Songs from a Lead Lined Room

When Suzanne Strempek Shea was struggling with breast cancer two years ago, she wanted to see what other people had written about radiation.

But what came up on the library computer were reports about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, not personal responses to a searing medical treatment. Not the same thing at all.

Now Strempek Shea, who lives in the Bondsville section of Palmer, has filled the gap with her fifth book, "Songs from a Lead-Lined Room" (Beacon Press).

The book chronicles her ordeal from the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the winter of 2000 to the following November, the time of her last radiation treatment.

Though the book is non-fiction, readers of the novels of Strempek Shea will recognize her combination of minute observation, tart humor, multilayered memories and images that keep returning like a phrase in music.

All that, but more intense.

"You're hyper-attuned to everything you're seeing and hearing and taking in," explains Strempek Shea about her cancer experience.

She has always been able to find the surreal in the pedestrian, and this book is steeped in "found" poetry. She can fill an entire chapter with a catalog of the businesses, churches, restaurants and private homes she passed on the way to the hospital every day for seven weeks.

A friend writes to her in a postcard about a team of six camels at the Big E that "made no sound as they walked down the street."

A picture shows St. Agatha holding her own lopped-off breasts in a dish.

A man at the hospital brushes the long yellow hair of a woman who has no hands.

Strempek Shea doesn't belabor symbols but, in this context, her images are supercharged. She finds a frightened bird trapped in the observation tower at Quabbin Reservoir. Folding it into her scarf, she takes it outdoors, gently loosens its tiny feet from the fleece and watches it go, "like a moving piece of air."

In her fear and grief she compares herself to something who has tumbled out of the back of a truck that will never come back for her. She is a ship sunk in wartime, with people floating by in diving bubbles. "I see their faces at the windows looking at my wreckage," she writes.

She reports the stupid things people say: "It's not like you had chemotherapy. Now, that would be something to complain about." She takes the media to task for its false cheer: The headline "Radiation" over a photo of a woman in a tight little bicycle suit, pedaling past a blurred landscape.

Yet Strempek Shea also writes gratefully of the "gemlike ring of sisters and brothers" she has gathered in the course of her life. Among them are "Cindy" (Cynthia Hamel of Belchertown), a constant reassuring presence who has survived cancer herself, and "Padraic" (Stevens), an Irish musician who composed and taped songs for the author to listen to on a Walkman during her treatments.

The walls of the radiation room, she explains, were so thick that otherwise only one annoying radio station came through.

Strempek Shea didn't start out to write a first-person account. When she came back from her first radiation treatment - she insisted on driving alone because she didn't want to feel like a "patient" - her husband asked her how it went. She couldn't answer.

"I put up my hands to say, 'Wait a minute,'" she says. "Then I sat down at the computer to write, and I wrote for half an hour."

Only then could she stop and talk about the experience.

Strempek-Shea is married to Tom Shea, a columnist for the Union-News and Sunday Republican in Springfield, where she was a reporter for many years. She suspects her newspaper training is what made it possible to give form to her grief.

"I was a reporter for so long that when I write it's in decent shape to begin with, because of the whole deadline experience," she says.

For a long time she considered her cancer writing a private therapy. "Nobody saw it 'til the end," she says. She gave the text to a few people so they would better understand her behavior and feelings.

They encouraged her to show it to her agent.

The publisher suggested that she add a chapter at the beginning, to introduce herself to people who had never heard of her.

What a wonderful chapter it is. Just as her novels are reminders of the richness of experience in rural places and small towns, this book reveals the wealth of consciousness in one pure heart.

Strempek Shea is the kind of person who worries about startling blue herons with her kayak, because their wings must have to work extra hard "when you are a creature of that size." She is a person who picks up trash on her morning walks, a person who consciously pretends to fall for it when a quail uses the old dragging-wing strategy to lure her away from a nest.

For most of her life, she ended her day with three Polish prayers. Then, in the darkness, she would conjure up three things that happened that day that she was grateful for, and they would spin off into dozens of others.

"In January I'd hear the rush of air from the furnace," she writes, "and would be grateful to have that furnace."