Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Terri Tate. Terri is a clinical nurse specialist, a teacher, and a humorist who offers keynotes and workshops primarily for health care organizations, survivor groups, and other communities. She’s a down-to-earth inspirational teacher disguised as a standup comedian. Her unique brand of humor shines hilariously into the darkest corners of the human experience. She visited these dark places most notably during two near-fatal bouts of disfiguring oral cancer. With her one-woman show, Shopping as a Spiritual Path, Terri has reemerged from illness to a new wholeness, committed to illuminating the way for others as they discover their own path to healing, purpose, and passion.
With Sounds True, Terri Tate has released a new book called A Crooked Smile, which recounts her experiences through her cancer diagnosis, multiple surgeries, and a spiritual journey she never expected to traverse. It tells years of living in a crucible of inner growth, and shares her surprising adventures with unlooked-for helpers, shamanic guides, and unexpected openings to spiritual sources of wisdom and healing.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Terri and I spoke about tapping inner guidance—how she learned to do this, and how in many ways she says this was the prize of her ordeal with oral cancer. She also talks about her discovery of an inner voice she calls, “the vile bitch upstairs,” and also another inner voice that she calls, “the girl in the closet,” and how these discoveries were critical to her healing process. Terri reads from her new book, A Crooked Smile, and finally, she shares with us the greatest lessons that she’s learned in receiving what she calls “25 bonus years of life.” Here’s my conversation with Terri Tate.
Terri, in your book, A Crooked Smile, you talk about all of the various challenges, the physical challenges that you went through, through two bouts of a disfiguring oral cancer. I’d love to give our listeners a sense of the physiological changes, if you will, that you’ve gone through through this process.
Terri Tate: OK. I would be happy to do that to the best of my ability without getting too gory, I hope. The first occurrence started with a sore under my tongue, and it took several months for me to get a diagnosis. I went to lots of different healers and doctors, and everybody had a different theory. It wasn’t until some months later that someone did a biopsy and found that it was cancer. I had a surgery, during which they removed the cancer, a portion of my tongue, and the nodes on my neck, and said that they had gotten it all. After that, I was not really—once I healed, I looked and sounded pretty much as I had before, so that people could see me and not know that I had this surgery.
Eighteen months later, I started getting symptoms that were vaguer—there was no particular spot this time, just pain and tingling. But it again took several months to diagnose, and by that time, I had a tumor the size of a golf ball under my tongue. That surgery was not so gentle; it lasted 24 hours and in seven attempts, they removed more of my tongue, more than half of my lower jaw, and lymph nodes all over the area. They attempted to rebuild my jaw by taking part of my left hip, and that failed seven times because the vessels didn’t work. They added extra vessels, and ended up doing another surgery wherein they installed a titanium bar to replace my jaw and brought tissue from my breast and neck into my mouth so that I now have part of my left breast on permanent loan to my mouth. They [also] took tissue from my ankle and my hip, so I have a very unique physiology. Whenever I go to the doctor for anything—you can be there for a rash—they want to see my whole body, because they’ve never seen one like it. Did that answer that question?
TS: It did, and thank you for all the detail. As odd and difficult as it is, I wanted to give our listeners, who can’t see you right now but can hear, you a sense of what you’ve gone through. So thank you for that.
TT: Uh huh.
TS: I’m curious; so here, after this 24-hour surgery, what was the process like for you of coming back to life, if you will, in this new physical form?
TT: Well, I’m a talker, so if I go into too much detail, stop me. But I spent several days on a ventilator in the ICU, and then a couple weeks on the head/neck cancer floor, where I had more tubes than anyone had ever seen. I’m a nurse by training, but fled immediately into psychiatric nursing because I’m not fond of gore and I like patients who keep their secretions on the inside, so I was not at all comfortable in what they called a body but didn’t feel like one at that point. I say in the book that I felt a little like the character that James Joyce described by saying he lived a short distance from his body. That was how I felt in the hospital.
