A Healing Shrine by Joyce Zonana

From October 5, 2023. Joyce posted the blogpost which she titled: Nineteen months and Counting: Experiencing  the Web of Life

On February 28, 2022, I unknowingly drove into a deep snowbank, shortly after finding myself in  a strangely  unfamiliar landscape. Suspecting a TIA, my primary care physician  urged me to go to an emergency room for a possible CAT scan. There, a lesion in my right parietal lobe was quickly discovered.

The doctors wanted to do an immediate biopsy,  with permission to resect the tumor if a malignancy was detected, and indeed it was: Grade 4 glioblastoma multiforma, (GBM ), an unusually aggressive primary brain cancer And so began what was to become my unexpected and unpredictable  “healing journey”: first  with six weeks of daily radiation and chemo, followed by two additional craniotomies and several more courses of chemo, including one that left me completely debilitated and in need of two  blood transfusions. Many months of twice-weekly physical and occupational therapy have thankfully brought me to the  point where I can now read and write  relatively easily, walk without falling and talk coherently, occasionally remember where I put my phone and my eyeglasses—and, most importantly , acknowledge  my  dependence on others for my day-to-day wellbeing.  My brother flew to be by my side when I first got sick,  and has remained as an almost daily companion; my husband watches over me wherever I go and whatever I do; he  also shops, cooks,  cleans,  and does laundry for the two of us; my friends visit regularly to keep me connected connected to the larger world; home health  aides watch over me as well, while my doctors. nurses, technicians,  and therapists bring the latest science to bear on their treatments and tests. I participate in two support groups: one  for GBM survivors, led by a  social worker in a hospital department of neurosciences, the other, led by an Integral Yoga minister, focused on honoring the Divine Mother, the Goddess in all her names and forms. Lately,  I’ve been thinking about Carol P. Christ’s  emphasis on the “web of life”  as a key  element of her thealogy. I’d always understood and accepted this concept  intellectually, but now I feel it viscerally, as my hard-won, individualistic  feminist independence (my ability to  navigate life on my own and on my own terms) gives way to a deep experience of what I can only call feminist interdependence. When I first discovered I could no longer walk down the street by myself, when I acknowledged that my work as a scholar and teacher would likely never be resumed, I spent days sobbing. But recently something new has come into play –-a growing acceptance and embrace of my embeddedness in the “web” Carol celebrated.  For the moment my cancer has stopped growing,  but I know that each day might well be my last, and rather than lamenting, I am grateful now for the lessons it has brought me,  as well as for the dedication,  compassion, and skill of the doctors, nurses, technicians and therapists who have helped me, for all for my  brother, my husband,  my friends,  neighbors, and relatives have done and continue to do. Most importantly, I am learning to ask for help and to accept when it is offered. More confidently  and deeply than ever before, I can now say … the Goddess is alive, and She is everpresent.  I am held in an intricately woven and infinitely supportive web of life. Blessed be.

Here is what Joyce wrote at the beginning of August, 2024

I have recently returned from a three day stay at Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center where I underwent surgery for the recurrence of my primary brain cancer, glioblastoma, first diagnosed in March of  2022.

During those three days, I was cared for by an extraordinarily compassionate, competent and diverse team of do tors, nurses and technicians. When I emerged it was as if I had been reborn, held in a circle of light and love. Much more than a modern medical center, Memorial Sloane Kettering seems to me now to be an Asklepion, like the ancient centers where pilgrims came for healing dreams in addition to medical interventions. 

Such temples continue to exist throughout the world, including especially in North Africa where for example I had previously been granted a powerful healing dream  at the Maimonides Synagogue in Old Cairo.

I am left with gratitude and humility, and a profound sense that spirit and flesh are indeed one as the Goddess holds us in Her arms.

Links for more information:

Asklepion

A Healing Home of Dreams by Joyce Zonana

To Sit on the Earth, a memoir by Tobie Nathan, translated by Joyce Zonana with Janet Lee