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SS

Stephanie Sugars
Welcome, dear friends and guests!

SS

Recurring themes in conversation

 What is more precious than gold? Light.
What is more precious than light? Conversation.

            - Goethe in Green Snake and Beautiful Lily

Dear loved ones,

As I mentioned in my previous posts, one of my greatest joys is sharing as many good times with as many of you as possible. And, since I’m a Gemini and an anthroposophist, one of my greatest joys is conversation.

Fortunately you are pure gold, enlightening beings, so sharing conversation with you is sublime.

In our conversations, I’ve noticed several recurring themes. I’d like to address three of them in this update – My troubles are nothing compared to yours; I couldn’t do what you’re doing; dying and death.

When I hear, “my troubles are nothing compared to yours,” I feel uncomfortable. Each person’s troubles or life situation is unique. Incomparable. And close to the individual. Your troubles seem bigger to you, because they are closer to you.  A friend recently reminded me of the stress scale tests that objectify and quantify an inner experience of stress . (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(psychological)#Stress_Scales)  

We can’t really quantify our subjective experiences of life. On any given day, your splinter may be a bigger deal for you than my advanced cancer diagnosis is for me. I want to acknowledge that our individual experience is important and relevant for each of us. And that it’s important that we each meet our own challenges – even while doing so might require a whole lot of help from the natural, human and spiritual worlds.

 When I hear, “I couldn’t do what you’re doing”, it seems short-sighted. If you had 20, 30, 40, 50 years of training as a patient, I bet you’d probably do just as well, maybe better. I just have a whole lot of practice as a professional patient. Imagine if you were told one day that you have an incurable disease that would cause “premature death” (whatever that is), you would be majorly stressed. My friend Michael Lerner in his book Choices in Healing  http://www.commonweal.org/pubs/choices-healing.html likens it to being dropped into a jungle war with no training, backup, orientation.

It seems really foreign and threatening from the outside. But from the inside, my side, it’s all too familiar.  For many years I’ve struggled with what I call Mid-Traumatic Stress Disorder around medical interventions. It feels like I’ll never, ever get out – alive or dead. That seems to have healed into a subtle dance with what I now call treatment fatigue.

Dying and death is such a huge topic. Fortunately, I, and many of you, are intensely interested in it – as spiritual explorers and pilgrims, ministers, hospice volunteers and “ordinary” human beings. My short reassurance is that from my perspective, death is a friendly and welcome state, a coming home to God. Great joy! Great love!

My fear states arise around symptoms, side effects and complications. The shortness of breath imparts a certain misery that requires skillful means to co-exist with. Because I’ve been exposed to many ways of dying, I’ve witnessed ways I really don’t want to die: chemo unto death; brain metastases; long spells of unrelieved pain. Many ways of dying are uncomfortable. I put my trust in the spiritual world and my palliative care doctor.

Death itself is a comfort.

Existence in a body is a miracle. Existence outside a body will be another.

I will sign off with love and good wishes for each of you.

Warmest healing regards,
Stephanie

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