mom often stop by with a container of chicken soup or a small gift for my 10-year-old daughter, so I was not surprised when, mid-morning one day last month, the front door and I heard my parents’ voices. I got up from the computer and headed to the front door. Mom had been crying. Dad was pale. “I have pancreatic cancer,” Dad blurted out from the entryway, before I’d even reached the living room. “We just came from the doctor’s.”

I almost say, “You’re kidding,” but I only allow myself a fifth of a second of denial before slap! Gut-clenched, iron-lunged, acid esophagus: so this is how my dad’s life will end.

III.

The pancreas: mysterious hermit of the abdomen. The unwritten credo of medical students is, "Eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't mess with the pancreas." An alchemist, when happy, the pancreas transmutes tiny particles of food into an enzymatic energy drink that plaits bone and braids muscle, nurtures dendrites, and regenerates skin. A stingy tyrant when crossed, it lies hidden while making any manner of mischief: no more insulin from its islets of Langerhans (imagine Norse gods brandishing swords against angry skies while cursing, “No more sweetness for you!”); pancreatitis (acute, chronic, infectious recurrent, and interstitial relapsing); cysts and pseudocysts; atrophy; Calculus; Fibrosis; Cirrhosis. In the United States, pancreatic cancer is the tenth most commonly diagnosed cancer for men, ninth for women. The median survival period from the time of diagnosis until death for untreated advanced cancer of the pancreas is about 3 ½ months; with good treatment, this increases to about six months. Later, I wonder how, somehow, I knew, in the instant Dad said pancreatic cancer, that it meant all this – hidden, dangerous, sweet.

IV.

Kant believed the soul permeated every part of the human body. Carl Du Prel, a German philosopher who lived in the mid-1800s, argued that our emotional center originates in the solar plexus, located just above the navel, near the pancreas. One new age guru maintains a diseased pancreas is the result of rejecting the sweetness of life.

V.

Two weeks before the news about Dad’s pancreas, I am flying home from a job in New York, feeling horrendous. I had a glass of wine the night before, waiting for my college friend to call, but this morning, it feels like I drank two bottles – of rotgut. I write it off to a lingering cold and jet lag. Days pass. I don’t recover. I get worse. Then a bit better. Worse again. Weeks pass. I decided I have a low-grade bug. Feel worse. Waves of nausea and fatigue that resemble the sudden, chilling onslaught of the flu, scurry to the bathroom. Seems to strike between ten and two.

VI.

What I have learned from my father: admit when you are wrong; do the numbers and don’t hide from the truth; when you have nothing left to go on, go on your nerve; don’t fence me in; humility; cordiality; a habit of driving myself toward a future where things will be better; and. too often, a visceral sense of being one step removed from the breathtaking moments of life.

Just yesterday, walking in the Grand Forest near my home, puppy darting ahead and then back to my side, a floppy silver streak, I came around a turn and the autumnal sunlight lit up a stand of cedars and a single big leaf maple, all velutinous with fairy light. The air was saturated with cedar, fir, neon-new moss. I stood still, feeling a swell of well-being, connectedness, gratitude - or did I watch myself feel? The sweetness is there but sometimes I can only take tiny sips.

My father always murmurs the same thing when life shines brightest, “This is wonderful. This is so wonderful. Isn’t this wonderful?”

VII.

I finally go to my doctor, expecting a quick prescription for antibiotics. She orders a full blood panel. When she calls with the results, she tells me my pancreatic enzymes are elevated, very unusual. She asks if I know where the pancreas is. I picture the various diagrams of the pancreas I have seen in the last two weeks: at the oncologist, at the surgeon, at the oncologist’s again, not to mention the thirty or so websites I have visited obsessively, clicking for hope.

Each doctor asked my father, “Do you know where the pancreas is?”

VIII.

I tell my daughter that Grandpa is very sick. I tell her while we are in the car, doing errands.

She cries, easily, immediately. “I mean, I love him, he’s the best grandpa but Mommy, he always says to you, ‘Don’t make her hug me.’ I want to hug him!” She asks why Grandpa doesn’t believe we love him for himself, without Mom as mediator. Staring at the highway, I open and close my dry mouth. How to explain to a child the jumbled stories we create to survive?

That weekend, Lilly takes Dad outside to the patio. Dad sits in a plastic patio chair. Lilly dances around him and tells him how much she loves him. That nobody makes her love him – or anybody else. She punctuates her declaration with a cartwheel.

IX.

An ultrasound shows my pancreas is smooth and tumorless. No one knows why I am feeling poorly or my lipases are elevated. When anybody hints at a connection to my father, I protest, “But I started feeling ill two weeks before we learned about Dad.”

X.

A friend remarks, “You are on the edge of a mystery.” I feel lost and guided, terrified and brave. The sweetness my dad has denied himself calls to me. It calls to my dad, too. When we are alone, we talk about it, about how he is trying.

I am, once again, bumping down the stairs in my night diaper, and this time, I hope, my Dad will know I've come for him.

***

My dad died two years after his diagnosis in 2006. Even though the chemo was brutal, he was grateful for every day he got. He did, I believe, finally realize how loved he was.

Love,

Jen