There were many moments there when I couldn’t see how I would ever function again. I couldn’t talk for a long time, I certainly couldn’t eat, and it was a very, very slow, arduous process back to living in a body—particularly the talking and the eating parts. Talking is not only—not only constitutes every career I’ve ever pursued, being a therapist and a hypnotherapist, and a speaker and a consultant, but it’s also my favorite hobby. I often felt, and in fact told my best friend before the surgery, that if it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to talk, I didn’t really think I wanted to be around. Also up there among my favorite activities is eating, and that actually continues to be a challenge but I’ve managed to master it sufficiently that I can get down most of the things that I love.
But it was a very long process, and just as I had begun to recover from the surgery, I had radiation for seven weeks, which again shut me up and made eating impossible. Then the bars that they had installed came loose during the radiation, and that required another surgery to take that out. Then, the doctors wanted to do yet another surgery to use my hip or a metal bar or another bone to replace the bar they’d removed. That was when I tapped in to the inner guidance that was really the best prize of this whole ordeal, and knew in my heart that if I ever got into another patient gown at that point, I wasn’t getting out. So I didn’t have the surgery.
TS: Now, talk a little bit about that “tapping in to your inner guidance,” especially as you talk about that being the “prize.” Tell me how that happened and how you experience inner guidance.
TT: OK. That was a real turning point, not only in the cancer journey but in my life in general. Prior to that, there had been a fair amount of agreement among the experts as to what to do, but their opinions diverged at that point. Having just the one mouth, I was going to have to decide for myself if I was going to have more surgery, and if so, what kind. I had, prior to that—I’d always been fairly intuitive; I’ve always been a seeker, I’m a mental-health type, I’ve pursued a lot of different spiritual paths. But I had never, until then, made such an important decision based primarily on my own wisdom.
In looking back on it, I now see that the voice—really the only voice that I had trusted prior to that was the critical voice in my head that I refer to as “the vile bitch upstairs.” That voice had been so ubiquitous throughout my life, that before the cancer, I had thought she was all there was to me. The cancer slowed me down and shut me up enough that I was forced inside, and heard, then, other voices.
The first was one that—it came as an image of a dehydrated and emaciated woman-child of indeterminate age that I flashed on as I was out taking a walk when I was trying to recover from one of the surgeries. As I gradually tried to get to know her, [I] decided that this was the part of myself that I had shut away because it was too needy. Without sounding too Californian or too woo-woo, there’s a part of me that believes that that needy part really wanted to get my attention. It took something this serious to get me away from taking care of other people and focus on myself. It was in getting to know that part that I had disowned, I believe, that I was led to this voice of wisdom.
The way it shows up for me is that I—and I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but I was on an airplane flying down to my parents’; it was the first time I’d gone anywhere after the surgery and radiation, and I wrote in my journal, “What do I do?” I was guided to write a little symbol in my journal, and then I just sort of wrote automatically, and then another symbol, which to me signaled the end of this other voice. I’ve been doing that ever since. When I have a question, as big as, “Do I have this surgery?” or as minor as, “What do I do today?” I’ll write the question and then put the symbol, and then wait for the answer. I’ve never had to wait very long.
TS: What is the symbol? I’m curious about that.
TT: Well, it’s like a little sort of wedge. It’s like a pointed parentheses.
TS: And when you see that symbol, that’s somehow associated with kind of opening this automatic writing channel that you trust?
TT: Right. And I do, now, get that sort of information physically without writing it at times. I’ll do things like muscle testing and all of that. I believe that we all have that wisdom, and not everybody is as out there as I am, so you don’t have to name it in order to trust it.
TS: One of the questions I have is, how does somebody know? This comes up for a lot of people: “Great—I need guidance in my life. I don’t necessarily have a situation that’s as desperate as Terri Tate was in, about what approach to take to healing, but I have things in my life—’Should I break up with this person?’ ‘Should I leave my job?’ Et cetera.”
TT: Absolutely! And those feel every bit as desperate in the moment, because I’ve been in those situations too.
TS: You know, I’ll try automatic writing, but I don’t trust what comes out of my pen. It’s a bunch of—you know, it says this, then it says that. It contradicts itself. It’s not so coherent. I don’t trust it. How come Terri got writing that she trusts? I want to be like that.
