Dancing at the Edge of Life: A Memoir Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

For anyone who's had a loved one die from cancer, Dancing at the Edge of Life will hit home and hit hard. After a pesky cough drove her to the doctor's office, 30-year-old poet and writer Gale Warner was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a viciously malignant form of the disease. She immediately started to record her often extraordinary thoughts in a diary. When she passed away a little more than a year later, she had compiled 1,000 pages of her spiritual and physical illumination and desperation, from the ecstasy of living through a good day to the excruciation of a bone marrow transplant.

What makes this book remarkable is Warner's perspective through it all. Though not particularly religious, she endured her treatment with Job-like patience, fortitude, and grace, reasoning that with each setback--and with each victory--she ought to be able to unveil a life lesson, to become closer to the spirit of the earth. She also perceived her bone marrow transplant as a ritual reincarnation of sorts. While her earth-goddess philosophy may strike some readers as being too far out in left field (she writes of feeling as if she's a channel of sorts for the pollution and destruction of the land), her love of the earth and perception of her role on it is extraordinarily thought provoking.