The Most Important
“Who’s the most important person in the world?”
I was seated at a table in an office with a view of Sedona’s red rocks, and I had just been told I had stage iv breast cancer by a surgeon who then asked, “Who is the most important person in the world?”
January, 2020. I was forty-three years old. Had breast cancer in my early thirties and always kinda expected this day, but like all scenarios I ever imagined for myself — in hope, in fear — the actual scenario, the very moment of arrival, should it ever come at all, feels different than I expected.
Hearing I had incurable breast cancer felt different than I thought it would feel. Since 2011 I imagined it, predicted it coming back, feared it coming back and wasted countless hours to worry, and then there I was in Sedona, Arizona, and the moment I lived in dread of had arrived. Had I not been put through the wringer at Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH), had I not begged, pleaded and lied about having a lawyer in order to get someone to take my situation seriously, I wouldn’t have felt that touch of relief I felt that night just to finally have an answer.
“Who’s the most important person in the world?” Asked my surgeon, a woman I’d just met that night, a woman who I expected to present to me the way all the providers at NAH* had presented to me after I had taken my tumor to my primary care physician and said, “I think I need to get this seen to.” I was almost ten years from my first diagnosis, off Tamoxifen, no longer seeing the town oncologist (seriously, up on the mountain there was only one) who had all the charisma and bedside manner of a hardened war criminal. My care at NAH, until that night, had been cold, indifferent, and messy. So I had thought this surgeon, part of the NAH system, would be just another doctor who didn’t really know what she was doing, just another doctor who didn’t really seem to care, just another doctor who treated me like a walking cadaver.
“Who’s the most important person in the world?” From the moment I stepped into her office that night where women came and went, many smiling and laughing and calling the front desk women by their first names, and the front desk women calling the patients by their first names and seeming to know things about their lives, saying things like “Hey, did Billy hear back from U of A yet?” Or “Say hi to Jen!” Like they knew their lives — like they were talking to co-workers and friends, but they weren’t. They were talking to patients.
There’s a lot of mystery in the southwest. My time in Arizona changed the landscape of my soul — for a lot of reasons, one of which just the energy in the air there. The cosmic mysteries you cannot deny when you’re sitting in the Sonoran at night watching bats fly circles, the sky filled with bright stars, the call of coyotes. You can’t deny it when you’re standing with teenagers under the clean blue skies atop a mountain, watching the Jones Benally family do the hoop dance. And the sky at night on the mountain? That alone can change a person.
“Who’s the most important person in the world?” My surgeon asked after giving me the whole story of the cancer I’d been emailed about three months after first presenting to my doctor with a tumor. The patient portal message had been brief, as the man who wrote it did not know me, he was filling in for my doctor who was (I’m serious) skiing in Switzerland. I think they planned to wait until he got back to give me the bad news about that biopsy, but a co-worker advised me one day at work to come into her office and call them, because it had been a month since the biopsy and no one could give me an answer. “Call them and say you have a lawyer,” she said. “But I don’t have a lawyer,” I replied. “Sure,” she said. “But they don’t know that.”
So my imaginary lawyer had gotten me the basic information — “this is breast cancer. So sorry.” So I knew I had recurrent breast cancer before I met this surgeon who, after telling me the cancer was metastatic, stage iv, incurable asked me, “Who’s the most important person in the world?” I had warmed up to her by then. I had warmed up to her immediately, but I must admit when I was sitting in the waiting area, traumatized from all I’d endured so far at NAH, exhausted, unhappy, I watched these women happily coming and going from a breast cancer clinic and saw it as a red flag. What kind of hippie bullshit have I gotten myself into this time?
However, when I finally met this surgeon in the exam room, I realized she was not a hippie. She was just so incredibly real. So present. So alive. I had never in my life met a doctor, in a clinical setting, who seemed magnetic to me. Her very presence put people, including me, at ease because she was so unscripted. I had a sense, an immediate sense upon meeting this surgeon that I was in the presence of some kind of greatness and I was.
“Who’s the most important person in the world?” Dr. Dupree asked me, at the table in her office that had a view of the red rocks there in Sedona. “Who’s the most important person in the world?” She asked after telling me that my breast cancer was back, and it was incurable, and it was for the rest of my natural life. I was crying when she asked. That kind of news rolls up on you like a storm front, and then it thunders through.
“Who’s the most important person in the world?” Dr. Dupree asked and I wondered if it was a trick question. I already knew, after spending an hour in her presence, that she was an Obi Wan Kenobi. I’ve met a few in my life, maybe you have too. Teachers. Good fuckin’ teachers. I already knew she was that so perhaps this question was a mystery, a koan like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” I felt self-conscious trying to answer. I looked across the table at my then wife who looked miserable. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted to say “Her?” But I knew that wasn’t my answer. “You?” I said to Dr. Dupree.
“You!” She said, clutching my hand harder, the hand she’d been holding ever since I started crying. “You are the most important person in the world.”
I was uncomfortable with that statement. I did not get it. I knew I was definitely not the most important person in the world. Those days, the marriage was feeling so hard and confusing and a little scary. I was an English teacher in an American public school. Back then, I was pretty sure I was the most important in no area of my life. And I certainly wasn’t (yet) the most important to me.
“You’re the most important person in the world,” said Dr. Dupree, and I had no fuckin’ clue what she was on about, but I knew I wanted to listen to her, my newest Obi Wan, the teacher, the guide. So I just smiled and blushed and nodded.
