The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

by Stephen Cope

Initiation by cancer became for Marion a new birth canal. “Cancer has made me sadder and wiser,” she wrote, “and therefore richer. Because death is an essential part of life, to be fully alive is to be prepared for it. The gift of cancer is the gift of NOW.… Through failures, symptoms, problems, we are prodded to renounce attachments, redundant now. With the breakdown of what has gone before, the possibility of rebirth comes.” 16 Toward the end of her initiation through cancer, Marion and Ross were at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party. Everyone was dancing. Marion was glued to the couch. Doctor’s orders: fragile bones! Finally, she said to Ross, “Come on, Ross, let’s dance.” “Oh, Marion,” he says, “you know you can’t dance. You could break your back.” “I sit out the polka,” she writes in her journal, describing the exasperating moment, “can’t keep my feet still.” “A voice comes up from my perineum,” she writes with increasing fervor, “ ‘Marion, you can sit on this couch until you rot, but I am going to dance. I don’t care what Ross thinks … I don’t care what anybody thinks. I don’t care