“It’s Not
About the Hair” by Debra Jarvis
c.2007, Sasquatch Books $23.95
245 pages
Whining does
no good.
You can rant
and wail. You can scream to whatever God
you believe in, pound a pillow, or glare at everyone around you. Tears are cathartic and fear is easy to
understand, but none of these will change anything if your diagnosis is cancer.
That’s one of
the things you learn up-front in the new book “It’s Not About
the Hair” by Debra Jarvis.
As a chaplain
in the cancer center at a Seattle hospital, Jarvis counsels patients who are
new to chemotherapy and their disease. She talks to family members about
treatment and expectations. She listens. And she talks about dying to cancer
patients who are terminal.
You would
think, with a job like that, Jarvis would have seen it all.
And you might
be right. She did, until she herself was
diagnosed with Stage I breast cancer.
Jarvis said
she cried, but wasn’t as terrified as she thought she would be. First of all,
she had seen cancer: what it means, what it does, how people react to it, and
that it can be survived. Secondly, she
had faith in God and a sense of humor.
Sometimes, those were one in the same.
Jarvis went
through a mastectomy and reconstruction, but while her treatments were exhausting
and her body felt as if it had run the kind of marathon that she was fond of
tackling, Jarvis never stopped caring for the patients she had become close
to. Woven through a narrative of her
treatment, her work, and her post-cancer life, Jarvis remembers people like
Addie who died with her three rambunctious grandchildren attending, and whose
5-year-old grandson put the adults at ease. She writes about Jenny, who
received a “rock ritual” after her last treatment. She writes of Cindy, who planned her own
death. She writes of the faith she shared with them and with all her patients
as they went through treatment together.
As an
almost-seventeen-year survivor of cancer, I’ve read a lot of books about
cancer, written by former patients and by the doctors who treat the
disease. Among those books, “It’s Not About the Hair” is refreshingly different.
Gone are the
doomsday suggestions for sores and stents and sutures. There are no maudlin bedside scenes where
people carry on and relatives wail, and while you’ll find anger in this book,
you’ll find more of an abundance of joy.
Yes. Joy.
“It’s Not About the Hair” is all about finding peace and faith, no
matter where your cancer takes you. It’s about the silliness (and needfulness)
of buying mastectomy lingerie. And it’s
about surviving the days you have left, whether it’s two, twenty-two, or
twenty-two thousand.
Whether
you’ve just been diagnosed with any kind of cancer, are many years past
treatment, or if you’ve been on the support side of surviving, “It’s Not About
the Hair” is an excellent book about living and dying and the faith to do
both. If you fall into one of the above
categories (and who doesn’t?), isn’t it about time you read it?