Book Review: After the Fear Come the Gifts
After the Fear Come the Gifts: Breast Cancer’s 9 Surprising Blessings. Kay Metres. Narrated by Brigid Duffy, Julie S. Halpern, Bridget Duffy, and Bill Fike. Audiobook. Produced by Acta Publications, 2019.
Reviewed by Suzanne Brazil.
Clinical psychologist Kay Metres was looking forward to retirement until a suspicious spot turned up on a routine mammogram. In After the Fear Come the Gifts, she shares her journey with breast cancer from diagnosis through treatment and recovery and explains how she can make the audacious claim that cancer arrived bearing gifts.
The audiobook is arranged in chapters outlining each of the nine titular gifts, beginning with transformation, learning to ask for help, interdependence, surrender, and more, moving through the wide range of emotions and lessons that her diagnosis brought into her life. Each chapter ends with an invitation to consider questions for reflection.
Metres' realizations and revelations are full of compassion and affirmations that the audience can use, whether dealing with their similar diagnosis or that of a loved one. But perhaps more interestingly, her insights apply to any traumatic experience. It is her specificity that makes the hard-earned wisdom universal. “I was holding a head of red cabbage when the phone rang,” says Metres of the call from her doctor. She goes on to ask the audience, “How did you find out? Were you as overwhelmed and dismayed as I was?”
In each chapter, she shares a bit of her soul, history, imperfections, and personality quirks that make her experience unique. In doing so, she invites the audience to ponder their own reactions, fears, and experiences. For example, she's an introvert who wanted to maintain some semblance of control by keeping the diagnosis private. On the other hand, her husband is an extrovert who needed the support of sharing the information with his wide circle. In sharing the story of their conflict and resolution, she sows the seeds of self-compassion that she later realized as one of her gifts.
The narrators do a beautiful job of translating the peaceful, encouraging mood that is at times lightened by laughter at an anecdote. Of course, with such a serious subject matter, there are many difficult and necessary bits of information regarding side effects, surgical outcomes, fear of reoccurrence, and more. These topics are tackled head-on but with a warmth and compassion that comes through in the performances.
Metres shares with great honesty about the effects she experienced, including mouth sores, cognitive difficulties, sexual side effects, and, of course, hair loss. She writes that “difficulties taught me new ways to live my life.” From learning to ask for help to realizing how much others appreciate being asked, cancer has provided her with an opportunity for personal growth she may not have had otherwise.
“So much of what happens to us comes out of the dark,” says the author. Anyone going through their own unexpected dark-of-the-night experience, including those with breast cancer diagnoses, should find Metres’ book a welcome guide.