It turns out that she needed every ounce of courage and resolve she could muster, Josephson says. In the harrowing months that followed, there were endless exams, X rays, medications, blood transfusions, CT scans, MRIs and finally two surgeries followed by aggressive chemotherapy treatments.

     Before the initial treatment, she had what she calls her “Red Rain” vision. “To this day,” she says, “its hope and promise comfort me.”

    When the cancer was found, and Josephson was given a short time to live without intensive treatment, she began using visualization methods to help fight the disease, she reveals. The healing vision came soon after.

     “Lying in my hospital bed,” Josephson says, “I closed my eyes and a vivid picture appeared before me. When I opened my eyes, the picture was still clear and evident. There was a beautiful blue sky with white fluffy clouds floating aimlessly. Quickly, though, the clouds became dark and angry, fighting for position in the sky. Soon the whole sky was black and violent and torrents of rain pelted down.

     Gradually this intense rain began to turn crimson in color. In time the red rain let up and turned to crystal snowflakes that floated down and dissipated. The sky became clear again, sunny and warm with a rosy glow. It was like a lingering sunset that captivated my whole being.”

     The white clouds that turned dark and violent represent her immunity cells invaded by the cancer, Josephson explains. The crimson rain represents her life-giving red blood cells, empowered by chemotherapy, that wash away the cancer. The reemerging sun and clear skies represent her cancer-free cells restored to energy and health.

     But other analogies come to mind, she says. “The black clouds might signify the need for healing. The red rain could symbolize the blood of Christ and the critical importance of forgiveness and spiritual cleansing in our lives. The crystal snowflakes could denote the purity and truth that follow forgiveness, with the sun and warmth embodying the love and blessings that become free-flowing.”

    “I firmly believe,” she adds, “that renewed health also means the restoration of mind, soul and spirit as well as body.”

     In remission now for nearly ten years, she credits her cure to modern medicine, intense prayer, an enduring faith, and the purifying vision of red rain that turned dark clouds into crystal snowflakes.

     But Josephson has learned much more from her ordeal—lessons, she says, that will stay with her the rest of her life, however long that may be.

     One of these lessons is never to lose the level of awareness and the clear perspective that her wake-up call provided her. “I couldn’t change my frightening situation,” she concludes, “but I could change my attitude toward it. I came to realize that fear, rather than paralyzing a person, can serve as a passageway to true faith.”

    “In my deep soul-searching as I faced death, love and forgiveness kept coming up as the all-important things in life. Love and forgiveness equal compassion. And if compassion guides our words and actions, we will always be moving toward the light, in the direction of all that is good and honorable in our existence.”

     But cancer doesn’t end with remission or a cure, she adds. “There are side effects and issues that remain. The desperateness of the disease lingers with us and makes us aware of the feelings we need to deal with in order to maintain our overall health. Mental and emotional healing takes longer than physical healing, and we may not have as much help with that process.

    “I feel eventually we’re meant to share the simple truths with which our cancer experience has blessed us. One of the greatest of these truths is that fear doesn’t have to paralyze us. If we take it on ourselves to move past that fear, to summon our courage to do for ourselves what no one else can do for us, it can serve as a passageway to limitless faith, hope, forgiveness and a liberated, love-motivated future.”

     “With remission, we’re given more time, a second chance,” she adds. “With my altered perspective, I’m learning to allow myself to be the ‘real’ me rather than the ‘super’ me. Somewhere in my development as a person, my true self was often denied or squelched, creating a false and idealized self.

     "Cancer gave me the awareness that I was stifled, suffocating, maybe living a lie. I began using my energies for honest growth rather than the maintenance of my approval-seeking self. I’m now in the process of freeing myself from my condemnation to that place between what I really am and what I was trying to be. This condemnation, in itself, is a form of cancer.”

     Pronounced cured of her lymphoma ten years after its diagnosis, she’s considered a true survivor by her family and friends, Josephson says. And now that she’s been restored to health and a state of wholeness, it’s important for her to help others understand the true nature of loneliness, weakness, grace and strength.

     “My own survival prayer was for courage and grace to face the unknown, and I received it.”

     This, she says, was the greatest gift her ordeal with cancer gave her, a life-affirming realization in the form of a paradox that she will hold close forever: “Once you reach total solitude in the experience of facing death, you find we are not alone in the end.”

     Each of us must look inside ourselves for the faith, courage, and hope we need to bear the Omega moment of our lives. When we turn to ourselves, we reconcile our greatest fear—that we all us must die alone, regardless of how many loved ones are gathered around us.

    I once asked a venerable old doctor what he told his patients as they were dying.

    “I tell them what they want to hear,” the doctor replied. “If they’re religious, I tell them they’re going to heaven. If they’re not, I tell them they led a good life and that’s all that matters. I tell them whatever they want to hear.”

    I remember being disappointed by his answer, thinking him flip and callous. Now I realize that he was wise and compassionate.

     For we need to believe our own truths, not someone else’s, particularly when we are dying. We need to know that what’s in our heart is right.

     And if no one is there to tell us what we desperately want to hear, then we have to tell it to ourselves.

---

Lionel Fisher is the author of Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude (Beyond Words Publishing, Spring 2001), which records the emotional and spiritual triumphs of men and women who have found amazing grace alone.  At a time when more of us than ever are living alone, an estimated 40 million Americans at the turn of the century, we continue to seek our happiness and fulfillment, our answers, our very identity in others, points out the author.

In the fall of 1996, he embarked on a cross-country journey in search of what he calls the new hermits: modern solitaires who have stretched their aloneness to Waldenesque proportions, achieving great emotional clarity in the process. He also spoke with their urban counterparts who, through necessity or choice, prefer to savor their individuality in smaller servings. In his book, Fisher interweaves their real-life stories with his own insights and experiences to offer counsel, inspiration and affirmation on living well alone.  Celebrating Time Alone affirms that its all right to be alone, to want to be alone, even to be lonely at times because the rewards of solitude can make the deprivations so worthwhile. Fisher, who also writes a column on the art of being alone, invites you to share your thoughts and feelings on magnificent aloneness.  Reach him at beachauthor@hotmail.com.

© 2002 Lionel L. Fisher.  Reprinted with permission of author