A few weeks ago, I received an email from Cameron Von St. James regarding a campaign to spread his wife Heather’s story about surviving Mesothelioma-– an often fatal consequence of asbestos exposure. The nurse in me wants to share her story here and the writer in me wants to spread the power of hope through her story.
It is my pleasure to present this introduction and interview by the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance with Heather Von St. James.
“The Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance’s (MCA) very own Heather Von St. James is spearheading an awareness effort on behalf of mesothelioma victims by sharing her personal holiday, LungLeavin’ Day, the anniversary of her surgery on February 2.
LungLeavin’ Day started out as a personal celebration in the beginning of February between Heather and her husband Cameron to recognize each year Heather remained cancer-free, but has now turned into a celebration of life and overcoming fears with many family members, friends and cancer survivors.
LungLeavin’ Day is not just for cancer survivors though, it is a day for anyone who desires to take control of their lives and throw their fears to the fire. Read our interview with Heather below, check out her new page and share with your loved ones!”
You have permission to smash your fears…LungLeavinDay Photo Credit: Mesothelioma.com
Thank you Heather and Cameron for sharing your cancer survival story. And congratulations, Heather for overcoming this devastating disease and spreading your hope to others.
I love the idea of smashing our fears like throwing a plate so it breaks into smithereens and loses any functionality and power over us in our lives!
I hope you’ll all go visit the Mesothelioma blog and enjoy this interview. Any thoughts?
I’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below~
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Rev. Martin Luther King , Jr.
Bestselling Author, Memoir Teacher and Clinical Psychologist Maureen Murdock returns for Part 2 of the spoken word piece she did for SPARKS theater in Pacific Palisades, CA. She describes a heartwrenching visit with her son Matt in prison. Here is Part 1 if you missed it.
Welcome back, Maureen!
Memoir Author and Teacher Maureen Murdock
“Hooked on Hope, Part 2: A Mother’s Story About Bipolar Disorder and Prison.”
I am a therapist. What I do is help other people give voice to their lives to heal. When people come to my office it’s safe for them to have their feelings, to cry, to rant, to rage. My office is a sanctuary. But when I visit my son in prison, I have to go against my every instinct as a therapist and mother—encouraging him to express his feelings would only put him in danger.
Safety is a big issue for me. I have struggled with and failed to keep my son safe. When he had his first mental health emergency in his second year in college I tried to get him the help he needed, to stabilize him, to keep him contained. But it was not enough.
When bipolar illness is paired with substance abuse it’s a recipe for disaster.My son has made some bad decisions that have had huge consequences.
The night Matt was arrested for knowingly buying a stolen laptop while he was on probation, my first thought was well, now he’s safe in County Jail. I know where he is. This was before he was sentenced to 4 years and transferred to San Quentin.
I want you to understand— that in spite of all of his struggles, my son is a talented artist. He has had gallery shows in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Our shared love of art is a way we connect in the purest, uncomplicated way. Making art is the way he makes sense of and connects with the outside world.
Over the past year, he did a series of silkscreen prints in the art studio inmates use when a volunteer teacher comes into prison. A recent assignment was to create a print about human rights in the prison system.
Matt’s artwork: Towers Linoprint
His silkscreen illustrating Solitary Confinement, Mental Illness and the 8th Amendment was chosen to be part of an art show in San Francisco. His statement under the print read: “In prison, it’s not possible to do artwork which is not political. The very act is one of resistance.. Solitary Confinement is a clear constitutional violation, an insidious exercise of cruel and unusual punishment.”
Matt’s artwork: Solitary Confinement
Matt was proud to be in the show; it meant he still had a presence in the art world. His dream after prison is to curate a show with art from prisoners he admires.
He had been saving stamps for six months to send home his additional prints and the prints of other inmates he had bought. Stamps are the only currency in prison. They are bartered for CDs, junk food and inmate art. He had constructed a large make-shift envelope for the prints and waited to send it home until he knew the guard on watch who would inspect it. Officer Lee examined the contents and taped the envelope closed.
It arrived at my house sealed shut but empty.
One of the other guards must have confiscated the art. Six months worth of scrimping and saving and creating only to be stolen by someone who can–with impunity.
It is conceivable that the art was taken to be examined for gang-related imagery. It is also known that inmate art is stolen by guards for sale on e-Bay. The journal in which he had written an essay on the injustice of solitary confinement had also been taken.
