Alisa York, author of Fauna and Far Cry, calls Susan Wadds debut novel, What the Living Do, “a fierce and fearless novel about a woman drawn to self-destruction yet desperate to live – and maybe even love. A deeply moving and memorable debut.”
These words sum up what many readers have felt while immersed in the pages of this remarkable novel: a dogged persistence that seems at once a surrendering of one’s will to live and a testament to life. We asked Susan to join us for this special guest post to share about where this opposing and equal pull comes from. Her response was staggering.
Susan Wadds and her son.
A Wolf’s Tale
By Susan Wadds
At eighteen I was diagnosed with a rare blood disease. After many medical interventions, including the final “cure” of a splenectomy, I was healed and able to carry on with my life.
As a teenager I had suspected there was more to the disease than some random occurrence; a system gone “off,” but at the time had no resources to investigate the possibility that ITP had its roots in my psyche and not simply in my blood. So in my thirties, when diagnosed with cervical cancer, I challenged the medical system by refusing the prescribed hysterectomy and chose instead a myriad of alternative healing approaches. Always watchful through regular checkups, it was clear the cancer wasn’t progressing, but neither was it retreating. The common wisdom was, have the damn surgery. I agreed to a LEEP incision but the margins weren’t clear. Still, I wanted to understand why the disease had manifested. If I was to blame, either for a past wrong or because there was something rotten at my core that needed to be exposed and excised.
After leaving the doctor’s office in Thornhill where I’d had a PAP smear, I drove along Rutherford Road, just south of Wonderland where there was still a lush little forest. It was early winter with a dusting of snow in the ditches. On the shoulder of the road, a small wolf stood, as if waiting to cross. Without a thought, I pulled off the road and got out of the car.
We stood watching each other for moment after moment. No cars passed. The sky a quiet grey. Something wild stirred in my chest but I stood still, waiting. Inside I craned to hear what this creature was telling me. At last, it turned and jogged lightly back towards the forest, turning periodically as if to check if I was following.
I wept in the car, knowing this encounter was unspeakable magic. When I received the results of the test, saying no cancer was detected, I felt the wolf had been there to reassure me. However, the next test found some cancer, so I decided that the wolf’s message had been to be patient and to stay the course.
At forty-one, I discovered that I was pregnant. With active cancer. My oncologist advised a full hysterectomy in order to “kill two birds with one stone,” since he was of the opinion that birthing a child would spread cancer throughout my body.
I disregarded his insistence. I also turned away from the invasion of amniocentesis, a recommendation for geriatric mothers.
I’ve been reluctant to share my story because I would never want anyone to assume this is anyone’s else’s healing path. I acknowledge that mine were a series of dangerous choices. I’ve never been able to logically explain any of my questionable decisions, but I’m here, thirty-three years after my initial diagnosis, to tell the tale.
I also did want to tell this story, just not as a memoir. So I created Brett, gave her a job I would never be able to stomach—that of clearing roadkill—and gave her cervical cancer to see what she would do. Like me, she couldn’t explain her stubbornness. Like me, she suspected her disease was payback. And like me, it was an encounter with a wolf that opened her eyes and gave her hope.
What the Living Do is a work of fiction. It was the best way I could tell my story and have it not be my story.
When Benjamin Rain Meenghun (wolf in Ojibwe) was almost six years old, I agreed to a hysterectomy. I found a sympathetic doctor who agreed to leave my ovaries if he felt them to be healthy. The surgery was an oddly blissful experience. Doctor Will told me my ovaries were “beautiful.”
Susan and her son, Benjamin Rain Meenghun.
My son and my birthdays are a week apart. On August twentieth, I will be seventy, on the twenty-seventh, he will be twenty-eight.
Bring home What the Living Do (Regal House, 2024) by Susan Wadds.
More about What the Living Do:
Sex and death consume much of thirty-seven-year-old Brett Catlin’s life. Cole, ten years her junior, takes care of the former while her job disposing of roadkill addresses the latter. A cancer diagnosis causes her to question her worth, suspecting the illness is payback for the deaths of her father and sister. Thus begins a challenging journey of alternative healing that she doubts she deserves. Just as Brett surrenders to the prescribed cure, a startling discovery sends her on a more profound exploration of cause and effect. Encounters with animals, both living and dead, help her answer the question: who is worth saving?
More About Susan Wadds:
Winner of The Writers’ Union of Canada’s prose contest, Susan Wadds’ work has appeared, among other publications, in The Blood Pudding, Room, Quagmire, Waterwheel Review, Funicular, Last Stanza, WOW-Women on Writing, and carte blanche magazines,. The first two chapters of her debut novel, published by Regal House Publishing, “What the Living Do” won Lazuli Literary Group’s prose contest, and were published in Azure Magazine.
A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, Susan is a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop facilitator. She lives by a quiet river on Williams Treaty Territory in South-Central Ontario with an odd assortment of humans and cats.