TT: Well, it may be the gift of desperation. I’m not sure. But I think it’s probably more a function of continuing to play with it and rely on it in—start small, with issues where the stakes aren’t quite so high. I’ve been sort of a drama queen [and] started with very high stakes. But start with little things and see how it goes. I can’t promise that that internal work is what led to that voice and trusting it, but I’m pretty sure that was true for me. It was a process wherein I learned to like myself better on the inside than I did when I looked good on the outside. I feel like if there’s one thing that I’ve learned that’s applicable to everybody, it’s that whole notion of being gentle with ourselves and learning to accept ourselves as is, whatever the “as is” is. For me, it was an obvious disfigurement; for other people who look great, there are things that—I mean, we all have things that we’re not crazy about about ourselves. It’s freeing to embrace, be gentle with those parts and eventually you come to accept and at least like, if not love them, that I think opens the way.
TS: Let’s talk a little bit about this being gentle with ourselves. You talked about “the vile bitch upstairs” as a critical voice inside your head that previously you were quite identified with. I think a lot of people can connect to that. I definitely have a “vile bitch” upstairs. My question is, for people who say, “Yeah, I know what that’s like, I hear that voice. How can I be gentle with myself?” How have you learned to be gentle with yourself—when that voice says, “You shouldn’t have said that on the radio, or to that person.” It says all kinds of things to us about our bodies: “Look at your thighs, look how much ice cream…” et cetera.
TT: Exactly. And she says a lot of that, believe me. That was one of the things when I became disfigured, it was like, “Oh, damn, I wish I liked my thighs better.” So yes. I think—I believe that that’s one of the reasons I stuck around, was to be a cautionary tale: to like what you have now and don’t wait until it’s excised. I think it really—it’s not an easy lesson. I mean, I’m a nurse and my career was speaking to nurses around the country, telling them that they can’t be any nicer to their patients, that they can’t take any better care of their patients than they do of themselves. I believed that wholeheartedly, and it was a little embarrassing when I came down with cancer and had to say, “Well, maybe I’m not practicing what I preach.” I think, in answering your question, to just step back from that critical voice and realize that that’s not you; it’s the voice of fear. I’ve come to appreciate the bitch herself; I mean, I talked about firing her when I found the gentler voices, and buying her a condo in Boca…
[Tami laughs.]
TT: …and telling her that she’d done 70 years—or however many it was at the time, 55, 45, or whatever—of faithful service, and she could now take it easy. I think it starts with being gentle with that cruel voice, maybe looking at where it comes from. I mean, I think that the vile bitch took a lot of lessons from my mom, who, bless her heart, was afraid all the time and didn’t know how else to express it.
TS: Did that idea of “firing” her and sending her to a condo in Florida—does that work? “Hey, I’m going to fire you.” Did that work?
TT: Sometimes. I mean, the minute I got tired or the least [bit] stressed out, she was on a redeye back.
[Tami laughs.]
TT: And attempted to take over, which she would do for short pieces of time, but between the girl in the closet and the guides, it became clear to her that she was no longer in charge.
TS: Let’s talk a little bit about this other—could I call it a sub-personality? I don’t know if that’s how you’d refer to it.
TT: Sure.
TS: “The girl in the closet.” So, this is the needy part of you—that she was hidden away and you wanted nothing to do with her?
TT: Right.
TS: And what was the importance, for you, of getting to know the girl in the closet? Because I also think this is probably something a lot of us can relate to—some part of us that’s needy. I mean, being needy is, in general, not that attractive in our culture.
TT: No. No, it’s not in the culture, and in many, many families, there are generations of unmet needs that get passed down from one to another. If you didn’t get your needs met when you were little, then where do you find the wherewithal to meet the needs of your kids unless you’ve done a lot of work on yourself? Generations before mine had more basic needs to deal with than that. So I think that it’s really something that—coming to accept that we didn’t get those needs met is not easy, but I think that it’s important, and to accept the fact that our parents didn’t get their needs met, so how were they going to meet ours?
