"…having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." – Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

   The way the ground melts into oceans, lakes and rivers, the way we can sail on water, bathe in it and drown in it, all of this awakens stories.

   What makes water into waves? What lives beneath its surface? How could it be that it can both excite and kill?

   That is what the late New York Times essayist Anatole Broyard divined about cancer when his doctor told him he was terminally ill – that his cancer could kill him but it could also elicit his most fascinating story.

   "…[my diagnosis] was like an immense electric shock," Broyard wrote. "I felt galvanized. I was a new person. All of my old trivial selves fell away and I was reduced to essence." (italics added.)

   Imagine being "galvanized" by the news of your imminent death! Instead of thrashing in panic, Broyard swam straight into the waves. His diagnosis became a gift from a sea now askew. 

   The first thing Broyard did was to take charge of his destiny as much as he could – to remind his doctors and himself whose life was at stake. 

   But, his most crucial act was to embrace the mystery of his illness through storytelling. "…narratives are the most effective ways to keep our humanity alive," he wrote.

   Isn't this true of all of us whether we are ill or well? Metaphor is better than a scapel for engaging the terminal condition we call life. 

   The cause of death is life. How else can we make any sense of it except through story? Moby Dick captivates us through storytelling not through Power Point analysis.

   "…a sick person can make a story out of his illness as a way of trying to detoxify it," Broyard wrote. 

   Imagine the way the lives of caregivers would change if they transformed the alternating panic and drudgery of suffering into a narrative. At the moment of his or her appearance the patient's life begins to spill the blood of stories.

   What do we do with those pictures the patient paints? What do we do with our stories?

   Beyond the clinical diagnosis lives our humanity. Lose that, and both patient and caregiver are cast adrift in a sea of misery unrelieved by what we need most – Love. 

-Erie Chapman

Photographs copyright erie chapman 2012