Restoration: When Treatment Ends

My clients can hardly wait for their treatment to be over. They visualize having their strength, energy, and independence back. They imagine their return to work or other pre-diagnosis activities. They picture a calendar filled with events of their choosing, rather than the many medical appointments that brought them to the end of their treatment. They are ready to have their old life back.

But they also see the end of treatment as a new beginning. Of renewal, after surviving the diagnosis and treatment for cancer. A celebration of a clean bill of health, after imaging or other tests report the joyful finding “No Evidence of Disease”. They want to restore themselves physically, mentally and emotionally in the months and years to come. They wonder how to incorporate the experience of these past months as they move forward, knowing that their life has been deeply changed.

There is something we can learn from the Japanese culture about restoration.

Imagine for a moment you have just received a package, sent to you from a family member or friend. Inside is a porcelain bowl, a remembrance of a time past or a person no longer in your life. But when you unwrap the item, you find that it is broken into several pieces. What to do? The item holds too many memories to simply discard it, but if you try to glue it back together, you can’t imagine that you will be happy with the result. You could consider having it professionally restored, but even with seamless repairs, you will always know that it was broken. The bowl is forever altered; it will never be the same. It can, however, be more.

The Japanese have a method for repairing valued art objects that dates to the 17^th century. Rather than attempting an invisible mend, the artisan carefully fills the object’s break with liquid gold, highlighting the break rather than hiding it. It is thought that by doing this, the treasured piece is honored in its entirety, a life story which includes the break. The name of this form of restoration is kintsugi, which means golden joinery.

This repair method forges an object’s destruction with precious metal, restoring it in a beautiful way. It does not try to mend it in such a way as to forget, but to remember.

Whether we like it or not, cancer changes us. You likely have seen that in your own life. The challenge is to find a way to make that change a part of who you are moving forward. To embrace the change in such a way that honors the fact that your present life story is both different and beautiful.

If you are interested in learning more about counseling support to help with post-treatment restoration and recovery, please email me at [email protected]