In 2005 well-known Christian author (and professor and pastor) Walter Wangerin was diagnosed with cancer. And complex, difficult to treat, no-cure cancer. He did what, I suppose, many of us who think through our pens, would do: he started writing. So he wrote letters to friends and family periodically, from diagnosis through treatment, declining strength and ultimately to the point when the tumours stopped getting worse.
This realism, the real-time reflections and Wangerin's genuine ability to write (face it, not all Christian writers can write) give the book a revealing, thoughtful and yet calm ability to explore cancer, life, death, hope, the medical system, the past...and to see from inside a man's head what I have had to watch, in my 'professional' capacity, from outside on far too many occasions.
What do I take away from this book?
- how communicating with those who care about you, to know they are there and listening, is a vast help in horrendous times
- the importance of living in the now and how imminent death restores that childlike ability to dwell in the moment
- and that when the moment comes, when we are now facing what we at least believe to be the end, what we feared we would fear, how we feared our faith might fail, that we might dwell with constant panic - does not necessarily have to be the case at all.
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