For me, it was—I really wasn’t—I mean, I sort of looked for her because when I—I’m a mental-health type, and I lived in Ann Arbor when I was diagnosed, so there were all manner of mental health suggestions about what had caused this. That was the era of John Bradford and the inner child work, which I had always been a little repulsed by—not him, I think his work is brilliant, but the whole idea of the inner child, I was way too defended to believe that I had one. But I did start watching videotapes about [it] and read his book and found them valuable, and tried to write letters to this inner child.
It took a very long time, because she was pissed. I mean, she wasn’t coming out at the first invitation. She didn’t trust me, and with good reason. So it took a long time, and a lot of digging. Then, I was out for a walk one day—and this is a little aside, but [on] the walk, I had just crossed Zeeb Road in Ann Arbor and when I had my first conversation with Jennifer, the acquisitions director at Sounds True, I learned that her grandfather was Mr. Zeeb and Zeeb Road had been named for him. She was born in the hospital where I had my first surgery. So that was one of many miracles.
But I was walking down the road and had this image of this dehydrated, emaciated, just really shriveled up woman-child of indeterminate age, huddled in the corner of a dusty closet. And I got it, that that was a part of me that I’d locked away. It literally took decades to get her out and flesh her out, and the last image I had of her was me carrying her piggyback, and she was quite chubby, freckled, and wearing pigtails. I didn’t feel frightened of her, and I was happy to carry her, and I was happy to go in the direction she wanted to go.
It was, in fact, a conversation with her that was my first-ever published story. I was a speaker before the cancer, and afterwards I realized that the girl in the closet had not really wanted to be up onstage in front of thousands of people, and was a little resentful that I’d dragged her there. So it was clear to me that if I ever hoped to be back on a stage, I was going to have to have her on board. So the first story I told in public was at a Cancer as a Turning Point conference in front of about 1200 people, and it was my conversation with the girl in the closet.
TS: You mentioned here that you were a speaker before your oral cancer, and also that being a verbal person is something that’s always been important to you. One of the things that I’m curious about how you worked through is just the grief involved in having one of your greatest joys and talents impacted in this way. I mean, I’m imagining if a surgeon can’t do surgery anymore because they injure their hands, or here I am, I’m a speaker/presenter, what that—just going through that. Now, here you are—you’re speaking beautifully, I understand every word you’re saying, but I’m sure at one point that was questionable whether or not that would work, [that] your vocal function would be so clear. I can just imagine the terror and the grief of that.
TT: Yes. I remember really vividly the first time that it dawned on me that this might impact my ability to talk. I was interviewing surgeons for the big surgery, and my sister, who was really amazing in this whole process, had found surgeons in various hospitals, and I was interviewing the one at Michigan near my house. He made some reference to [the fact that] they would have to do a tracheotomy if they removed my jaw. I flashed back on being a nursing student and having to do such a tracheotomy of one of my patients, and remembered that he couldn’t talk. I also remembered him smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy hole, which is a visual that I could live without. But it dawned on me that I might not talk again.
I really freaked out, and I stopped the surgeon and said, “Are you saying that I might not be able to talk?” And he said, “Well, that’s a possibility, but likely you’ll speak, but I don’t know how well your voice will go down in business settings.” He did what turned out to be a really accurate impersonation of what I would sound like. It was not something—my glib response was, “Oh, I’ll use it to my marketing advantage,” but I wasn’t so confident on the inside. And yes, that was the hardest part. And after, they said that the radiation might also impact my vocal cords in such a way that I wouldn’t speak, and I didn’t [speak] for a month after the treatments. It was—I mean, it was really—not talking and dying were vying for first place on my list of fears, and it was not clear which one was ahead. It was terrifying. I would write, but believe me, clever repartee suffers when you’re writing on an etch-a-sketch. The conversation is way on down the road when you’ve written your pithy comment.
TS: Now, the other thing, Terri, is that you are, I think, a classically beautiful woman. You’re tall, you’re thin, you’re elegant, you have long fingers—you’re just a gorgeous woman.
TT: Well, thank you.
