Helplessly Hoping
“What if I forget what I learned? And what if I can’t learn to hope again?” author Kate Bowler asks her psychologist. It is a climactic moment in No Cure For Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), her second memoir since she was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at 35. After innumerable surgeries and therapies—chemo, immuno, radiation—Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School, has outlived, several times over, her initial prognosis of one year. In the scene with her psychologist, she wants to know if planning a party for her 40th birthday might be a good first step towards learning to hope again. Her oncologist describes her as being in a “durable remission.” Bowler, now 41, would add that she is someone who is adamantly not a believer that her remarkable remission has to do with the power of positive thinking. She’s met far too many people in the past six years whose cancers killed them, despite all their efforts to think positively. Instead, you might call Bowler a believer in an informed, grateful, cautious kind of hope. But she’s still not used to it. In the early, stunned months after her diagnosis, she writes that “suspended painfully in the present, I had been able to use my fears to see more clearly. I knew what to love. I knew who to love. I found moments of enoughness without the promise of more.” She treasured every minute with her family, especially her very young son. To put it in the biblical language [...]
