In an essay titled A View from the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map: “There you are, the future patient,854 quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and—no time to think—out you go. “You descend. You hit the ground. . . . But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to? . . . No
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