Matt was devastated.
I wish I could tell him that everything will be okay. That he just has to hang on for 3 more months.
But I don’t feel like things will be okay.
I feel powerless to change his circumstances. All I can do is ask you to keep an open mind about those you might not understand. There’s always a hidden narrative.
***
Maureen, the sense of injustice is palpable. Anyone, especially a mother with a child in prison, will be touched by your words. I admire your courage in getting your story out there so that we all can know the realities of prison life. I am joining you in being “hooked on hope” that Matt will move forward from this harrowing experience with purpose and strength. And yes, may we all be more understanding of the “hidden narratives” when we face that which we may not understand.
Author’s Biography and Contact Information(from Amazon):
Maureen Murdock is the best-selling author of The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, a ground-breaking work which revealed a broader understanding of the female psyche on both a personal and cultural level and was Murdock’s response to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces. When Murdock showed Campbell her book, he said, “Women don’t need to make the journey.” Murdock’s readers around the world have shown that he’s wrong! A Jungian psychotherapist and creative writing teacher, Murdock is also the author of Fathers Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind, The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children, and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory, a seminal work about memoir and what’s involved in writing a memoir. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages and she lectures internationally.
The Emergence of a Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective by Maureen Murdock informs the reader about the early signs of bipolar disorder in an adolescent or young adult from a mother who has been through this journey with her son. The book describes what’s involved in a mental health crisis, the trauma of a first hospitalization and facts and figures about bipolar disorder, the fastest growing brain illness in children today. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, four million children and adolescents in America suffer from a serious mental disorder. Through early diagnosis and treatment these young people can live productive lives.
As a mother and a psychotherapist, it was difficult for me to find adequate resources when my son was first diagnosed so I offer tools to navigate these turbulent waters. Included are suggestions about Mental Health First Aid, personal recommendations for links to TED Talks by two young people talking about living with bipolar disorder and community resources a family can access for support before, during, and after a mental health crisis. Like the award-winning movie “Silver Linings Playbook,” The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective gives the reader a glimpse into the challenges a family experiences when a child is struck with a mood disorder.
The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder:A Mother’s Perspective
How about you? How do you handle life circumstances when they don’t turn out the way you want them to? How do you help a child whose choices have led to consequences and injustices that are difficult for you as a parent to deal with?
Maureen has graciously offered to give away a copy of her Kindle short to a commenter whose name will be selected in a random drawing.
We’d love to hear from you. Please share your comments below~
Next Week, Monday, 1/13/14:” All Dressed Up and So Many Places to Go–Publication Decision Time.”
“There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.” John Stuart Mill
I am thrilled to kick the New Year off with a guest post by Maureen Murdock about hope while dealing with an imprisoned son who has also been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. Maureen is a clinical psychologist as well as a leading figure in the memoir community and the author of several memoir writing books. Her current memoir, Hooked on Hope is pending publication. Her recently published Kindle short, The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder addresses why she chose to write about mental illness in the family.
I had the pleasure of meeting Maureen when I attended her memoir writing workshop at the International Women Writers Guild (IWWG) Annual Convention this summer at Drew University in Madison, NJ.
This is Part 1 of an excerpt from a spoken word piece Maureen did for SPARK theater in Pacific Palisades, CA.
Welcome , Maureen!
Memoir Author and Teacher Maureen Murdock
Hooked on Hope: A Mother’s Story About Bipolar Disorder and Prison
Ten years ago I taught a week-long memoir course at Skidmore College. One of the writers, a middle-aged woman from Queens, wrote about being the mother of a son in prison.
“People don’t realize,” she wrote, “When a child is in prison, his mother is there too. I see the fear and disgust in people’s eyes when I say my son is in prison. I imagine they’re thinking, ‘she must have been a terrible mother for her son to be incarcerated.’”
I was deeply moved by her statement about being imprisoned too. I had never thought about that. Up until then, like many people, I thought prison was primarily populated by low-level drug dealers, thieves, and murderers, mostly black. I grew up in New Jersey and the only white people I knew who went to prison were Italian mobsters. This well-dressed white woman was the first woman I had met who was the mother of a convicted felon.
Six years later I am too.
