In 1984 Reynolds Price, professor of English at Duke University, began a four year battle with spinal cancer. After surgery to remove the tumor, and a series of radiation treatments, he was left with searing pain and lost the use of his legs. For four years he underwent numerous treatments and further surgery. Eventually he learned to manage his pain, continue his work, became even more productive as a writer of poems, plays and novels, and lived until 2011. He wrote A WHOLE NEW LIFE, as a memoir of his experience. It eloquently describes the four years he endured excruciating pain and his reflections on the options he explored with the medical community at Duke. Some of the doctors were wonderful and others were impersonal and merely clinical. It is an enthralling and inspirational read.
Near the beginning of his ordeal he experienced an actual happening as he lay in bed. He was transported to the Sea of Galilee where Jesus beckoned him to follow him into the water.
Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over my head and back till water ran down my puckered scar. Then he spoke once – ‘Your sins are forgiven’ – and turned to shore again, done with me. I came on behind him, thinking in standard greedy fashion, It’s not my sins I’m worried about. So to Jesus’ receding back, I had the gall to say ‘Am I also cured?’ He turned to face me, no sign of a smile, and finally said, ‘That too.’ Then he climbed from the water, really done with me. I followed him out and then, with no palpable seam in the texture of time or place. I was home again in my wide bed.
Was it a dream I gave myself in the midst of a catnap, thinking I was awake? Was it a vision of the sort accorded from a maybe external source to mystics of differing degrees of sanity through human history? From the moment my mind was back in my own room, no more than seconds after I’d left it, I’ve believed that the event was an external gift, however brief, of an alternate time and space in which to live through a crucial act.
That real event sustained him in the years that followed despite his bouts of depression and despair.
His lesson to us in this memoir is that while friends may wish you to return to your former self it is not possible. You have to create a new life. The question to God is not “Why me?” but “What next?” He quotes Deuteronomy 30:19-20 “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, and listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.”
You cannot wallow in self-pity. You must go on with life and move out to other people. “Your chance of rescue from any despair lies, if it lies anywhere, in your eventual decision to abandon the deathwatch by the corpse of your old self and to search out a new inhabitable body.”
He learned patience, to sit and attend, to watch and taste whatever or whomever seemed likely or needy, far more closely than he had in five decades. In the ten years since the tumor was found he completed thirteen books. He sensed strongly that the illness either unleashed a creature within him that had been restrained or it had planted a whole new creature in place of the old. He is grateful for so many blessings in his life.
I strongly commend this book to anyone who is facing cancer treatments and pain and mourns the loss of their former life.
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Over the years I’ve followed the life and writings of Reynolds Price, partly because we were fellow students at Duke in the `50s, but mostly because I enjoy his memoir-writing style. He devoted forty years to the teaching faculty in Durham. As a novelist and storyteller, he spoke of his small-town upbringing in NC, where he characterized his home state’s “small town and rural communities as `people estuaries.’’”
“Our memories,” he said, “are our treasures. They are who we are. Looking backwards some of us see our parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, cousins, long-time friends, teachers, preachers, and the places we knew them – home, church, school, stores, and fields. Those people and places of growing up define us. They are our anchors. They are our foundations. They are our roots.”
In his best-selling book, Clear Pictures, Price ruminated on memories and how early they surface in one’s life. In this memoir, he wrote:
More than once I claim memories that go further back than most of my friends can credit. In the years I taught Freshman Composition, I regularly asked my students to excavate their earliest memory, if only the color of light on a crib rail, and then to convey it without embroider in prose. Almost invariably they evoked a quick image or a lingering sound from late in their third year or early in the fourth. The only student who shared a recall as early as my own was in the first class I ever taught – September 1958, a sixteen-year-old woman who became the novelist Anne Tyler.
Bill Hilles