The Strength of Words

WRITING AND THE STRENGTH OF WORDS
by
Robert Villanueva

Myelodysplastic Syndrome. Anemia. Hemogram.

A writer is supposed to love words. And I do. But not those words. Those words invaded my vocabulary in the last half of 2000, and I almost wish I’d never heard them.

Sure, I’m glad that my mother now knows what she has, after having been afflicted with a nameless condition since 1983. Sure, I realize that words are neither bad nor good. But, neutral or not, words have power. And intimidating words like “incurable,” “spontaneous hemorrhaging” and “rare blood disorder” came along for the ride when I learned those other words.

Such words can be like leeches. They can attach themselves to people, draining them of life and hope.

Every other Monday—sometimes more often—I sit in the Cancer Care Center of an Elizabethtown, Kentucky, hospital. There, my 77-year-old mother gets platelet infusions, sometimes blood. I sit with her, ever vigilant for those leeches.

Looking at her, I still see the woman who encouraged my childhood writing. I also see Mom when she was in her 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. I see the youthful laughter in her eyes from days past when she joked with friends at the dining room table playing dominoes. I see the smile she wore when she came home from a night out dancing.

I even see Mom as the woman she was before I was born, the woman from the stories she told about her life before and after leaving her hometown of Saltillo, Mexico. I see the woman who couldn’t read English and used a “colored only” bathroom in the Deep South of the 50s because the concept of segregation was more foreign to her than she was to this country. I see the intelligent, resolute woman who taught herself English in part because she wanted to sing along to the radio with the likes of Patsy Cline. I see the woman whose beauty was so undeniable that it inspired a photographer to follow her around Saltillo, snapping off picture after picture of her when she was a teenager.

Many years ago, Mom gave me a glass reproduction of one of those photos. It stands on a worn wooden base. In the photo, Mom leans against a waist-high stone wall, a tree with hanging branches like a willow behind her, the Saltillo sun splashing down on her like a spotlight. She exudes glamour. She looks like a movie star, an undiscovered Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth.

I love that photo. It shows everything about Mom at once: her beauty, her poise, her dignity, her self-confidence. Those traits still comprise her presence.

But I also see something else when I look at the photo, something I’ve always known but rarely acknowledged. I see how delicate it makes its subject looks, how much it is like looking at a ghost of an image. And now, sometimes when I look at her, I see Mom as that photo. I see her as delicate, breakable, even a translucent version of herself. And I know that I am being assaulted by doubt. It is like making myself vulnerable to those same leeches that drift around the Cancer Care Center waiting for an opportunity to attach themselves.

While Mom draws on her inner strength to deal with her condition, I have had to take strength wherever I can find it. My family and loved ones are great sources for me, but I also find myself looking at the situation with a writer’s eyes.

Maybe I see these things in order to write about them, to force them to make some sort of sense. Words have always sustained me.

As a child, my words assumed the form of bad poetry on homemade cards I gave to my mother. She still enjoys pulling those cards out and showing people, not as a means of embarrassment but as a source of pride.

Throughout my junior high school and high school years, my words formed short stories and more bad poetry. Later, after graduating from college with a degree in journalism, my words took the form of news stories, features and columns that I wrote as a staff writer or news editor for local newspapers.

Now, as a fiction writer and freelancer, I write a little bit of everything. And Mom is still as proud as she was when I wrote poems on homemade cards. She is still my Mom, and—at 46—I am still her little boy. Her pride in me cannot be shaken from her no matter our ages or personal trials.

I look back at myself as a child, and I realize that I wish I knew now what I knew then. And I mean that just as I wrote it. Back then, I knew days would always keep coming, Mom and Dad would always be there, and bad things were temporary.

Those days are gone, and somewhere along the way I had to find something I could use to reconcile the difference between childhood innocence and adult reality. Everyone has something that sustains him or her.

Despite the machines, the tests, and the infusions, Mom finds something to sustain her. She is first and foremost a parent, a strong, intelligent woman who does not yield to her hardships because to yield would mean to give up something that she could give to her children.

So I must use what I have always used to sustain me: words.

Writing words usually helps me put things in perspective.

I have to write. I have to guard against the leeches and nurture the comforting words.

I have to believe words have power, that they can sustain me indefinitely.

I have to believe—no matter what else happens—words can be truth, and truth cannot die.

I have to believe writing some words gives them more substance, and those words become stronger. And I have to believe one of those words is “hope.”

Hope.

Hope.

Story ID:	849
Written by:	Robert Villanueva (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	Radcliff KY United States
Year:	2006