When you are treated for cancer and have made it through, what do you do next?
According to the Australian Government’s Institute of Health and Welfare, the rate of survival for cancer has increased from 55% in 1991 to 71% in 2020. Despite a rise in numbers of cancer diagnoses, fewer people are dying from the disease – modern medicine has developed better treatments for cancer and reduced its mortality rate. Consequently, the number of cancer survivors among us grows.
How, though, are these survivors meant to go on? How do they address the experience they have just undergone? How do they fit themselves back into the world?
Megan Maurice’s Life goes on: stories of survival, support, hopes and fears is about ‘surviving survival’: despite an abundance of information on how to live through traumatic experiences such as cancer treatment, we need to understand how to live after that trauma is over.
Maurice is a sports journalist for publications such as The Guardian and Crikey, with previously published books including Shine: the making of the Australian netball Diamonds and Fair game. However, a breast cancer diagnosis during the pandemic led her away from her typical subject matter. Rather than documenting races on a track or games on a netball court, she considers the sheer ‘marathon’ that is surviving trauma.
Maurice’s ‘guidelines’ or ‘rule book’ for survival are not theoretical: she draws from personal experiences to properly illustrate how we can move past trauma. At one point, she speaks of the ‘numbness’ she felt during her survival model: she discusses the dissociation she experienced in medical settings even where the appointment was unrelated to cancer, since the ‘altered brain automatically sees that environment as a threat’.
She interviews Greg, whose diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer, began to consume his life: the coincidence of his treatment with the pandemic meant that he was physically separated with his family, and he was forced to leave his career as a school sports coordinator.
Maurice notes the effect of her own [LE1] diagnosis on her 7-year-old daughter. She speaks with Emily, a woman in the process of recovery from childhood domestic violence: when trauma damages the whole family, it is even more difficult to navigate growth and healing.
Many of those with whom Maurice speaks are women in sport, and she does not ignore the way in which trauma can upend such an active lifestyle. Conversely, though, she notes how exercise can form part of recovery and advocates for finding the ‘spark of hope’ that will maintain a forward momentum away from past suffering.
Despite the gravity of its subject matter, and the inherently distressing nature of trauma itself, Life goes on is not a book that weighs you down. Maurice argues for the power of gratitude, of being thankful for one’s survival, as a means of keeping your chin up; she even considers the possibility of grief and suffering becoming a ‘beautiful sadness’ that we hold inside. She notes the importance of support systems and of planning for the future, and she does not leave her reader hopeless.
Drawing from the poet Robert Frost, the ultimate message of Life goes on is no-nonsense, affirming and encouraging: ‘In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.’
[LE1]I assume Eamonn means Maurice’s own diagnosis?
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