Cameron Powell - Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk on the Camino de Santiago

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Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept To My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk

2018 Cameron Powell. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, or photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the author.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-68401-961-8

Cameron Powell writes and speaks passionately on things that matter: love and fear, death and comedy; the art and science of mindfulness and positive psychology; storytelling for life, career, and interviews; social justice; and how to flourish and grow during challenging times.

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Get the best of these new writings on navigating difficult emotions, the science of compassion, self-forgiveness, unearthing your strengths, how art heals, and much more, along with exhilarating videos of the journey Cameron took with his mother through Camino de Santiago, and Deleted Scenes and other bonus material that didnt make it into the adventure youre about to go on.

Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so vertrgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
~
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Fr Ingelein

AUTHOR NOTE

Most of the story told in these pages was written first in diaries and then posted on the blog CaminoNotChemo.com, by my mother and me, as the events were taking place. Ive elected to preserve most of our original, less-filtered impressions as we wrote them at the time, and in the present tense, without the later, writerly additions of Memory, Poetry, fearlessness, expertise, and other tomfoolery.

Blog entries have been edited for brevity and clarity, and only occasionally revised for context or to make me look nicer or more clever.

Some names have been changed, including my own.

PROLOGUE

Ones destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

Henry Miller

I was married once, and with a brevity I was surprised to find agreeable. The nature channels tell me penguins can boast of longer relationships, and all too often do. By the time a judge closed the file, in the fall of 2011, I stood with my motherwhod had no happy unions herselfon a yellow-arrowed path, six thousand miles away, like characters in some twenty-first century update to the Wizard of Oz.

My sixty-seven-year-old mother was on this 500-mile trail because she wanted a cure for her ovarian canceror at least a break from worrying about all the cutting and poison, as she put it. She had beaten back cancer in 2001, aged fifty-seven, ditched the emperor of all maladies in a fiery lake of chemotherapy. Then she ran and ran and would not look back. Oh, the places I went! she would write later, in our blog at CaminoNotChemo.com. Erlangen, Germany, where I was born, Switzerland, Venice, Amsterdam, and more. How my endorphins just went nuts with joy. I felt such a sense of well being, of wonderful peace, that I was in tears half the time. I said prayers of gratefulness and thanks for my eyes that could see the beauty. For my senses that could take it all in and amazement at the miracle that is our planet.

But the emperor had returned with reinforcements just over a year ago, in April, 2010, as measured by the test for ovarian cancer known as CA (cancer antigen) 125. She was astonished.

You mean it can come back?

Surgery, said the surgeons.

Chemo, quoth the chemotherapists.

Radiation, recommended the radiators.

She felt besieged with choices and their risks: another horrible chemo, or death sometime soonwhich was worse? Her first rodeo with chemo almost a decade earlier had been so excruciating that she cried whenever the merest idea of enduring it again came up. Chemos ancestor, mustard gas, after all, had been used to blister the skin, lungs, eyes, and throats of soldiers in World War I. Besides, she still felt fine. She was still not symptomatic, and her cancer was unusually slow-growing. Not yet, Mom had told the doctors. I want to do it my way first. Though Doc, her primary care physician, would have preferred she do something soon, he and several other doctors agreed there was no immediate need, even now, a year later. So now here we were, with backpacks and hiking poles, crippling blisters (her) and a torn calf (me), high on the wild-dog-infested and wind-swept spine of a mountain range in northern Spain.

Exhausted from the long road to divorce, I hadnt believed there were any answers for me here, so I had sort of convinced myself I wanted nothing. I stood at the foot of a high rubbled mound, holding my new Nikon SLR, which Id rationalized buying, from Costco, for this very trip. The video was on. Mom had talked about this moment for months, and I am nothing if not a catcher, or perhaps I mean a chaser, of moments. She was picking her way up the mound, through the powdery rocks, gray and white like her short-cropped hair. Cousin Carrie, fifteen, had abandoned her own massive backpack and was watching the scene from my left. In a field to my right, an older man, very tall, with sturdy boots and a backpack, was weeping.

The mound was pierced at its summit by a 30-foot-tall oak post, about as big around as a telephone pole. The very top of the post was fitted with a cross bearing a tiny iron cap, like the sort of hat an English bulldog might wear, if an English bulldog had scored an audience with the Queen. The three free arms of the tiny iron cross ended in Boy-Scoutish fleurs-de-lis.

For thousands of years a mound of rocks had marked the summit of this mountain range. And for thousands of years, some version of the Cruz de Ferro had spied on the most intimate rites of countless pilgrimsfirst Celts and other Pagans, later just Catholics, now we pagans were backas they formed meaning out of this very way station. A million pilgrims before us, along with shamans, druids, sundry witches, and Catholic royalty, had built up the mound with hand-placed relics from their own private rituals of letting go: of anger, of grief, of resentment, of illnessletting go, perhaps, even of the fear of death. Because that is what people do on pilgrimages, of any kind, whether they mean to or not. They let go. Thats what the verb to forgive means. To forgive others, and, harder yet, to forgive oneself. In his brief life, Jesus told us what he knew about forgiving our neighbors and our enemies alike, but the bastards killed him before he could show us how to forgive ourselves.

An ancient tradition holds that pilgrims should bring to the Cruz, from their own homes, one small stone and one personal item, and to leave them both behind at the cross. I watched my mother: her newly short hair, her glasses on a red string. She was placing among the rocks a small stone shed carried from a deep and ancient canyon near her adopted home in western Colorado. Then she began to search her trekking vest for the personal item shed stored away for this day.