Resilience

Brave or resilient?

/ edebock / 10 Comments

As a cancer patient, I’ve often been told that I’m brave. I know that people mean well, but that descriptor has never sat very well with me. To me, brave is the firefighter who enters a burning building to save lives or the person who jumps into deep water to rescue someone in danger of drowning. Bravery is defined as the mental strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty. It’s often impulsive or heroic. That doesn’t describe me or my thirteen year journey with neuroendocrine cancer.

Recently, a person whose opinion I value highly told me, “You’re so resilient!” and that word rang true to me. Resilience is a long-term process best described as the ability to endure, adapt, and survive adversity and recover from difficult experiences.

Those who know me well know that I’m a self-professed word nerd. Words matter to me. For more than a decade, the word stable, as in “no evidence of new or progressive disease” which was the final line on my latest CT scan report, has been a favourite word of mine. Now resilient has become another favourite!

So, how does a person build resilience? Becoming resilient is a lifelong process, not a one-time event. Life is rarely easy for anyone. Most of us experience a variety of difficult and upsetting events and circumstances over our lifetimes and I’m certainly no exception. Long before I was diagnosed with cancer, I endured a series of other tragedies and traumas, including the loss of a preschool daughter to leukemia. In each case, I chose to keep putting one foot in front of the other and living life to the fullest extent possible. That wasn’t easy, it wasn’t brave, and I couldn’t have done it alone, but it did help prepare me for life with an incurable cancer. I learned to accept circumstances that I couldn’t change and I also learned to depend on the God who loves me and who promised to take care of me.

In 2 Corinthians 4:8–9, the apostle Paul, who suffered many hardships, wrote “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” That’s resilience!

Book of the month – April 2023

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From the Ashes

Jesse Thistle

9781982101213This month’s book was a difficult read because of the content, but at the same time, it was difficult to put down!

Abandoned at the age of 3, Jesse Thistle and his two older brothers were taken into care by the Saskatchewan Children’s Aid Society. After a short time in foster care, they were raised by their paternal grandparents in Brampton, Ontario. In his teens, struggling with the effects of generational trauma and loss as well as his identity as an Indigenous youth, Jesse succumbed to a self-destructive cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and petty crime that eventually led to a decade of homelessness.

Finally, realizing that he was going to die if he didn’t turn his life around, Jesse entered Harvest House, a residential rehab centre and began his healing journey. Today he is a husband, a father, an assistant professor at York University, and is working on his PhD. Once a high school dropout, he won a Governor General’s Academic Medal in 2016 and is a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Vanier Scholar. He is also the author of the Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, published through the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.

It was never Jesse’s intention to write a memoir. The fourth step in his addiction recovery program involved writing a “fearless moral inventory” as part of making sense of all that had happened to him. In 2016, the Toronto Star published a profile of him that led to Simon & Schuster approaching him about a potential book deal. Fleshing out that original moral inventory became the book in which, through both poetry and prose, he details devastatingly painful scenes with brutal honesty and bluntness. It is, at times, a gut-wrenching read, but it is also a story of resilience and hope. As I read it, I couldn’t help thinking of all the other Jesses living on our streets and in our prisons. Every one of them has a story, but not all will end well.

One such story is that of Jesse’s father.

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Cyril “Sonny” Thistle, who was born April 3, 1954, was last seen in 1981 in Brampton, Ontario, near McLaughlin Road and Queen Street East. At the time he went missing, he was described as having a fair complexion, light brown hair, a thick moustache, and a gap between his top two front teeth. He was 26 years old.

The Thistle family has been trying to locate Sonny for several years, without any success. Jesse and his brothers desperately want to know what happened to their father.

Anyone with information on Thistle is asked to contact investigators at 905-453-2121 ext. 2233. Anonymous information may also be submitted by calling Peel Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or by visiting www.peelcrimestoppers.ca.