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Printed
February 7, 2006
Santa Clara Weekly
Writing
for Her Life
By Carolyn Schuk
Santa Clara Weekly
What do writing groups for cancer patient and the work of the Centre for Living With Dying have in common? Sharon Bray, the Centre's interim director, is happy to tell you.
"The work of the Centre is very similar to what I do in the writing groups in its underlying approach," she explains. "We are accompanying people on a safe and confidential journey. We're dealing with some of the most intimate aspects of what it means to live."
A native of Yreka, California, Bray comes from pioneering stock. The town of Bray, which stands in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, attests to her family's standing among California pioneers. Although she didn't come overland in a wagon train, Bray is a pioneer in her own way, forging a distinctive path in the emerging field of arts therapy.
Bray is the author of A Healing Journey: Writing Together Through Breast Cancer and the soon-to-be-published follow-up When Words Heal: Writing Through Cancer. Both books are based on Bray's experiences leading several popular writing groups for cancer patients in the Bay Area.
A diagnosis of breast cancer in the spring of 2000 prompted a bout of soul-searching for the type-A Bray, who had built an impressive career in education, career services, and executive management in for-profit and nonprofit organizations. At that time, Bray, who lives in Menlo Park, was the executive director of the Cupertino-based Career Action Center.
The cancer diagnosis was the catalyst for Bray to make some changes in her life and became the genesis of her writing workshops.
"After I was diagnosed with cancer I soldiered through it - leaving radiation sessions to return to the office and continue the painful process of downsizing the organization," she explains.
"About four weeks into treatment, my radiologist took me aside and gently suggested that I needed to to make myself the most important priority for a while," she continues. "I thanked him and drove back to work. On the way, I had to pull off to the side of the road, suddenly out of breath. I picked up my cell phone, called my board chairperson and resigned."
After leaving the Career Action Center Bray went into what she describes as "managerial hiding," taking occasional consulting jobs and serving on the boards of local nonprofits - including a stint on the BWC board from 2002 to 2004.
I needed to work from my heart and not from my head," Bray says. "I needed to reclaim my creative side.
"I went to Berkeley and took a writing workshop with Pat Schneider [founder of Amherst Writers and Artists and author of Writing Alone & With Others] that I had been trying to take for three years," she continues. "I came back on fire."
By a perhaps divine coincidence, shortly after she came back from the workshop a coworker gave her an article by James Pennebaker about writing and healing. A light went off for Bray.
"I quickly began to formulate the plan for a pilot," she explains. "An expressive writing group for women living with cancer."
In early 2001 she proposed the writing workshop to Palo Alto's Community Breast Health Project. It took off and Bray now offers workshops in additional locations for men and women dealing with cancer - including the Stanford Cancer Center and the Bay Area Breast Cancer Network in San Jose.
In late 2005 the Centre for Living With Dying, part of Santa Clara's Bill Wilson Center, was looking for an executive director. Bray was persuaded by BWC Executive Director Sparky Harlan to take a position as interim director.
"I was interested because I had been directing a grief and bereavement group at my church," Bray explains.
As a society we're terrible at dealing with death, according to Bray. "This is one of the things I hear again and again from men and women with cancer," she says. "Yet death is one of the most extreme experiences of human life - and one of the most normal."
Bray knows from first-hand experience the deficiencies of modern society's support for the dying and bereaved. When her first husband died at the age of 38 in a drowning accident, "there was nothing for us, for my children or my in-laws," Bray explains. "It would have helped us so much to have something like the services offered at the Centre."
What makes the work of the Centre unique, according to Bray, is that is works as a community. She tells of Lebanese villages where when someone dies, people from the other villages help carry the coffin. "They are literally carrying the grief of the community," Bray explains.
That's how she sees the role of the Centre's 50 plus volunteers. They're the heart of the organization," she says. "They are companions, friends. They listen. They don't try to problem-solve. And their commitment to this work is inspirational."
For information about the Centre for Living With Dying, visit www.billwilsoncenter.org/thecentre.shtml, call (408) 553-6950 or email thecentre@billwilsoncenter.org.
You can find out more about Sharon Bray's writing workshops at www.wellspringwriters.org. Her book is available at the website as well as through www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.