TS: You’re welcome. And there’s a picture of you on the cover of A Crooked Smile, and it’s a beautiful picture and I’m looking at it right now as we’re speaking. I’m wondering about that process for you—about the impact on your physical appearance and how you dealt with that.
TT: Yes. That was another area. Ironically—and maybe it was a blessing all along, but I grew up in a suburb and in a family where appearances mattered a lot, and at a very early age, it was clear to me that that was not what was important in life. So I was always a little rebellious about that, and I can’t say that I never dressed to meet the very tight dress code in high school, but I never was a lot into hairdos and makeup and that kind of thing. I always sort of rebelled against that, which I guess is now a blessing because I know of women who—women probably more than men, maybe men as well, but women particularly—who died rather than having the assault on their appearance that I went through.
I think that I was not—one of the gifts, I guess, of the vile bitch upstairs was I never thought I was that attractive beforehand, and I always thought my sister was prettier. It’s only now, looking at photos of before, that I realize that I actually was beautiful then. So I wasn’t that attached and I was sufficiently insecure that I never really knew what I was losing. That said, I didn’t look at myself in the mirror for a very long time. I had my sister cover all the reflective surfaces in the hospital room and I studiously avoided looking in the mirror for a very long time afterwards. I only gradually got to know myself in my new container after I had become fairly certain that I was going to be in this container for long enough to deal with it. There was a long time where I didn’t think I was going to be around, so it really didn’t matter what I looked like.
Thankfully, I was married, at the time, to a man who claimed to be able to see my inner beauty, and I bought that hook, line, and sinker; the fact that he later opted for a younger, blonder, more symmetrical woman was hard to take when it happened, but he was there and he was wonderful in the early stages. So that helped. And he’s a very good-looking man, so I used to be sure that people wondered what in the hell he was doing with somebody who looked like me, but I was sort of comforted—as I say in the book, when I first started dating him, I felt better just walking next to him. So there was that.
It’s been a challenge—one of my sons is a visual artist, and I know it was real hard for him to adjust to the way I looked because he sees things in a way that other people don’t. But we were having lunch one day, not too very long after the worst part of it, and he looked across at me and said, “You know, I think you’re more beautiful now than you’ve ever been.” That kind of acceptance from my kids, and I have a beautiful granddaughter now who’s only known me like this and loves me as I am. I have just the most magnificent people in my life. It was standing room only at Book Passage on Tuesday night and I got one of the first standing ovations in Book Passage history, so I’ve been really, really blessed in that way.
TS: This was a book launch event for A Crooked Smile?
TT: It was my first launch. Anne Lamott introduced me. I started visualizing that day two years ago when I worked my way into Annie’s class, and that night was as good or better than I could have envisioned it.
TS: Well, it’s pretty cool to have Annie Lamott write a foreword to your book and introduce you.
TT: It is really cool. It is extremely cool.
TS: That’s some beautiful good fortune there for A Crooked Smile.
TT: Yes. Well, that’s another amazing story of how I met her, which I don’t know if we have time for, but I could try to be brief.
TS: Let’s go for it.
TT: Well, after the cancer, my kids were living out here [in California], I was living in Ann Arbor, and when it was pretty clear that I was probably going to die soon. A doctor had said that I probably would, so I decided to come out here and tell my kids that I was going to die, and I fell in love with it so much that I borrowed an apartment here and started spending time out here and time in Ann Arbor. I was back in Ann Arbor, I was driving one of my sons, Justin, to the airport, and we had NPR on, which I didn’t usually listen to the radio in those days. I heard this woman talking, and I said, “That is the funniest person I’ve ever heard in my life. Who is that?” And they said it was this woman named Anne Lamott.
So I dropped Justin at the airport, went back to Ann Arbor, went immediately to a bookstore, and said, “Do you have anything by Anne Lamott?” They laughed, and took me over to the Anne Lamott section where I bought a bunch of books and learned that she lived in Northern California. My one friend in Sausalito at the time had told me that she was taking a writing class, so I called her and I said, “Was that, by any chance, Anne Lamott who was teaching that class?” She said, yes, it was, and I said, “Well, I want to take it too.” And then she laughed and said, “Well, go ahead, call Book Passage, and good luck with that.”
