Customer Reviews

Seeing the Crab

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Finally a book about living with cancer that doesn't have a saccharine, happy ending. Middlebrook writes for the large number of cancer patients who don't necessarily have great diagnoses, and who aren't well-served by the current body of literature that emphasizes good outcomes. As she writes about how other people have such a hard time even *talking* about cancer, how one's own expectations and aspirations fundamentally change, and how difficult it is, day after day, to simply cope and manage and survive with the burden of an enormous life crisis, one feels like putting the book down and exulting, "Here's someone like me!"

A good book for one who seeks to understand what it's like for someone facing cancer and its often hellish treatments. Middlebrook takes you inside the experience, to the heart of what it feels like for the "experiencer." I've never been afforded such a searing, close-in view, even after going through my own father's death from cancer. I wish I'd had this book then. Sometimes there is no right thing to say, but your presence alone can speak volumes. Middlebrook is a courageous warrior. But more than that. She gives hope that should we ever face such a diagnosis, we, like her, would be able to reach deep and tap unknown reserves of strength to face it--what else can we humans do? This is an often bitter and angry book, but it's beautifully written, uncompromisingly honest, and manages to be inspirational after all.

This was a terrific book. I am not sure what inspired me to purchase "Seeing the Crab", but it honestly changed my life. I have been thinking about switching careers and pursuing medicine, and this book helped confirm it. Middlebrook was brutally honest about all of her various accounts with cancer. It gave a wonderful insight of what therapy is like, how important it is to have a strong support group of family and freinds, and the battle of everyday life with cancer. In my family, I have had two grandfathers die of lung cancer, and a third grandfather is now suffering from the same disease. Although the area in which the cancer is located is different, the treatment is more or less the same, as is the pain they go through. This book gave me such a deeper understanding for what my grandfather has been experiencing, and the knowledge of what to say when we are together. I thank Middlebrook for her honesty, since it is helping me in my own family situtions. I highly reccomend this book to anyone who has cancer or knows someone who does. It will really change the way you think and treat those with this disease.

I read this book to better understand what my sister is going through and what she may face in the future. Anyone with a friend or relative with advanced breast cancer should read it. We try to "minimize" what is happening to them, and we tell them to keep a positive attitude, and we deny the reality of the seriousness of the disease, and the outcome. We tell them they look good, and try to give them false hope of surviving cancer. As the author pointed out, this makes them very angry, as though we are discounting what is happening to them. We need to be there for them and to listen. Just because they are in treatment for this dreaded disease, it doesn't mean they will survive it. The author knew she would likely not survive, and that her treatments, as horrific as they were, were just "buying her more time." This was a sad, but "real" story. Very powerfully written. I could not put it down.

This is much more than your straight ahead narrative of a terrifying illness and a hellish treatment. We share the author's journey through a time and space that exists where language does not easily, readily or typically tread. Probably not an easy read if you have breast cancer and yet somehow reassuring after all. I would recommend it for anyone who wants to understand what it is like to go through the experience.

This book was gripping from start to finish - a clear-eyed & clearly written account of life with metastatic breast cancer. The author, a 50-yr-old jungian therapist in San Francisco when she was diagnosed in 1991, lets us into the emotional & physical aspects of living not only with cancer but also with the devastation of cancer treatment. She describes how her priorities changed with the diagnosis (survive TODAY, don't plan for tomorrow; visit friends and take trips NOW, not later), and she acknowledges how in the midst of this devastation she is "lucky" compared to some of her fellow cancer survivors, in terms of family, friends & financial resources. For lovers of memoir, I highly recommend this book. The one jarring note for me was the writer's absolute furor when her mother, sister or a friend suggested there might be some slight possibility she wouldn't die imminently, even not within the next 3 years, as all the literature insisted she would given her diagnosis. Why did she insist that they accept her conviction that she was at death's door, rather than understanding (with her therapist's hat on) that for whatever reason they weren't capable of this? This is all the more ironic given that she ended up surviving until 1/09 - something i didn't learn until several days after i'd finished reading the book and googled for this info! Here is the article from the SF Chronicle:

Christina Middlebrook dies - faced down cancer
Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, January 26, 2009

At age 50, Christina Ross Middlebrook of San Francisco learned she had late-stage breast cancer and was told she did not have long to live.

That was in 1991. Ms. Middlebrook, a Jungian analyst who went on to write an award-winning memoir about dealing with her illness, defied medical predictions for nearly two decades. She died Tuesday at her Mendocino County home. She was 67.