Every other month I drive 6 hours to visit my son, Matt, at San Quentin. Female visitors are forbidden to wear underwire bras so I make sure I have my sports bra on. I put my car key, ID, and single dollar bills for the vending machines in the clear plastic purse I am permitted to bring into prison. The contents will be inspected. Nothing else can be brought into or out of prison.
After being searched and passed through the metal detector I go through a series of metal gates–surrounded by barbed wire. I hand my identification to the officer who sits in a platform on high—like some olive green khaki god– looking down at me. I take a seat and wait as the guard calls for my son. After he is strip searched, Matt is given a pass to enter the Visitors room. He walks toward me with a big grin, hands his ID to the platformed guard, and gives me a big bear hug.
It feels good to embrace his thin muscular body. I look into his eyes. Yes, he’s still there. They haven’t beaten him down–yet.
We sit across each other in plastic chairs eighteen inches from the next inmate and his visitor. Any attempt to find out how my son is really doing will be overheard. He tells me he just received a letter from the gallery owner who offered him an internship upon his release from prison next February. At the time of his offer a year ago the gallery owner told me, “Nobody should be judged by his last mistake.”
I thought what a humane person, what a good egg. The gallery is not far from my home in Santa Barbara so it meant my son would have a safe place to live with me and my partner, a roof over his head, a job, a new start. I could relax a bit about what he was going to do upon release.
But, Matt said, “He changed his mind. He rescinded his offer. He wrote that it was too risky to have me ‘handle’ millions of dollars of artwork.”
The gallery owner knew that my son was qualified—that he had done installation work at the Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica– so rescinding his offer didn’t have anything to do with skill. It had to do with stigmatization.
Losing that job meant that upon release Matt would be paroled to San Francisco where he was arrested, with nothing but a clear plastic bag for his clothes and $200.
I wanted to reach out to my son and hold him and tell him it would be okay. That something else would come along. But I had to sit on my hands and look at him as he put his head down, his hair covering his eyes so that neither I, nor the people sitting next to us on either side could see his tears. . .
to be continued, 01/09/14 with Part 2. . .
***
Maureen, this story leaves me spellbound. I could feel your mother’s love and anguish. Thank you for your bravery in sharing such a deeply personal and heart-wrenching story. I join you in hoping that getting your story out there will help to increase awareness and create changes in our judicial system.
Author’s Bio and Contact Information (from Amazon):
Maureen Murdock is the best-selling author of The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, a ground-breaking work which revealed a broader understanding of the female psyche on both a personal and cultural level and was Murdock’s response to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces. When Murdock showed Campbell her book, he said, “Women don’t need to make the journey.” Murdock’s readers around the world have shown that he’s wrong! A Jungian psychotherapist and creative writing teacher, Murdock is also the author of Fathers Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind, The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children, and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory, a seminal work about memoir and what’s involved in writing a memoir. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages and she lectures internationally.
The Emergence of a Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective by Maureen Murdock informs the reader about the early signs of bipolar disorder in an adolescent or young adult from a mother who has been through this journey with her son. The book describes what’s involved in a mental health crisis, the trauma of a first hospitalization and facts and figures about bipolar disorder, the fastest growing brain illness in children today. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, four million children and adolescents in America suffer from a serious mental disorder. Through early diagnosis and treatment these young people can live productive lives.
As a mother and a psychotherapist, it was difficult for me to find adequate resources when my son was first diagnosed so I offer tools to navigate these turbulent waters. Included are suggestions about Mental Health First Aid, personal recommendations for links to TED Talks by two young people talking about living with bipolar disorder and community resources a family can access for support before, during, and after a mental health crisis. Like the award-winning movie “Silver Linings Playbook,” The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder: A Mother’s Perspective gives the reader a glimpse into the challenges a family experiences when a child is struck with a mood disorder.
The Emergence of Bipolar Disorder:A Mother’s Perspective
Once you choose hope, anything’s possible” – Christopher Reeve
“Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark” – George Iles
I am delighted to feature Wellness Coach and Writer, Ted Cole to expand on one of my favorite topics, the power of hope. Ted and I met through his wife Cate Russell-Cole when Ted emailed me with his thoughts on how hope has worked in his life. He has some interesting thoughts about how hope is a choice we all have.
Welcome, Ted!
