"Lessons on Drowning" by Molly Sentell Haile
We read the poem aloud twice, then transition into a discussion of its rich figurative language.
“I’m sorry, can I just ask?” Stephanie interrupts, her hand raised half-staff and her urgency overtaking her agreeableness. “Have any of you,” she goes on, her arms opening tentatively to indicate the rest of the class, “felt like that’s how people see you? After your diagnosis?”
Doug, a regular who in a previous class sang hymns to us in his lovely baritone, is already nodding his head, but I am utterly lost.
For seven years I have taught a creative writing class called Writing to Heal at a non-profit arts and wellness center for cancer survivors, patients in treatment, and caregivers. Some participants have been cancer-free for more than a decade. Even so, they are still redrafting the terms of their lives on the other side of diagnosis and treatment. Others, weak from chemo, surgery, radiation, or some combination of the three, arrive at our studio classroom in the renovated textile mill out of breath, the color of their skin a little off, a pallor that betrays illness and a pervasive exhaustion. Marian, who was closer to the end of her life than I had realized, had faded to a resigned grey. One day her daughter pushed Marian’s wheelchair into the classroom and decided at the last minute that she would join us too. Another time Marian’s husband wheeled her in but waited outside for the duration of the two-hour class. Letting her head sink into her arms on the table, Marian took the occasional nap during our class and when she felt too tired to write, she would just tell us stories about growing up the daughter of a veterinarian on a horse ranch in Kansas and, with her brothers and sisters, performing acrobatics on the backs of horses in motion. The week of Marian’s funeral, her husband called our office to say that Writing to Heal had been her last venture out before dying just a few days later.
Jane, a former Playboy Bunny with a gift for writing profound and eerily cohesive short pieces in the paltry ten or fifteen minutes I give for writing prompts, has metastatic cancer and once told the class, “They gave me five years to live. That was five-and-a-half years ago.” She tried to wave her tears away like she always does when she talks about the cancer or her mother. “What am I supposed to do now?” she asked. Her fingernails, painted a shimmering pink, fluttered like tiny seashells blown about in the wind on the beaches where so many of her stories and poems are set.
Hirsch Wellness Network is housed among hip restaurants, urban-chic apartments, law offices, and art studios at Greensboro, North Carolina’s red-bricked and newly renovated Revolution Mill, which originally opened in 1898 as the South’s only flannel mill. Owner entrepreneurs Moses and Ceasar Cone moved from Baltimore to Greensboro, where their mills, unlike Northern textile mills, benefited from their close proximity to cotton. Childless, Moses and his wife Bertha became philanthropists and helped fund the Moses Cone Healthcare System in Greensboro. Most Writing to Heal participants are regulars at the Cone Health Cancer Center, which treats the physical manifestations of their cancer, while over at the old mill, Hirsch’s arts and wellness classes address the emotional devastation of a cancer diagnosis, medical treatment, and the aftermath. It’s an unintended full circle set into motion back in the Gilded Age.
When I was a kid, I wanted to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer. I wrote letters to the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association informing them of my intentions and requesting their free materials on quitting smoking, which I passed along to aunts and uncles who had no plans to give up their Marlboros and Camels and who, incidentally, appreciated neither my concern nor the pamphlets.
In college, I spent a summer interning with an oncologist. The first time I watched him take a bone marrow aspiration from a patient’s sternum, the attending nurse caught me just before I hit the floor. If that didn’t deter me, my science classes did. The distance between a torque equation and humanity was too great for me, and I ended up finding what I was looking for in literature and creative writing classes—in Buechner, O’Connor, and Percy, in Atwood, Morrison, and Walker. That other dream—of making discoveries in a lab coat—suddenly seemed so misdirected, so wrong for me, and I let that person I’d imagined becoming go.
On the day of Stephanie’s question, I had handed out “Feared Drowned” by Sharon Olds. Under the guidance of Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s A Poet’s Companion, I had begun to lead the participants through the litany of metaphors and similes that Olds uses to create a foreboding sense of otherness in the speaker’s description of the man she loves and whom she fears has drowned while surfing. The poem’s speaker scans the ocean searching for his suit “as black as seaweed.” She asks someone to watch the kids while she goes to the “edge of the water, clutching the towel/like a widow’s shawl around me.”
We paused over the ominous imagery: rocks sticking out of the water like heads and kelp that snakes like an abandoned wetsuit. When the speaker’s beloved finally emerges from the water, she fails to recognize him.
“I mean,” Stephanie continues, “Do you feel like some people in your life have been that way since the cancer? Strange. Like this.” She touches the photocopied poem in front of her. “Like they don’t recognize you anymore.”
“Yes,” Doug answers definitively. Others are nodding now, and I am trying to catch up.
“It’s like they pull away to protect themselves,” says Lena. Lena of the high heels and brightly-hued, stationery-filled handbags, who sometimes writes responses to my prompts but more often uses the allotted time to pen letters of encouragement to everyone in the class in her larger-than-life purple script that loops and rolls. At home I keep Lena’s letters in the catch-all drawer of my desk. When I come across one while searching for an index card or a sheet of stamps, I read it and feel newly immunized in this ever-changing and often unpredictable world—something the past year has not so gently reminded us all, in case we had forgotten.
“In case you don’t make it!” Someone else blurts out.
One person laughs, and then we all do. At what? I wonder. It’s a gallows humor that this group of survivors of the worst kind of news about the people they love, about themselves, embrace.
“It’s my daughter who hasn’t been there for me the way I thought she would,” Stephanie tells us.
Another participant, a regular who has been especially quiet today, looks up at Stephanie and says, “Mine, too.”
Stephanie nods and dabs her eyes carefully, as if she had worn makeup today or maybe as if she used to wear it, before the cancer. “But then other people, people I would have never expected, have shown up—out of the woodwork.”
The class is no longer mine to guide. Of course it never was. Before our classes begin, I put out the notebooks, some paper and pens. I pass out a poem or two, maybe a short essay, sometimes a piece from Modern Love, around the table (or, more recently, over Zoom), and the class takes it from there, shaping whatever I had planned into what it needs to be for them that day. They are the ones, after all, who have been thrust into the deepest deep, which often calls for, I have observed, a different kind of fearlessness and honesty about living, about the dizzying turns a life can take. These survivors know that, “Once you lose someone,” as Olds tells us at the end of the poem, “it is never exactly/the same person who comes back.” Even if that person is yourself.
Molly Sentell Haile's short stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Oxford American, The North Carolina Literary Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2020 Doris Betts Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a Notable in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's M.F.A. Writing Program, she teaches at Hirsch Wellness Network and is currently at work on her first novel.
