In her searingly honest memoir Claire Gilbert uses the epistolary form to show us life as it ruptures. A diagnosis of myeloma, a cancer of the blood, brings existence into sharp focus. But instead of folding inwards into isolation, Gilbert creates a fully realised world through her Dear Readers, a private audience she addresses through a series of 44 intimate letters.
“My blood flows through every part of me, bringing me life as well as, now, the promise of death. I will not let cancer be the cause of bitterness growing in me,” writes Gilbert in her book Miles To Go Before I Sleep.
Indeed, the work flows and expands as she receives more devastating blows. While her body shatters through brutal and complex cancer treatments, it is her spiritual life that opens and unfolds. We have, of course, read stories like this before but there is something about the breadth, the theological tenderness of the letters, that creates a practical guide not just from treatment to transplant, but from worry into wisdom. The words originally existed for family and friends but now, in public, work to reclaim the grey, unnameable space that trauma occupies through diary writing.
The revelations of Julian of Norwich, the Christian mystic, act as sacred tenets along the journey. If a stem cell transplant is needed, Gilbert commits to reimagining life in an anchorite’s cell, to live like Julian of Norwich – a religious recluse. The acceptance that would fasten her more readily to an isolated fate is curious.
This type of communion and self-revelation, a willingness to hold the most difficult challenges of life close and allow them to subsume you without drowning, comes from a deeply spiritual place. God is always at work throughout this book. Gilbert’s day job is as a guardian of this kind of space – she is the director of the Westminster Abbey Institute – a place undoubtedly concerned with the landscape of the spiritual.
Distinct purpose
The letters give the I character a distinct purpose, an unreserved permission to move around in whatever direction the writer deems important, so the book is at its best when juxtaposing the mundane with the extraordinary. “I am not this body, it is an instrument for my use. But the pain makes me understand that I am my body,” writes Gilbert in the 24th letter. The next day she opts to get up and cycle to her “stem cell harvesting”. That self-propelling energy before having to surrender to the routine of a hospital is typical of her character.
Later, in the medicalised environment, it is the stilling words of George Eliot transmitting through the headphones that commune a moment between body, spirit and mind. It is the intersection of art and God that elevates and transforms, pulling the reader in closer. It is the interaction with real people too, such as Roy the Kurdish barber, who shaves Gilbert’s head for her, and talks about his people suffering in northern Syria. She calls him an “angel” who has “blessed” her. Curiously, his pain offers her an opportunity to disregard her own.
Miles To Go Before I Sleep, the title a line from that Robert Frost poem, is a clear-eyed pilgrimage towards whatever happens next. Roaming through the terra incognita of cancer treatments and transplant, Gilbert works to tell her story with as much compassion and certitude as possible. Early on in the book, a nurse’s failure to show Gilbert how to inject into her own body results in an out-of-body experience. Gilbert accidentally injects medicine between the skin and stomach resulting in a bubble, a pocket of skin filled with a drug that hasn’t actually entered the bloodstream.
Discomfort
This strange liminal space, the pocket where nothing is where it should be, is the same space where the writing exists. Like the drug, the words themselves spell discomfort, where anything can happen and discovery is both momentum and relief. Anyone who has ever had to deal with their own intravenous homecare can relate.
Sometimes the letters were so unflinchingly detailed – so uncompromising and fearless – that I had to put the book down and take a deep breath. Reading this book as a woman who has also undergone radical healthcare – as a woman who has also watched her own hair slink out in clumps and slide down the drain – I had to pause at moments. The epistolary mode left me too close to the material, almost too familiar with the circumstance.
The mysticism, the elevation of experience and desire to find something of God – of good – in moments of extreme bleakness, is the divine inherent within us all. Whether the inspiration comes from Julian of Norwich or Julie Andrews, we try to make the best out of every job that must be done.
In the book’s introduction, Gilbert says that because of love she can write with complete honesty, that words “teach me how to put my cancer to work and how to make it a source of joy”. Undoubtedly, with this intense, evocative and moving collection the reader is also put to work. But that is hardly a bad thing.
