ANGEL LOUNGE | Lisa Kingstone
A simple lounge inside the larger Macmillan Cancer Centre in London was yours for the taking if you had a diagnosis or someone in your family did. In my altered state, I cherished this privilege.
“I’m a patient of Dr. Stein’s,” I’d say, and waltzed in as if it were the Four Seasons. Even though this is where they broke the news that I had cancer, I associate it now only with comfort.
Near the ginger biscuits and tea station, real ceramic mugs were shelved, no cheap paper cups. The sign said, “Please wash your mug for the next person when you are done.” That small request added to the homelike atmosphere. We may have cancer, but we were all citizens of the house. I got my favorite fat-bellied teal mug with a yellow stripe, counting it as a good omen if it was not being used. Then I grabbed a lot of biscuits — probably more than was Emily Post acceptable. I sat down and waited for one of the angels to circle by. Within a few minutes, as always, one landed with the soft surprise of a ladybug on your arm.
“How are you today?”
I found out years later when speaking with a chaplain that adding the word “today” is crucial in not overwhelming someone in crisis. It makes it possible to answer and encourages the one-day-at-a-time strategy of how to endure suffering.
This question, asked gently, elicits tears from almost everyone in emotional agony. I blew out my list of concerns in a long sentence like a volcano erupting. I ended with the fact that I was ruining my children’s lives right when they should be free of me, the early years of college. I was going to start chemo and didn’t want them coming home to have the door answered by a bald stranger. The nurse specialist just listened quietly until I let out a big sigh followed by an enormous yawn. She reached over and put her hand gently on mine, tilted her head to the side and said, “This is hard,” which sang with an Irish lilt. Then we held hands quietly. When I reached for a sip of tea, she said, “Enjoy the tea and biscuit.” She touched my shoulder and whispered near my ear, “I’m just over there if you need anything.” She floated off to another needy spirit.
I took a bite of biscuit, a glug of tea, another bite of biscuit, making my way through the packages, tossed away the wrappers, washed my special mug. When I left, I could fling myself out into the teeming streets of London with a coating of angel.
I dropped by this support center often during the year I lived with breast cancer. After I finished my teaching for the day at King’s College London and before all my doctor appointments, it was a place to rest. I felt safe enough on my island of strugglers and soothers to sometimes fall asleep in their armchairs. Just outside the window were the civilians going about their lives on Tottenham Court Road, oblivious to our dramas.
I brought my mother in too when she visited me after my first surgery. I was worried about her since my brother had died of cancer. That tragedy used up much of her psychic energy. She was a problem solver and couldn’t solve that one and was worried she couldn’t fix my situation either.
An angel wafted by our chairs and sat down. We told her that chemo would be in the cards for me very soon. Mom added, “I told my daughter ‘You don’t have to look like you’ve had chemo. We’ll get you false eyelashes, fabulous movie star ones, and boots past your knees and makeup. You’ll look great. You can have fun with the wig. You can look stylish! Not everyone looks terrible. It’s a choice.’ ”
The angel looked at my mother with compassion. Then she said simply,
“She will look like she’s gone through chemo.”
This stopped my mom’s denial in its tracks, and her energy downshifted. She leaned her head back on the couch. Then we had some tea.
Because we were living a country apart, we told my son I had cancer over Skype. As soon as we broke the news, the screen froze on his reaction shot. He had been showing a version of that face ever since.
When he came for a visit during winter break, I brought him to the center for an emotional tune-up, and he spoke with one of the nurses. After about a half hour, he came to find me on the couch, and his face had morphed into a semblance of his former self. A decade later I asked him about the experience, and he remembered the feeling, but not the conversation. Now a therapist, he looked back at his experience with these professional soothers and said:
“I was emotionally made of rock, and nothing was comforting to me. When I talked to her, I felt like she loved me, and the feeling got past my layers. She was totally present, no ego. Normally you feel all these other undercurrents in people: their own reaction to you, how they want you to perceive them helping you, so many things that block all the light. Then talking to someone with that pure presence, it’s like basking in sun.”
Tender acts are magnified by a thousand when you are sick. At my deepest moments of terror, it was a few flashes of kindness that guided me through that tunnel. My cousin squeezed my ankle as I was shoved into the MRI tube. My GP, Dr. Stuart, said: “We will sort this out”—then walked me out to the exit when I got confused. Judy, my cancer center buddy, repeated, “You will get to the other side of this,” when I called her before all my surgeries, thinking I might not wake up. My college roommate always answered the phone and listened to my panicked rants.
“What should I do?”
“I don’t know, honey,” she said. The word honey melted my angst.
These acts, sometimes lasting a few seconds, were buffers against the hail of questions pelting against me from well-meaning others: what did you do to bring this on, why not get a second opinion, how about going macrobiotic, can you change your mindset, and the pervasive “I’ll pray for you.”
So many people needed things from me. If I was quiet, they felt they had failed to cheer me up. If I fell asleep, they felt ignored or disappointed. Once when I wasn’t feeling up to visitors, a neighbor was miffed I hadn’t placed her high enough on the intimacy hierarchy. As the dying person (or one who thought she might be dying), I just wanted to be seen, since I felt I was slowly drip by drop disappearing.
I understand all these people’s responses. I find it challenging to be present in my own life; I am so full of the business of it— planning, anticipating, forecasting. I am so sure I know best. I often say to my children, “I promise you such and such will happen,” as if I can determine the future. I dispense advice like Pez without any encouragement from the recipient. My husband sometimes calls this style of behavior “bulldog.” I mean well, but it looks like a hostile takeover to those on the receiving end.
When I retired from academia, I knew I wanted to do angel training, partly to change my response to people’s suffering, but also to be on the angel side of the equation, to give an ounce of what these specialists had given me and my family.
The closest thing I could imagine was to volunteer for hospice and work with patients who were dying. I joined after months of bureaucracy: blood tests, criminal check, an online multi-page test, and an in-person interview. I read their training manual: don’t talk about yourself, don’t ask a lot of questions, don’t try to make small talk, don’t make suggestions. Just follow their lead.
Sitting with Miriam, the first patient I am assigned a few weeks later, I turn off my phone and don’t try to entertain her. I listen to the oxygen machine which sounds like a giant creature breathing underwater. She has her eyes closed and I’m holding her cold hand with my two warm ones. I feel like I’m meditating because thoughts float in: “If we move her bed back, she can look out the window,” or “I should get those Beanie Babies off the bookshelves and let her have them in bed with her.” I let them float away to the rhythm of the air machine.
Sometimes one of the aides will come in and ask a question or start to chat with me about their own lives. But then they leave, and I go back to the rhythm of breath. Miriam opens her eyes and looks at me and I look back. I don’t try to smile, just reflect her own vulnerable face.
Basking in sun.
Lisa Simone Kingstone is the author of Fading Out Black and White, which was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed. A 2025 Rockower award winner for excellence in personal essay, her work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, Shooter Literary Magazine, PW, Hadassah Magazine, Patterns of Prejudice, Lilith, The Linden Review, and Months to Years. A former literature professor at King’s College London, Kingstone lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her husband.