Story Frame 25 – Foreshadowing

24 April 1998 – Linda McCartney died last week from breast cancer. She was 56. I think Karen gave up hope to recover when Linda McCartney died. I could hear it in her voice. “With all their financial resources,” she said to me, “and it wasn’t enough. She still died.” Paul described himself as “shipwrecked” over her death, I can’t even imagine.

Martin is in Brussels for a shoot. He woke himself up at 4:30 am this morning so he could call to say ‘goodnight’ to me at 10:30 pm. He told me he’d seen the London Times with Paul & Linda McCartney on the cover and immediately thought of me. He bought the paper to bring back to me, along with a copy of Paris Match for me and a small crêpier. He remembered I’d had an intense craving for crêpes last summer so now I can make them myself!

Foreshadowing is a technique used by both filmmakers (and writers) to keep their audience (and their readers) in their seats, to keep them watching or to keep them reading.

The best foreshadowing sets the stage and prepares the audience for what is to come, even if the audience is unaware of it, dropping hints and clues about future developments and plot twists while being subtle enough to avoid giving away the plot.

Foreshadowing is a tease and, as with the best teases, you aren’t necessarily aware of what’s happening until some point in the future, when you’ve had time to reflect and look back.

After her initial chemotherapy, Karen was in remission for nearly six months. During those months, she was happy and hopeful. We were all happy and hopeful.

She happened to be talking to me on the phone the exact moment she realized the cancer had returned. But she didn’t tell me.

The little loft condo Karen was living in had a narrow spiral staircase that led up to her studio. On a whim, she had decided to paint the railing gold. Just the idea of doing that delighted her.

She had painted halfway up the stairs when the phone rang. It was me, she later told me, calling to check in on her and to tell her about the kids and our latest documentary film escapades – anything to entertain her, distract her, keep her spirits up.

Listening to me prattle on, she paused her painting and put her hand under her armpit, to gently massage away the tightness that had built up from the repetitive brush work. And that was when she felt the swollen lymph nodes and realized she was no longer in remission. The cancer was back.

Hearing the excitement in my voice about an upcoming film shoot, she kept this frightening news to herself until my next visit a few weeks later when she found the words to tell me in person.

Lou was visiting Karen at the same time. She’d already told him and he’d immediately flown up from Belize to be with her. Thank god for Lou.

He teased her and tried to keep her spirits light by purposely draping his wet bathtowels on her furniture or pretending to turn left after she’d told him to turn right. Each time she yelped at him in exasperation. And each time he would laugh, his Paul Newman blue eyes twinkling in delight as he admitted he was doing it “just to see if she was still in there,” still the Karen who was so particular about everything, still the artist he knew and loved so much. And all the time, doing his best to mask his own pain from both of us.

Lou and I went with Karen to see her oncologist at the hospital. Having studied her latest test results, he gently suggested she might think about contacting hospice.

Lou and I took this to mean we still had time to try and find someone who could cure her. I remember how lovingly optimistic and foolish we both were, thinking she’d been granted a reprieve.

But Karen was, as always, way ahead of us. Her normally relaxed face was rigid with stress and disappointment, as she fought back tears. Hearing the word hospice, she knew she likely had less than six months left to live.

In the following days, Lou and I struggled with words and possible action plans, trying to find ways to make things better for Karen, ways to release her from the disease-imposed limitations on her future and give her positive thoughts.

Somewhere in the frightening murk of my thoughts, a scene from a documentary Martin had produced prior to Karen’s diagnosis bubbled up to the surface. It was a tiny, fragile lifeline of an idea.

Final Blessing explored how individuals with incurable illnesses can still have an optimistic outlook and positive moments in life, despite living with a death sentence.

I’d only been on one shoot for the film, which I found extremely depressing and difficult – an interview with a young mother and her son, both diagnosed with the same fatal illness that had already killed her other three children – so I had only a slight familiarity with the rest of its content and characters.

One day, however, I happened to pass through our basement edit suite while Tim, our editor at the time, was working on the rushes from an interview Martin had done in Missoula, Montana with Ira Byock, a physician and advocate for palliative care, and author of the book, Dying Well.  

The team had also shot interviews with a few hospice patients. When I heard a man say how lucky he was to have gotten cancer, I stopped in my tracks, thinking I had misheard.

“Tim, would you back that up and play it again for me, please?” I asked.

He did, and once again I listened to the man on camera say how lucky he was to have cancer. Cancer had given him the most precious gift of all, he said.

I listened in disbelief. Surely I had misheard this, I thought. But no.

His cancer diagnosis had given him a warning, he continued calmly, and with that warning, enough time to get his affairs in order and tell everyone how much he loved them before he died – something that would not have happened had he been the victim of a heart attack, gunshot wound or car accident.

His way of looking at things, of framing his circumstances reminded me of a simple head trick I used to play on myself when I was younger. When I something happened that I didn’t like, I would try to think of something even worse, then ask myself, ‘Which of the two would you prefer to have happen?’ And the answer was of course, the thing that had actually happened. Ahh, well then, I’d say to myself, you got your wish! Things aren’t nearly as bad as they could have been.

For some reason – even though I was the puppetmaster – playing this simple trick on myself often worked. It worked psychologically, because it made me felt slightly more in control. At least in my imagination, I was the one who made the choice, even if I had created and stacked the odds myself.

I was struck by this man’s positive attitude, and the reminder of being aware of the privilege of choice, even if the choices are self-invented as a framing and coping mechanism.

Listening to him reminded me this was the exact perspective I needed in order to cope with the next six months emotionally. This attitude is what would make the difference between six months of despair and six months of gratitude. The unthinkable was going to happen. With medical know-how and expertise seemingly exhausted, the only weapons and guides available to us were in our minds.

And with that realization, Operation Final Blessing was put into action.

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com