DANCING AT THE EDGE OF LIFE

A young woman’s articulate and passionate journal of the last 13 months of her life. Warner, an award-winning poet and journalist (coauthor, with Michael Shuman, of Citizen Diplomats: Pathfinders in Soviet-American Relations and How You Can Join Them,1987), was diagnosed with lymphoma at the age of 30. Her intensely personal record of living with cancer, filling nearly a thousand handwritten pages at the time of her death, is a remarkable document. What is probably most astonishing is the spirit, the optimism with which she battled her cancer, first with chemotherapy, later with radiation therapy, and still later with a bone marrow transplant. Warner’s religious beliefs permeate her journal; to categorize them is impossible, even for her (she entered “private” on a hospital form requesting such information) but the phrase “earth-based spirituality” probably comes close. A nature lover and an active environmentalist, she saw her cancer-invaded body as a metaphor for the earth: She likened the tumor growing in her chest to “Los Angeles suburban growth,” and when her breath came in wheezes, she thought of “the earth being strangled by overpopulation.” A close observer both of the natural world and of her own body, she described herself unsparingly yet uncomplainingly as “ripening and aging like a fruit” as radiation took its toll, and she visualized the ordeal of a bone marrow transplant as a ritual of purification involving the mythic elements of water, fire, air, and earth, leading to a rebirth. The nature of evil, disease, healing, love, creativity, prayer, fear, pain, dying, death, and reincarnation—Warner recorded her thoughts on all of these. Three days before she died, she turned her journals over to her husband, who, in a brief afterword, recounts her final hours. A powerful account of a life fully lived and a death bravely faced.