When her husband was ill with the cancer that eventually took his life, Elizabeth Cabalka escaped from it all each Wednesday afternoon to an unlikely refuge. It was the Annandale Laundromat. While the machines cleaned and dried the laundry, she poured out her thoughts and feelings about their cancer ordeal onto the pages of her journal. Eventually she wrote the first chapters of a book there and used the laundromat as its theme. The result is “Wednesdays at the Fluff ’n’ Fold – A Caregiver’s Oasis.” The 176-page account of her experience with cancer is at the printer’s and will be available in mid-October. Cabalka plans to have a reading and signing at In Hot Water at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30. “It’s about embracing life in the midst of death,” she said. “It’s about cancer from a caregiver’s perspective.” Her husband, Charles M. Winger, 43, died of esophageal cancer on Thanksgiving Day 2001 after seven years of marriage and 31/2 years of living with treatments, tests, remission and recurrence. The couple lived at the Koinonia Retreat Center near Annandale where he was business manager. Cabalka, 39, may be best known for spearheading the drive to collect $250,000 and build a new Annandale area library. The campaign started soon after Winger’s death and raised $100,000 more than the goal. She’s a library board member and vice president of the Annandale Improvement Club. Cabalka is also the founder of Healthy Insights Programs & Seminars, a trainer, facilitator, public speaker and musician. Her initial reason for writing the book was to heal, she said, but it’s also intended as a practical guide for people in the same situation or some other life-altering experience. “Writing it was a great healing tool for me,” Cabalka said. She worked at it on and off for the past four years. “This is the single most painful and challenging event in my life, and there came certain points where I just needed to put it away,” she said. Cancer was around her all the time, she said, explaining her Wednesday afternoon escapes to the laundromat to write after volunteering at the food shelf for a couple of hours. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love Charles. