Christine Kanownik on Her Poems

I have often sympathized with the Wife in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, thinking that maybe it wasn’t worth it. I have similar thoughts whenever I read accounts of dogged survival or watch the “final girl” careening through an obstacle course of dead teenagers. It’s all exhausting. I was reading the Wikipedia page for the Donner Party (as you do), thinking that I couldn’t imagine going to such extreme lengths to survive. Then I stopped in my mental tracks. 

You see, I had just spent the past 8 months in cancer treatment. It was the type of stuff out of a Cronenbergian nightmare. They tore me open, put things inside, took things out of me, injected me with mustard gas and poisonous tree extract. The radiation burns on my chest were so intense that I began to see what was underneath my skin, which I likened to stigmata. 

But these sacrifices we make, whether anyone asks us to or not.