Hanging by a String [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

Marilyn's story will grip you from the very beginning. Her expertise in writing captures you through her entire book. It's as though you experience everything along with her--from the beginning to the end and back again. Her darkest nights of the soul embrace dialysis, kidney transplant, near death experiences, recovery, and new disease crises and finally cure through spiritual enlightenment, love and acceptance.

Here are some thought-provoking insights you won't want to miss:
. The most powerful healing force is Love.
. Each individual must take responsibility for his own healing.
. Self-hate, fear and guilt must be released for healing to happen.
. It is our destiny to heal ourselves.
. Our Love and creative works must be allowed to flow outward, unimpeded, or everything turns inward, and we create our own disease.

Don't miss the incredible healing message of this book!

Jean Krueger, Author of "WHY THE WEIGHT? DARE TO BE GREAT!" ISBN#: 0972208607

Gibson believes much about life, including disease, is governed by a lack in our souls. Pain forces us to analyze our actions in quest of the source of our suffering. Diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, she went on a spiritual journey - seeking a cure for a disease that attacked her kidneys and almost took her life. She spent seventeen years trying to cure herself, becoming an expert in the nuances of this and other related diseases.

Viewing music as a transcendent force, this accomplished violinist believes a strong constitution is needed to heal as well as make good music. Physical and emotional stress exacerbates the affects of a disease, leading to a search of the fathomable recesses of her soul for clues that might have triggered it. In the process, she decides if medicine isn't the solution, she will seek answers from a higher power. Triumphantly, her beliefs and commitment move her closer to those answers that may save her life. Her description of the hospital sessions is compelling; the reader can almost feel the pain from the medical devices.

Continuing to perform professionally in spite of the disease, Gibson travels around the nation, as well as abroad - remaining one step ahead of the inevitable. She discovers yoga, becomes a vegetarian; embracing ideals from a new counterculture to open her mind to new healing possibilities. She becomes convinced that lupus can be held at bay if she maintains pure habits. Unlike her mother who suffers with rheumatoid arthritis and believes in doctors and healing through drugs, Marilyn's faith has always been suspect. As her mother becomes progressively more disabled, it reinforces Marilyn's skepticism.

In spite of her quest for solutions, Gibson is diagnosed with life-threatening hemolytic anemia. The prescribed drugs simply delay her destiny. As she lies on a cold table in the emergency room, she feels her life force slipping away: "Suddenly, I found myself in another dimension. A glowing golden tunnel appeared in front of me. Far, far into the tunnel, almost as if at its distant openings, stood a man dressed in a splendid robe. A luminous white light emanated from behind his magnificent form. With a small smile on his barely intelligible features, he beckoned to me gently. There was a transcendent peace about him, yet I sensed incredible power. . . . As I slipped into the tunnel, he pulled me back. . . . I had survived my near-death experience."

After a failed marriage, Gibson finally finds her life's mate. She and husband Tim form a polarity; they are opposites. His pragmatic nature brings her closer to the very world she had wanted to leave. In spite of this new happiness, lupus flare-ups threaten this new security. She soon faces death again when her hemoglobin level registers around four, 36 points below normal. A transfusion is the only thing that can save her life.

Throughout the book, Gibson introduces concepts which, under the circumstances, may be regarded as the actions of a desperate person clinging to life. However, her attitude and candor illustrate that these actions are motivated by strong, often unconventional, beliefs: "My familiarity with Zen Buddhism defied logical explanation. Although I had never studied it, somehow I `knew' the experience of satori. During an experience known as self-regression, I discovered I had been a Japanese man in another lifetime. Another such regression brought images of a former life as a silversmith in Colonial America . . . I knew that each past life was correct."

Gibson later encounters a death-threatening bout with spinal meningitis. Enveloped in an ice suit to control her skyrocketing temperature, she again is barely able to cling to the physical world. "Hallucinations crowded my vision as I floated through a pleasant, ethereal dimension. Returning to reality for a check on my body sent me back up to the stratosphere to escape my physical agony. Hours passed as I slipped in and out of consciousness. . . . As in my previous near-death experiences, it was more difficult to put on the mantle of physicality than to pull it off."

Throughout her ordeal, Gibson retains her innate love for music, and her profession as a concert violinist. "In particularly emotional times, music mingles with life like blood with tears. My violin was like a beautiful lover. I knew every inch of its dark brown varnish and sensual curves as well as I knew my own body. The sides reminded me of an Italian painting, or an ancient map, with snaking lines of age pointing to random destinations."

After spending excruciating, dehumanizing periods on dialysis machines, Gibson receives a gift of life - one that returns her life to normal. Robert, her 71-year-old father, donates one of his kidneys. Prior to the surgery, she makes a decision: "The mind will direct the body successfully if given a chance, but it must be guided to the correct results. My happy result hinges on unswerving faith."