And I called Book Passage and said, “I want to take Anne Lamott’s class,” and then they laughed and said, “Yes, you can be the 151st person on the waiting list.” I was reading Bird by Bird and got to the section where Annie writes about how one of the downsides of being a writer is that you’re alone too much and you start to have crazy thoughts, and you go to the mirror and you see a white spot under your tongue and you’re sure it’s oral cancer and that the surgeon will have to cut out half your jaw, and no one will ever want to kiss you again, as if they ever did.
So I decided, well, one of the gifts of almost dying is you do the things today that you might have put off, and I figured I’d suffered enough—I was going to use this. So I wrote a letter and said, “Dear Anne Lamott, you’re the funniest person I’ve ever met or ever heard, I’ll do anything to be in your presence, and sometimes that spot really is oral cancer.” And I asked my friend to take it to class with her. Not expecting much but figuring I had nothing to lose, and the next day Annie called me and said, “Come anytime you’re in town.”
TS: Now that is a very cool story. Thank you for sharing that.
TT: Yes.
TS: Now, I would say something about you, Terri, that you said about hearing Annie Lamott on the radio, which is you are a very wicked funny person, and it’s come across some in our conversation, and it certainly comes across throughout A Crooked Smile. I wonder if you’d read for our listeners a passage or two from the book.
TT: Absolutely. I will read one, actually, that—let’s see here. Trying to find one that relates to—OK. This relates to coming to California. This was after the surgery and after the radiation, and I was beyond the classical treatment, so I was looking at all the alternatives. My then-husband was a rolfer, and so he was very into looking for alternative treatments. So he wanted me to go over to a live foods program, so he was pushing for that.
“Now that I could eat a little, I decided it was time to work on my diet, in case I lived long enough for nutrition to make a difference. Jeff started promoting live foods again. He was ready to clear his calendar for two weeks at the end of June so we could take a part in a residential training program at a live foods center. I needed to see the place before I would consider it.
The day of the open house at what we now called ‘Food Camp’ dawned bright and beautiful. We drove along winding country roads, relishing the burgeoning greenery and blossoms, and hoping that the food we were about to eat didn’t come from the run-down farms we were passing. Then I realized that Food Camp was one of the run-down farms. The shabbiness extended to the buildings and the rubble-covered grounds. I had seen less depressing back wards in state hospitals. In sharp contrast, the inhabitants were loaded with zeal and stories of miraculous healings from eating raw.
One especially gaunt, exuberant fellow gave us a tour. The residential quarters was hard, narrow cots, where we would sleep for two weeks. The bookstore was just 15 books. The colonics center, whose purpose was obvious, and the wheatgrass greenhouse, with windows so dirty that photosynthesis was a real miracle. The pinnacle of the tour was the kitchen, where a swarming mass of smiling people were busy not cooking. And then there was their grand buffet. I took a plate and fell into line behind Jeff. There were platters of raw vegetables, big tossed salads loaded with sprouts, nut loaf, and rock-hard dehydrated crackers better used as weapons than snacks.
I had seven lower teeth. Ensure and smoothies were still the mainstays of my diet. Most of the dishes on this crunchy smorgasbord came with cayenne or other peppers to introduce a little flavor into the bland repast, so anything I would chew would be too spicy for my radiated mouth. The bitch nagged, ‘You better at least try something. This might be the very thing that saves you.’ But there was no way I could eat any of it. I sat sipping tea and feeling like I had at junior-high dances, while everyone, especially Jeff, wolfed down heaps of food.
“By the time we left, Jeff was feeling the curative powers of eating raw and was ready to enroll in camp. I don’t know whether the depression or starvation would get me first, but I knew I wouldn’t make it out of there alive. I’d rather go to San Francisco and visit my kids. In truth, I hadn’t given up on Food Camp. I wanted to be able to tell one of those miraculous healing stories myself someday.