"She was a woman of astonishing willpower," said Jonathan Middlebrook, her husband of 23 years. "She was just strong - strong - right to the end."

She was also someone who spoke and wrote openly about the dark things that other people often shroud in euphemism or deny outright. Like death, or what it feels like to have metastatic breast cancer.

Carl Jung, the early 20th century Swiss psychiatrist, wrote: "Death is psychologically as important as birth. Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose."

Ms. Middlebrook didn't shrink away from it. Instead she confronted the shocking diagnosis head on, writing "Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying Before I Do" with frankness and clarity.

"I want the well-entrenched American denial system to change," she wrote. "We are taught that when a person informs us 'I am dying' or 'I'm in deep s- here,' we are to respond by saying 'Oh, no. No, you're not. You'll be fine.' "

In a book review that appeared in The Chronicle in 1996, Steve Heilig, director of public health and education for the San Francisco Medical Society, called it a "brave book" that "includes not only the agonies and frustrations of negotiating the medical maze, but inspiring amounts of support from her husband and children and seemingly endless numbers of friends."

Her willingness to face the diagnosis head on - and her insistence that doctors speak plainly with her - may be attributed only partly to her Jungian training. Unapologetic practicality and plainspokenness were also just her way.

Her husband recalled a walk they took one day while on vacation. A snail was inching its way along the walkway ahead of them, and he - an English professor at San Francisco State University- began spinning a yarn about its life and where it might be going.

"Then she just stomped on the thing!" he recalled with amusement. "I asked why, and she said, 'Habit. I'm a gardener.' "

Born on Oct. 17, 1941, in Evanston, Ill., Ms. Middlebrook graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1963. Three years later, she earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago School of Social Work.

During this time, she married Gordon Cutts. The couple had three children, but the marriage did not last. In 1985, she married Middlebrook.

"She was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me," he said.

Ms. Middlebrook practiced psychotherapy for 40 years at what was then known as Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco, and then in private practice. She became a licensed Jungian analyst in 1985 and was an active member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

A decade later, her memoir earned the Jonquils Award from the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center, honoring "efforts to increase awareness and give hope" to those with cancer. It also won the "Books for a Better Life" award for memoir in 1997.

When she wrote her book, Ms. Middlebrook believed death was imminent.

"I have lost any thought of returning to my old life, watching my children enjoy graduations and find work and marry and have children. I do not think of my work, with its attendant conferences and meetings and committees. There isn't any question any more about my retirement, that mythological time when I was supposed to have earned enough money and enjoyed enough success to relax. I do not expect to know my grandchildren. I do not expect to grow old. I don't even think about the spring."

But Ms. Middlebrook did live to see her children marry, and she knew all five grandchildren, ages 3 months to 7 years. She also lived long enough to enjoy the home that she and her husband built in Redwood Valley (Mendocino County) overlooking Lake Mendocino, a place they called "the landscape of our hearts' desire."

In addition to her husband, Jonathan, of Redwood Valley, Ms. Middlebrook is survived by her sons Ethan Cutts of Fair Oaks (Sacramento County) and James Cutts of Los Angeles; her daughter Maggie Araya of San Francisco; stepdaughters Leah Middlebrook of Eugene, Ore., and Sophie Middlebrook of San Francisco; and her five grandchildren.

Memorial gatherings are planned in San Francisco and Redwood Valley. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, 2040 Gough St., San Francisco, CA 94109, or to Phoenix Hospice, 1 Madrone St., Willits, CA 95490.

This wonderful woman totally gets me, almost scarey. At the age of 28 I was diagnosised with stage 3 BC. I was told that I will not make it 5 years with my prognosis. I too did the horrid red devil in my standard first 6 monthsofchemo.ThenI did a Stem Cell(2-1-00)along with rads. I am two years out of treatment and going through the horrid scans and watching and waiting that she did. It is about time someone told it like it is. Those of us that are called so lovingly as premies...under the age of 40, are literally giving a death sentence, never to see our children grow up. I thank you Christina for opening the worlds eyes to the reality of this beast. Maybe our children never go through this!!!!!!
Lovingly,
Baby Girl

I know I have picked this book up before..in the paperback form and at least twice in the hardcover edition. Parts of this memoir were very good and toward the middle it really starts to get long winded. Don't judge a book by it's hard or soft cover like I did and it left me empty. Not much new material here. I will do a google search and see if Christina is still alive or not. The paperback came out in 1998.