“Wigs are expensive,” the woman says.
“How much?” I ask, guessing hundreds of dollars.
She says, “Thousands.”
“Maura” is talking about a human-hair wig, a “very special” one. Her closest friend borrowed it for her from a sister-in-law when Maura lost her hair during chemo.
Maura took the wig home, and her daughter’s seven-month-old kitten snatched it and ran away with it downstairs and out of sight.
“It took a long time to find it,” the woman’s teenage daughter, sheepish owner of the calico miscreant, says.
How long, hours?
“Oh, no,” the daughter says. “Days.”
They finally found the wig in the pantry, under the bottom shelf and up behind a pot — and it was intact.
There is more than one wig story, and there is usually at least one person in the class wearing a hat or scarf.
I am at the EASE (Exercise and Survivorship Education) Cancer Survivorship Workshop, held each October at the Sun Mountain Lodge, in the Methow Valley, Washington, a massively “restorative” environment. We perch high in a glacier valley, looking toward distant spires and down upon stepped terraces, red sumac on gold hillsides, blowing aspens and Douglas firs.
I teach writing classes here because three years ago, at home in Carbondale, I wrote a two-part series in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent about navigating thyroid cancer, and the foundation president, Katie Kemble, a nurse practitioner and a longtime friend, invited me.
While fully understanding that thyroid cancer is highly treatable and my situation was different than that of others with more serious diagnoses, I had been shocked upon hearing the word “cancer,” and struggled to understand and even schedule all the particulars. Humor helped me turn an important corner in dealing.
And once friends realized they could joke about it, the floodgates opened. Some predicted I would attain superpowers such as mind reading. They also said, as I readied myself for radiation:
“I thought I saw a UFO last night but it was just you up ahead on the trail.”
“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Oh, wait, it’s you.”
And this charmer, from a longtime friend: “You’ll be good as new after all this. Just a little hotter.”
But my wicked friend Andrew took the cake when I asked when his baby was due, and he said, “April 3. Will you still be alive?”
I felt better every time I laughed. Laughter is superb medicine, with known physiological and emotional benefits. According to the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Buffalo, N.Y., as early as the 1960s Dr. William F. Fry, a psychology professor at Stanford, published landmark studies on the physiological effects of laughter.
I believe it has benefits beyond what science could be expected to understand.
I also remembered, even before any personal connection to cancer, being charmed by this passage in the book “Operating Instructions” by Anne Lamott, about going to a movie with her best friend, Pammy, who has breast cancer. Anne bought M&M’s, with Pammy declining her offer of another box. During the film, Pammy tapped Anne on the shoulder for some; then kept putting out her hand for more. As Anne began to protest, Pammy smiled and whispered, “I have cancer!”
Last year, The New York Times published an essay, written by an ovarian-cancer patient, titled “Cancer Humor,” on three new memoirs. It opened: “Cracking up may be a better option than breaking down, or so the recent publications of three young adults with cancer suggest.” She quoted one young memoirist who muses about starting a line of irreverent thank-you cards with sayings such as, “Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do.”
I ask the eight or 10 students who come to each of my classes to look for the moments of humor in their own journeys.
Some of the moments that participants describe are tiny. One woman talked about dressing up to go to an Elton John concert with her sister, and putting on mascara. “And wouldn’t you know that was when my eyelashes fell out?” And they collapsed laughing.
Another year, “Carl,” 24, an outdoor-adventure guide, told of the raging party he and his friends had the night before he started chemo. They hauled out their toys — bikes, boats, skis — onto a lawn. At some point, fireworks may have been brought in. At dawn, they all shaved their heads in solidarity, great chunks of hair rolling away.
“Then,” Carl said, ” my hair never fell out anyway.”
Participants write their stories with pencil and eraser on index cards, a paragraph per card, enabling shuffling. I urge them to continue in the future to write down their thoughts and experiences — for their loved ones, who would be honored to read them, but also for themselves.
One other wig story came this year from “Ken,” the husband of a patient. (Many family members and friends attend.)
“She ordered this wig, and she was talking and talking about it, and looking forward to it getting there,” he says. “I saw it come in the mail, and I cut open the side of the package, and put in a Halloween wig, and glued it back. She opened it and started yelling, ‘I spent all that money and they sent me this?!’”
“Jim,” fighting prostate cancer, says he takes his comfort where he can, and with a chuckle recites a post-surgery progression: “I went from incontinence, to Depends, to a maxi-pad, to a mini-pad!”
Kemble co-founded this conference 12 years ago. As a 16-year-old, she lost her 37-year-old mother to cancer, and she has long had a deep and expert interest in oncology and survivorship. Kemble knows other drastic change as well. In 1989, when we were housemates in Aspen, she was hit by rockfall while climbing in Telluride, nearly losing her leg, which today remains painful and unstable. This is my third, though not last, time attending the EASE Cancer event.
The workshop covers myriad topics, from “chemo brain” to the importance of exercise in recovery and cognition, to classes on nutrition and avoiding carcinogenic household products, to managing lymphedema, all taught by health-care personnel. There are art and yoga classes. Mary Gunkel, an RN and oncology nurse and certified yoga instructor, at the outset promises: “I will not make you into a pretzel. People have done my yoga class who are on oxygen and on hospice.”
On Saturday night, two area bands, the Saddle Rockers and the Lake Boys, play live music, as volunteers. Everyone is out on the dance floor — or almost everyone. Jim just smiles as his wife, “Kelly,” who has been air-singing to him along with a love song or two, jumps up to join in a line dance. Kemble would love to dance, but her bad leg won’t support her. Mostly, the music is another great unifier.
“We’re not sick right now,” a young woman told me. “We’re just all people out dancing.”
And laughing.
Alison Osius is executive editor at Rock and Ice magazine in Carbondale. For information on the nonprofit EASE Cancer Foundation, .