Wellness Coach and Writer Ted Cole
The Power of Hope
My interest in hope started just after surviving a series of life challenges. These challenges came in quick succession, barely allowing me to take a breath in between. I became unemployed, when my job of 25 years disappeared through downsizing; then divorced after a 25 year marriage. The challenges progressed into a full-blown life crisis, where I questioned whether or not I was getting what I wanted from life. Then the truth hit me… I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Without any life purpose, I had no direction and a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness pursued. I was truly drowning in despair. I became clinically depressed and stressed, which resulted in a serious of related medical problems. I was hanging on by a thread.
How I could have survived all of this? That is where “the power of hope” comes in. I remember sitting under a tree in a park reading a self-help book and desperately seeking a solution. One of the chapters was on change. In essence, the message was that we are the product of the accumulated changes in our lives. Now, surprisingly that chapter did not mention something which came quite intuitively to me. That being, that if we are the product of our changes, then it must follow that we are the product of our choices. That became the spark I needed to move forward. It became evident that hope would not just happen, instead it had to be as a result of a conscious choice.I could choose to do nothing and continue down the spiral of despair, or I could choose to make choices which would lead me along a path of becoming more hopeful.
In my despair and depression, reality became quite surreal. That seemed to make me gravitate towards writing as a means of recording what was happening. This was a journal of sorts, a way of slowing down and giving more meaning to what was happening, thereby making it real. This grounded me, which led to me to ponder my real purpose in life. With a lot of soul-searching I discovered that my purpose is helping others who have been drawn off-course by events in their lives.This eventually led me to my pursuit of Intentional Living. I realized how close I had been to being spiritually bankrupt and I got back to my Christian roots, which was the missing link in the chain.
Looking back, my progression was that I first viewed hope as a separate entity (this was a symptom of my spiritual bankruptcy); which then developed into my belief that hope and faith were intertwined (my faith rediscovered). However, a more recent revelation occurred to me, which was that hope could only come from a foundation of faith.
Faith and Hope compliment each other and work together as “the power of hope.”
After a lot of research as to how other people define hope, I have come to the conclusion that hope, like faith, love, compassion, joy and happiness, is unique to each person.
Each of us defines what hope is in our own context, and the power that can be derived from it.
The following is my summation of lessons learned about the power of hope and faith:
1 Faith is the foundation of hope. Without faith as the foundation, hope becomes empty and false.
2 Faith provides the confidenceand assurance of what we are hoping for.
3 Without faith and hope you cannot move forwardwith your life’s purpose.
4 Faith is the belief that the unseen will happen, hope is the energy we put into nurturing it.
5 Transforming Purpose and Hope into fulfillment takes a high degree of Determination and courage (I call this PHD – there will be more on PHD on my blog).
6 Excuses do not support a path to hope, only action will pave that path. I personally have to be actively participating, or at least influencing an outcome, to remain hopeful.
7 Hope, like acts of encouragement, joy, love and kindness, are all magical gifts which we can give in abundance; never having to worry about depleting their stores.
8 The power of hope thrives when we joyfully embrace it and are truly thankful for it.
Hope Base Photo Carolyn Conner/Flickr Creative Commons
Hope is the flame on the candle of faith. The flame of hope can flicker and dim, but it can never be extinguished by life’s challenges, as long as we maintain our foundation of faith.
May your flame of hope shine brightly, to help light the path for others.
Ted Cole is a Certified Wellness Educator, a Dale Carnegie member and agraduate of Context International’s Pursuit of Excellence series. He has been involved with change management and it’s processes within his corporate career where he found that many of the issues which occur within commercial ventures, are similar to those which occur within an individual’s life.
Having dealt with many changes in his own life, Ted began to formulate his own philosophy of change on a deeper level. From there he started to research and develop the “Crossroads of Change” Course. He has also always had an avid interest in spirituality and self-development. The mind-body connection and hope are themes that have always been an integral part of his philosophy and developmental work.
Crossroads of Change originally started as a book about hope; which he was co-writing with his wife, Cate Russel-Cole. Realising that the whole process of achieving greater wellness was much larger than simply focussing on hope, the book concept grew into what it is today.
Ted, originally a resident of Canada, now lives with his wife in Brisbane, Australia.
Thank you ,Ted, for sharing your personal journey of how the power of hope has worked in your life. I especially appreciate the idea that hope is a choice, rooted in faith. I also agree that hope is unique to each person.
How about you? We may all have a different way of finding hope in our lives. How has the power of hope worked for you? We’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below~
Next Week: “Music Matters in Memoir Writing: A Reflection”