She left the hospital eleven days after the transplant and has experienced no rejection problems. She resumed her music career, playing in such big shows as Shogun, Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon. She also founded and leads a group, the Herrick Trio.

Today, Marilyn Gibson lives a normal life. She resides in New Jersey with her husband Tim Malosh, two parrots, three finches, a shar-pei, a pekingese, and three cats.

The author makes bluntly clear at the beginning of the book that she does not believe health and disease to be mere circumstances of luck or genes, and is never timid or evasive about her belief in their spiritual and metaphysical origins, and thus in spiritual and metaphysical solutions. Indeed, lest there be any doubt in the reader's mind, the author makes her premise starkly clear in the first two sentences of the Introduction : "I believe that we choose what we need throughout life to address lack in our souls. This includes disease." This proclamation prepares the reader for often unexpected detours in a book that is far more than a history of one person's fight against a devastating and incurable disease.

While few people today would question the profound effect of state-of-mind in one's physical health, many readers (myself among them) will disagree with the extent to which the author attributes non-medical causes, cures, and indeed the very "reasons" for disease. Yet none of her premises were casually formed. In the course of decades of seeking answers to the origins and remedies for her disease, the author explores Buddhism and other transcendental disciplines, while never abandoning the Christianity with which she was raised. Without pre-judgment, every insight which is loving and beneficial is welcomed and assimilated. Not only her present life is scrutinized for clues to her disease, but also those of her parents and grandparents, and even of her own, previous lives.

Some readers may categorically dismiss such non-empirical observations as previous incarnations and spiritual explanations for disease. Even such a seemingly peripheral event as the manner in which she finds an apartment to share in New York City, is given an explanation which may seem mystical to some. I don't doubt her apartment story; yet even if I did, the straight-forward manner in which it is recounted would allow even the most ardent skeptic to accept it as her own history of herself, and to move forward from there. And although I, for one, did not accept as fact some historical paranormal phenomenon which Gibson cites, these details were nonetheless important in illustrating her literal and inner journey. She expresses her beliefs directly and clearly, without pre-judgment and without requiring the reader to concur.

Since the author is a concert violinist, along the way one gets a sense of the enormous love and passion that are prerequisites for any such monumental pursuit, all of which ultimately tie in to her central theme. She expresses beautifully the concept that for her to play the violin is as necessary as for her to breathe. Indeed, one gets a sense that the violin was part of her life-long cure. "My violin ... was like a beautiful lover. I knew every inch of its dark brown varnish and sensual curves as well as I knew my own body. The sides reminded me of an Italian painting, or an ancient map, with snaking lines of age pointing to random destinations."

In fact, in Gibson's book, as in her life, music assumes the role of a life energy unto itself. Readers, such as myself, for whom such a concept is utterly natural will find her story all the more accessible. Those who begin the book believing music to be the mere juxtaposition of aesthetically pleasing sounds will have that much more to learn from it. Just as music is, symbolically, a life unto itself, so is disease. In recounting several rhapsodic images dancing through her mind when near death and under debilitating drugs, the Disease symbolically takes on the guise of a demon, not merely a biological horror.

Perhaps the parts of the book which most affected me were the occasional unexpected phrases which succinctly convey our great fortune to be blessed with life and sharing this Earth. For example, one such jolting phrase comes when she is in the mountains of Aspen, too ill to truly partake of the miraculous splendor about her : "I felt like an alien who had beamed down into paradise." Equally jarring are the author's hospital recollections when near death, before a kidney transplant turned her life around : "In this distorted world, I lurked in the shadows. Here in the murky recesses of my new life underwater, everyone spoke without sound or meaning. The surface, where healthy people lived, was a place where my admission pass had just run out."

Ms. Gibson extols the Western medical tradition which repeatedly saved her life, while questioning whether it in itself may on another level contribute to disease. These opinions are never expressed as a lack of gratitude of Western medicine, but rather in an effort to improve it. And who else better equipped to compose such a chapter? The author struggled for decades against a hideous disease, and skimmed so close to death that the most subtle thought of acceptance on her part would have effected it. She has endured massive, risky surgery, experienced various hospitals and diverse medical systems, and suffered the excruciating, life-numbing side-effects of the medicines needed to cope with the disease. And all through it, she meticulously explored varied religions and philosophies, evaluating how they might benefit people's physical and spiritual health. Combine the author's rare combination of experiences, expertise, and spiritual quest with her obvious intellect and fine writing, and her book should command wide attention.

No book has better reminded me of our incomprehensible fortune of being alive on this wonderland we call Earth, and of the tragedy that any of us might squander it.

Tom Suarez