THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604070254
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Easter is a time when opposites thrive in one another's company.
Spring is particularly sweet after a harsh winter. Life savored all the more after a season of death. Compassion stoked by suffering.
Mary Frances Swoope of Virginia Beach can give you twin descriptions of life and death in a way she couldn't four years ago.
First, the feeling of death.
The fear that starts in your chest and rises slowly into your mouth. The retreat inside yourself to hide the pain. The examination of a lifetime of regrets. All the things you wanted to do, but didn't. All the things you did that you wish you hadn't.
Swoope knows how death crowds the mind because she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992.
Cancer and death were synonymous in her eyes.
``You have cancer, you have death, that's what I thought,'' Swoope said. ``There's a cloud over your head.''
Ask Swoope what life feels like, and she can describe that just as vividly.
It's how you feel when you walk up to accept your high school diploma, 40 years after you dropped out of high school. Life is what you feel surge through your veins when you look back in the audience and see your husband and children proudly smiling.
Life is when you stop looking for God ``somewhere up there'' and start finding him in the world around you. Joining a church, signing up for church activities, meeting God in the people who sit in church with you every week.
Life is helping someone else who is staring death in the face. Joining a support group for breast cancer victims, sharing your story and your fear and your experience.
And life is how you feel when you wake up one day and realize you aren't afraid anymore.
``All my life I was afraid of death,'' Swoope said. ``Now I know that if I die, it's all right.''
Swoope knows life in its most potent form because she's been through all of the above. After going through 11 operations and chemotherapy to get her body to a cancer-free state two years ago, she realized she still felt sick.
She was still afraid.
So she set about re-inventing herself, not physically but emotionally. She saw a social worker for help. Talked with a priest. Joined an Episcopal church. Signed up for adult education classes. And shared her fears in a Bosom Buddies support group for victims of breast cancer.
She can't say she doesn't ever cry. She does. Every six months when she goes to the doctor for a checkup, she cries going up in the elevator. And re-visits the feelings of despair and isolation she felt most acutely after first learning she had cancer.
But she knows that pain has also given her a new compassion for others she never had before.
When she goes back down that elevator with a clean bill of health, she feels a relief that's all the stronger for the tears.
A normal checkup, a normal day, a normal year - these are now remarkable things.
She can't say she's glad she had breast cancer. But she can say the diagnosis changed her life for the better.
And that, after all, is what Easter is about. Taking life's darkness and turning it into compassion and insight and rebirth. Life is not nearly as strong and potent without the specter of death.
``You don't think about the things you don't have anymore,'' Swoope said. ``You think about the things you do have.'' by CNB