Judy was late getting her mammogram. After a painful divorce that meant she would have to change health insurance plans, she put it off, until she felt a breast lump. As a physician, she knew it was time to get it checked, and when she did, the mammogram showed something suspicious. After an excisional breast biopsy, the pathologist called her directly. “It’s all lymphoctyes,” the pathologist said, seeming confused. Judy knew all about lymphocytes. Before going to medical school, she studied them under microscopes as a technician studying transplant immunology. After a bone marrow biopsy and a PET scan, Judy found out that her tumor wasn’t your everyday breast cancer. It was stage 4 B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive and incurable variant of cancer.

Judy found out about her cancer just over a month before I cast her. Initially, she went to Mayo clinic on a Thursday and they told her she was starting chemo on Friday. Her response was “Whoa, Nelly!” (or something like that). She tells me that, with her kind of cancer, chemotherapy can only slow the progression of the disease, not cure it. And you can only use chemo once. But she feels great- full of energy, full of hope. With the support of a second opinion, she has decided to wait, at least for now. After all, she had long ago scheduled the workshop where we met, led by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. Judy didn’t know she had cancer when she scheduled the workshop with Rachel. It now seems more than accidental that she planned to attend, since Rachel’s professional life revolves around counseling cancer patients and their families and leading healing retreats. Judy had a feeling she would find more healing from Rachel than from chemotherapy, so she decided to go to the conference. Chemo could wait its turn.

When I asked how she felt about her new diagnosis, she explained that it had been a hell of a year. She had been unhappy but couldn’t quite pinpoint why. She thought maybe it was her job. After completing her residency at a Harvard program, she always felt the need to be perfect, like she was never enough. But a year ago, when her husband of many years left her, she realized that the marriage had been the problem. Without that baggage, she was free, fulfilled, and happy with her children, her career, her passion for skiing, and her love of star-gazing. She said, “When I tell my patients they have cancer, many of them say, ‘Wait, I have to change my life and get rid of the baggage. Me, I already did that this year. I’m okay with dying. I don’t need to change anything.’”

When I asked her to describe what she would look like on the inside, Judy said, “I have the whole earth inside of me. Everything is there that I need. I guess it’s my science background, but I see all the chemicals and forms and mountains and valleys and flowing rivers. Cancer reminds you that your body is a garden- flowers and terraces, walls, and water, but there are some weeds. You need to work on getting the weeds out. It’s not evil or something foreign. It’s of you, but it’s too much of the wrong thing in the wrong place. We are our own little microcosms. That’s wholeness.”

I also attended Rachel Remen’s workshop, which is how I met Judy. I cast her only moments after the workshop finished. Just before our session, Judy had hugged Rachel goodbye and confessed to Rachel that she felt like her cancer would be viewed as a sin of weakness. Before that moment, Judy had never felt like it was notokay to have a weakness. But Rachel thought differently. Rachel told Judy that, for 52 years, she has been a patient with a chronic illness, as well as being a doctor. To Judy, Rachel said, “It’s okay to have a weakness.” Judy was overwhelmed. She had never been given permission not to be perfect. Nobody at Harvard every acknowledged her wholeness in the absence of her perfection. Judy said, “Rachel gave me a gift. She absolved me of my weakness.”

By the end of my meeting with Judy, I hadn’t seen even the slightest suggestion of weakness. Instead, I saw gardens when I looked at her- flowers and tall trees and flowing rivers and earth, without even a hint of fear or sadness or despair. I saw Eden, a walking, talking, breathing paradise with maybe a few weeds, but the weeds were yellow dandelions and Indian yellow California poppies, making up part of the landscape of something whole and beautiful. I saw strength. Not warrior-type strength, but willow branch strength, flowing and bending and arcing towards the earth.