Those were crazy days, and the sheer insanity and calamity of those times was just beginning and I had no idea. All I knew was that I was in this room in Sedona, and I’d just gotten the worst news but was feeling this weird pool of hope burbling up in my heart because there was something different and special about this doctor, and she was saying things that were all about life, and she was saying things about healing (not fixing, not curing), and just maybe I’d hit a stroke of good luck. (I had.) So what if she spoke in riddles? Many important teachers do. So I just nodded along with her enthusiastic insistence that I was “the most important person in the world.”
About a year after Dr. Dupree said it to me, I would get it. I am the most important person in the world because without me the world as I understand it, my world, ceases to exist. My life is my world. Your life is your world. Our lives, our perceptions, our perspectives are the world. And once that clicked with me, I started to care about me a little more. After a life lived in service to others in the world of nonprofit orgs: working in service of homeless women, in service of young people struggling with mental health, service to libraries, to American colleges, and then to public schools, to serving my wife, I had never considered my own needs. And then a surgeon — a surgeon? I hated surgeons! — asked me a question I could not answer then, but whose answer would open my eyes to a life that was available to me in which, maybe for the first time, I would focus on serving myself, and in doing so heal.
My name is Allison Gruber. I am the largely unknown American author of two books of creative nonfiction: You’re Not Edith & Transference. I’ve been an educator of kids and young people and not-so-young-people for more than twenty years. At fourteen, I was given my last rites (spoiler: I survived), at thirty-four, with no family history, I was diagnosed and treated for stage ii breast cancer. Afterwards, I did what everyone does when they survive a little cancer: they quickly marry someone and move to Arizona.
Once my life was firmly a country music song — I got the cancers (again), dog’s dead, wife up and left - without a place to stay in Tucson, exhausted from teaching full time in the public schools, I went home to Chicagoland, lost all my money in the divorce (because sometimes people are even shadier than you think, and you are more naive than you think), and had what could best be described as a “nervous breakdown.”
I could not fathom, once back in Chicagoland, how I would possibly go on — with the heartbreak, this fucked up breast cancer shit, with no money, having been gone long enough to feel like a stranger in my homeland. I did not know how I could go on. And I wasn’t young anymore. I was forty-five. How could I go on? How could I rebuild my life again from what felt like nothing?
And then I remembered the words of this surgeon, Dr. Dupree, who told me I could heal. Who told me about her Healing Consciousness Foundation, which offers holistic healing modalities to people dealing with breast cancer, and she said that whenever I was ready, they would help me. And when life brought me down to my knees, I decided to take the advice of my surgeon, my teacher, my friend and alongside my Western medical care, embrace some holistic practices.
After two years of working on myself in therapy (Western & holistic), after finally getting diagnoses for mental health struggles that have plagued me since adolescence, by finally confronting trauma, and committing my spiritual life to the study and practice of Buddhism, I was able to climb out of a headspace, a soul space and begin a lifetime quest to heal myself. Not cure, not fix, but heal. This is an ongoing verb.
By following the advice of a surgeon, who was not just any surgeon, I discovered that the holistic/western medicine debate is all wrong. It’s not one or the other — it’s both. At least that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn, having found a sweet spot where my Western healthcare and holistic healthcare work together symbiotically. My anxiety and depression are down. My sleep is good. My overall health is good. There is work to be done, but I can assure you (as can those who were around to witness), I’ve come a very long way in a relatively short period of time, and I’m ready for whatever work lies ahead in my commitment to healing myself.
Though we come from very different backgrounds, though we occupy very different subject areas, Dr. Dupree and I share an essential philosophy: the belief that compassion, true compassion, is the answer to many of the problems plaguing our nation — particularly with regard to healthcare and the education system. We also both believe that it’s not a zero sum game when it comes to holistic and Western healthcare — it should not be “holistic v. western,” but a blend of the two. Through Dr. Dupree, I have met a ton of like minded healthcare providers, and that gives me hope, and it should give you hope, too.
I did not magically find a cure for cancer, but if you have one, hit me up. What I found, in the past two years of healing, of studying and practicing Buddhism, was something more important than everlasting life. I found peace. And I discovered that I can generate peace. I can also generate happiness and joy. I can generate none of these things if I do not heal. I fuck it up all the time, I am deeply imperfect, so I have to heal every day of my life. In order to get the most out of my life, I have to be in a state of healing always.
So if you’re into this kind of thing, you should read this blog? Newsletter? Blog? As I attempt to “re-launch” this Substack — is it a blog? I think it’s a blog? — the content will be free. That said, writing is work, so if you like what you read, and want to drop any $ on my efforts here, I won’t stop you.
I can’t promise brevity, but I do promise to post once a week. The next several posts will focus specifically on my introduction to holistic healing, and Dr. Dupree who introduced me to new ways of looking at what it meant to “heal,” and how my understanding of compassion evolved through holistic healing and the study of Buddhism. I am not trying to convert you to Buddhism, and I’m not a medical doctor — but I know a little bit.
This is not a medical advice Substack, this is not a religious Substack, this is not a self-help blog, this is just a blog about getting better, about learning how to love your life wherever you find yourself, and about the struggles and missteps of being a human being who wants to always be better.
If that sounds like your thing, great. If that sounds heinous or hellacious or tedious to you, or if you’re like Old Me and thinking, “what kind of hippie bullshit is this?” there’s lots of other blogs to read. Though maybe, if you’re anything like Old Me, you need to read this hippie bullshit, more than most.
Happy New Year to those who got this far. Hope to see you back next week for the installation where I will discuss my own understanding of the word “healing,” and that time Dr. Dupree rolled me down to surgery and said I was going on a trip. “Where do you want to go? You can go anywhere.” And I said, “La Jolla.”
Be Good.
Signing off,
Gruber