A few days later, I went alone to a new oncologist to check out the continuing symptoms in my mouth and to get a refill for Roxicet. ‘I didn’t know much about oral cancer,’ the doctor said in a gentle voice, ‘so I read up on it last night in preparation for your visit.’ Her honesty increased my faith in her; it had been two years since I’d heard a doctor say, ‘I don’t know,’ although clearly many of them hadn’t. She continued, ‘Having had two recurrences, the chances of a third are extremely high.’
I let her finish and asked her for a refill of Roxicet, and then I fled past smiling volunteers in the quaint gift shop and into the parking lot shaded by budding trees, which unlike me were bursting with new life. My first impulse was to call Jeff, as I had in each of the previous crisis moments. No, I needed to be with this news alone for a while; after all, I would be dying alone.
Now that all my efforts at regaining health had proven futile, it was time for a big, strong cup of coffee. I found a trendy café, chose a small table near the pastry case, and stared blankly out the window. I reveled in the taste of the blackish brew, and a large, luscious, chocolate eclair, as I pondered what to do with what little was left of my life. There was a curious freedom in not having to try anymore.
Suddenly, clarity seized me. I rushed to the pay phone and dialed Jeff’s office number. ‘Fuck Food Camp,’ I told him. ‘We’re going to California.’ What I didn’t realize at the time was that California IS food camp.”
TS: Oh my. Well, you are laugh-out-loud funny, Terri. Now, here this doctor says there is a high chance of a reoccurrence, but you haven’t had a reoccurrence. Is that correct?
TT: That’s correct.
TS: Do you have a fear of a reoccurrence at this point?
TT: You know, yes and no. I’ve had a lot of cancer scares in the intervening 23 years, which is really, the fact that I can say 23 years is a miracle.
TS: It is.
TT: Since I had a two percent chance of surviving. I hadn’t had a bad cancer scare for many, many years, and as I was preparing the final draft to get to Haven at Sounds True, I had another one. I can read you a paragraph about it, which will maybe answer your question.
“Much as I wish it were otherwise, I accept that I will never really be done with cancer. I recently had pain in my mouth that felt very much like my recurrence. It was my worst scare in decades, complete with an oral biopsy under paltry local anesthetic and eight days of waiting for results. Oddly, I wasn’t as panicked as I expected to be. I felt held by God in a new way, and was able to sleep and spend quiet time finishing this book. I looked back on the 25 bonus years I’ve been granted, and felt really blessed. There’s still a lot I’d like to do in this lifetime, but I finally saw what Jeff meant when he said I’ll be OK whatever happens.”
So [in] most of the scares, including that one, my guides have told me that it wasn’t cancer. Increasingly, I believe them. To say that it doesn’t scare me at all would be a lie.
TS: I just want to say one thing, Terri. Here you were given only a two percent chance of being anything like in the situation where you are now, 23 years later. I just want to take a moment to say that I’m so glad you’re here.
TT: Thank you very, very much, Tami. That means a lot, and I’m glad I’m here too. I mean, without sounding maudlin, I can’t begin to express to you how happy I am to have A Crooked Smile come from Sounds True. There is not a publisher on the planet that I would prefer. And the experience has been just amazing.
TS: I’m happy, so happy to hear that. What I’d love to know is, here you were only given a two percent chance, and yet here you are. Do you think it’s your incredible sense of humor that buoyed you? It doesn’t sound like it was the raw food—I mean, do you just say this is a mystery?
TT: No, it was not the raw food. That’s right. It might have been the ice cream that I’ve had virtually every day since, but that’s the one thing I’ve always, I’ve pretty much been able to eat—not right in the beginning, but for a long time. I certainly think that humor has had a lot to do with it. I say that there’s a question of, “Why me?” in terms of having gotten the cancer, and then there’s a question of, “Why me?” in terms of survival, when the vast, vast majority of people who’ve had what I had didn’t. I think that—I think humor had to do with it, I think that I did a lot of treatments, both alternative and standard. I’m sure that helped. I had a huge amount of support; the amount of love in my life then and now is really tremendous.
