A Time to Write

A plucky woman speaks out about disease and death "Do not go gentle into that good night...

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Dylan Thomas' haunting words about death are not usual newspaper fare, but they provided a poignantly apt beginning for the debut of Jory Graham's new column last July. Her twice-a-month appearances in the Chicago Daily News entitled "A time to live ..." are written for those who live under the shadow of death--either their own or that of someone close to them. As she wryly points out, Graham, 50, is herself on that "endangered list." An attractive, soft-spoken author and public relations counsel, she has lost both breasts to cancer, and this year learned that the disease had spread to her spine and leg.

Faced with so grim a diagnosis, Graham made a decision. She would try to break through the barrier of silence that all too often shrouds terminal illness. Before the end, she explains, "I want to do something that matters." So she approached the incoming Daily News managing editor, Gregory Favre, with the novel idea of writing a column about cancer--and death--from a patient's point of view. He promptly accepted the suggestion. Says he: "She is a talented writer with great sensitivity. There is a need for this type of thing." Readers apparently agree. Each of the ten columns that has appeared so far has brought a heavy volume of mail to the newspaper. Though Graham has not hesitated to scold doctors for their insensitivity and inclination to "play God with my body and my life," physicians are among her most faithful readers. At Northwestern University's medical center, one professor has made her writing required reading for his students.

A physician's daughter herself, Graham ministers blunt doses of good sense. About the discredited cancer drug Laetrile, she insists: "At best it is an expensive and cruel hoax. At worst it is dangerous." She rails against the phony cheerfulness of some visitors to desperately ill patients: "Distraction isn't what's needed. Perception is." She advises the ailing to be candid as well but reminds them of Hemingway's definition of courage as "grace under pressure." To relieve physical discomfort, she encourages friends to help on the simplest level: "Cook a meal, do the dishes, mend what needs to be mended, water the plants, answer the phone." To a woman who had refused to discuss her cancer with her husband, she said: "The fact is, you are bearing [your illness] now, but alone, which is infinitely more painful than if shared." What to say to cancer victims? "The right thing is honesty tempered with gentleness and a caring quality which, in the last analysis, transcends all words."

"Why me?" she asks in one particularly moving column, and opts for the existentialist answer that the universe is absurd, that her illness is simply random luck. In that way, she is able not only to shed self-pity but to turn the question around: "Why not me?" From there, she explains, it is "only a matter of time to it is me--and what am I going to do now?"

With that comes a sense of power, a recognition that she "can still make choices and decisions" in the limited time left.

Graham, whose cancer seems to have been contained for now by radiation therapy, maintains a full schedule. She makes guest appearances on local TV, has lectured at medical schools, continues to drive--although she must walk with a cane--and plans to turn her columns into a book. Despite periodic bouts of gloom, her courage never flags. "I am coming put of a long siege of metastasis [spreading of the cancer] and subsequent treatment and I am tired and sometimes in pain," she wrote recently, "but I am not dying. I don't feel I am going to die for a while. When that happens, I'll share the decent parts of it with you." Hers is the kind of ungentle finale that Dylan Thomas would surely have applauded. -

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