Seven Year Summer by Anna Byrne

While in her early thirties, Anna Byrne was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma. Over the next seven years, she endured four relapses, two stem cell transplants, and spent over 2,000 hours in Canadian hospitals. In 2014, she was given two years to live. Despite the odds, Anna left treatment cancer-free. She became a hospice volunteer and met Eleanor, a woman in her seventies whose death was imminent, and the two formed an unlikely friendship. Part memoir, medical guide, and spiritual text, Seven Year Summer explores the nuances of healing and hope amidst the struggle to survive.

An excerpt from Chapter 19 (Year 4):

The body prepares us for death. When our bodies are young and strong, we can’t imagine dying. It is too foreign from our daily physical experience. As we age or become ill, the body supplies us with a series of losses that soften our resistance to death.

The body slows, tires, weakens. The body is not able to maintain its previous pace, engage in the same activities it once found pleasurable, or continue in the roles it once enjoyed. These changes are often difficult to welcome and deserve the tender touch of our compassion.

But if we continue to resist these changes, our mind and emotions become tangled in a sense of diminution and depletion. We see death and loss as errors in the system, things to be corrected rather than as integral parts of life. We not only become averse to our dying but hostile towards it (and then of course to our own dying body). We fight it at all costs and the cost is this: when the body’s need to die is strongly resisted, an internal crisis occurs. The person feels this opposition play out within themselves, causing a kind of psychic pain unrelieved by medication. A person is pulled unwillingly to their death.

For others, the spirit and psychology ready first. Sometimes seen in people of an advanced age, those who have tired after a long illness or who are in chronic pain, or in those who have simply found peace with their lives – these folks speak of being ready. Curiously, the body itself may not be ready, and this could be unsettling.

And still, there are people for whom there is a harmonic arising of the internal and external during their dying. It’s not that the process of emotional upheaval or existential distress is avoided or absent. The feelings and thoughts around dying may be just as fierce. The difference may be in the acceptance of, and working with, the strong emotions, seeing them as both normal and necessary.

Rather than contracting around fear and pain, these forces are allowed to expand the heart, mind, and body. There is a deep exhalation of control, fear, and resistance. This is more than tolerance, perhaps even more than acceptance. It manifests as a profound trust that life and death are held by an overarching spirit of benevolence, whether natural law or spiritual love.