In recent months, I have faced the challenges of early-stage breast cancer. I’ve shared with a few friends, who have provided overwhelming support. As I continue down this path of tests, biopsy, diagnosis, surgery, medical decisions between natural and main-stream medicine, I find it challenging sometimes to remember the beauty of life, despite its darkness.

One of my sources of strength lies in the work and life of my long-time friend, writer Frederick Manfred, who passed in 1994 of a brain tumor, and who spent years toiling to report, record and interpret the American experience, both Native and immigrant. The span of his over 50 years of dedication to writing and away from other pursuits produced rich novels and essay which will live on, hopefully, for future generations.

Fred was a hopeful man, one who spoke out in support of labor and for justice that comes from a real democracy (Hubert Humphrey asked him to join his campaign for Senate in 1948).

Fred was also a flawed human being, just like the rest of us. However, his gravestone acknowledges that he embraced all of life, the beautiful and the painful. A quote on his gravestone reveals his view that “It was all marvelous. I don’t regret a minute of it, even the pain and hunger were sweet to have. It was life, not death, and all moments of life are very precious.”

All Marvelous

I’m going to punch the next man in the nose
that gets ugly about you, wrote Feike Feikema
to Henry Miller on March 11, 1944.

1.

All those years ago, when I was Feike, not Fred,
I dreamed of the marvelous, as Henry wrote,
It’s always beautiful. Anything that is marvelous
is beautiful. Indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful.

Yes, that’s what I thought, a young man with wife,
baby on the way, and only one book to my name. Thought Miller
was the cat’s meow. Would fight for him, would punch the man
who said he should lay off the sex, for god’s sake.
Women would blanch at your words.

And he was. The cat’s meow, that is. I liked Henry.
Liked how he tapped into the core of the lizard
in people, primal urge, sex, love, babies, working folk,
plowing land, people seen only in Hardy or Steinbeck.

That’s what I always wanted, to be like Henry Miller.
I loved women, despite having a wife. But it was all about
being real, understanding human urging. It was what
god put us here for. It is all marvelous . . .. very precious.

2.

All moments of life are very precious. Fred’s right, I think. This
place in me, this pain, I embrace it, like a small cancer that visits
and waits, yearns for an exit, waits until it’s cut away
like a rotten tooth, leaving only a gaping hole.

That hole will close, a forgotten crater in the moon,
a one step for me away from the notion that life can be free
of pain and hunger, that I will somehow be blessed with life,
not death, that there will never be an ending to this
compromised, bitter-sweet existence. Like the two tramps,
I will wonder if I’d be better off alone, me for myself. And yet,
and yet, I will wait, never alone, I will wait, always
tormented with accursed time. I will wait, for the sweetness
of pain and hunger, for how marvelous, how very precious,
it will all be.

From Portals: A Memoir in Verse, by Nancy Owen Nelson, Kelsay Books, 2019.