Excerpt from the book:

Things happen. In my case, cancer happened. I don’t know why. My struggle to deal with this radical challenge propelled me to walk a 460-mile-long pilgrimage road in France. Walking Through Cancer describes my three-stage journey on the Way of Saint James, a route that millions of pilgrims have followed, for a variety of motives, for more than a thousand years.
Humans are meaning-making creatures, making sense out of events by seeing them through filters accumulated during a lifetime of making sense out of things. Cancer offered me the opportunity to view my life through a fresh filter, a filter that colored my experiences with a new kind of significance. I chose to expand my meaning making to include the possibility of a compassionate universe filled with ongoing interaction with the Divine, however it manifested itself. Some might call this perspective grace; others might call it delusion.

Although I wrote up my travel notes after completing the first two stages of the pilgrimage, I put that rough manuscript in the bottom of a drawer. I wanted to forget all about having cancer. I wanted to look forward, not back.

Five years after surgery I statistically rejoined the general population pool. But statistics don’t consider emotions, and I waited until the following year to look at the manuscript again. Eventually I expanded it into this book.

In reworking the manuscript, I have tried to respect how I was “doing myself” during the pilgrimage while incorporating how I have changed as I have brought new meaning to my experiences. I invite you to share my journey and to use it as an opportunity to explore your own ways of making meaning in the world.