The Cancer Diaries

What happens when the wife of a prize-winning poet develops breast cancer? When her biopsy results came back, Kate Lantry sat her husband down and made a serious request. "I want you to document this cancer journey. I want you to go back to writing a poem every day. I want you to write about exactly what happens, as accurately as you can. Don't leave anything out." He told her he had covid fog, and could barely think, much less write. She said, 'If I can face all this again, you can write a few poems.' He told her he would. He hadn't yet heard the phrase 'tell your story of how you overcame everything, and it will become someone else's survival guide.' He didn't know how much these poems would mean to others as he posted them on social media, day by day. Women who had gone through similar trials, spouses who loved them, family members who had lost their mothers, daughters, and wives. As time went on, new people wrote him, people who had been newly diagnosed, and who were terrified, but they said that if Kate could go through this, so could they, and her story gave them courage to face what had to be done. And so he wrote, day by day, poem by poem. He documented their lives, their garden, their daily walks in the park, and all aspects of her treatment journey, as they entered the unfamiliar world of biopsies and ultrasounds, of Chemo and immunotherapy, of surgery and proton radiation. Book One tells the story of April, the time of her diagnosis, through the end of June, when Chemo had to be paused. Here are two sample poems from Book One: Flood Warning A quiet evening. Dark. And rain outside - They say we'll get four inches before dawn. I'm in the kitchen while she sleeps upstairs. Another day of biopsies. x-rays, of ultrasounds and needles for the pain: she's not supposed to pick up anything. I'm cooking, listening to Keren Ann whose voice reminds of Paris in the Spring how many years ago in rain like this: "The only things I still know how to make are water ripples on the waveless Seine." And me? I'm making rice and eggs. Young James still has an appetite, and needs to eat. Outside, the rain keeps falling, and the wind moves through the leafless trees of early Spring. I stand and stare at nothing, at the wind I cannot see into this foreign dark where songs and shadows merge with endless rain. Life List She tires easily. Now, when we walk she leans against me, gently, for support and wordlessly convinces me to slow each time we climb even a mild hill so halfway up, we stop, and I point out the blossoms of whatever plant is there the leaves, the shadowed stems, just anything to let her recollect herself before the climb continues up towards the crest. Or I will question whether those small birds are on the list I started weeks ago and pause to look them up. So far, we've reached four dozen species just in this small place: our garden, and this park one mile away where Rachel Carson wrote her Silent Spring. She leans against me, smiles, we move on discussing birds and blossoms, wind and clouds as we descend into the deepening shade.