I do believe that our bodies have an internal feeling ability that we’re only beginning to tap, and one that unfortunately Western medicine doesn’t really respect as much as I think it should. I think it could be—I would like to redesign the health care delivery system so that it supports rather than diminishes that power because I think we all have it. I think something mystical beyond the medical was at work, and I don’t think it was up to me. I hope that my attitude and sense of humor had something to do with it, but I certainly don’t feel that that was the only factor.
TS: In the epilogue of the book, Terri, you ask these two really interesting questions that you answer. Even if you don’t answer them exactly the same way as you did at the end of the book, I wanted to bring these two questions forward. One question is that, you asked this question that you just referred to, “Why did this happen to me? What’s my response?” And you said that you got an immediate response to that question.
TT: I did. I was driving out of Sausalito in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and it just flashed in my head, “Why did this happen to me?” And it wasn’t a wimpy, whiny question, which is not to say I’m not capable of being wimpy and whiny, because I am, but I wasn’t in that particular moment. It was more a matter-of-fact question. The answer I got was, “You wanted your woundedness to show.”
TS: Hmm. Hmm. That’s like something, does that connect in some way to the neediness that you talked about before that was so hidden, and it sounds like even hidden from you?
TT: Absolutely. As I say in the epilogue, it took me a while to believe that, but one of the things that the girl in the closet said to me in that first performance conversation was, “I did everything to get your attention, and I thought I was going to have to die and take you with me.” So I think that that’s—and I’ve thought about this a lot lately, what with all the—what happens when we hide our woundedness. Because not everybody’s disfigured the way I am, but everybody has wounds, and the world we live in is, in my view, way too focused on hiding those wounds and trying to be—trying to look like we have it all together both physically and in every other way.
I believe that what happens when we do that is that we project the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned onto other people. It doesn’t take much watching of the news these days to find an example of that. We’re not happy with ourselves, and we’re not fully who we really are. I believe that my ability to feel all emotions—the good ones and the bad ones that we label, but all of them—was hidden away with that girl, as was my creativity. I have two geniously creative sons, and a wonderfully creative granddaughter, but I had no idea I was creative until I got in there. And all those treasures were locked away in that closet with that girl.
TS: Terri, you say after asking this question, “Why did this happen to me?” and having this answer come to you, you say, “A better question, actually, might be, ‘What has all this taught me?'” And I thought this would be a good place to bring our conversation to a close—to hear what has all of this taught you?
TT: [Laughs.] Well, I’m not going to read the whole epilogue, but I know the highlights, and they’re gratitude, forgiveness, and acceptance. Acceptance of myself as I am. And I’m always trying to figure out if accepting myself allows me to help accept other things and other people better, or vice versa, but I think that it’s a mutual kind of thing, that acceptance of oneself leads to acceptance of others and it works the other way as well. At the end of my solo show, Shopping as a Spiritual Path, I say, “People have always told me God loves me, and I never knew what he saw in me, but I’ve come to learn to love myself as God does—or to put it in shopping terms, to love myself ‘as is.'” And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned, I think that’s it.
TS: OK. I’m going to put in one final question here.
TT: All right.
TS: Which is, our program is called Insights at the Edge, and one of the things that I’m always curious to know is what somebody’s current edge is in their life. What I mean by that is, where you’re experiencing your own kind of growing edge as a person. What that is for you?
TT: OK. Well—and this is my way of advertising as well as answering your question. Having gotten A Crooked Smile off of my bucket list, the only thing left is a relationship that actually really works well. I mean, I’ve had three wonderful husbands who were perfect at the time, and other great relationships. But I would really like a relationship coming from a place where I am now, of accepting myself, so that rather than specializing in men with potential as I’ve done in the past, that I would have a relationship with someone who I accepted as they were, who accepted me as I am.
TS: Well Terri Tate, you are one funny woman, and a beautiful writer, and as I said, a blessing to all of us that you’ve had these now almost 25 bonus years. I’m so glad you’re here and I’m so glad that A Crooked Smile, with a foreword by Annie Lamott, is out in the world. Congratulations on the new book, and thank you. Thank you for being on Insights at the Edge.
TT: Thank you, Tami, so much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening, everyone.
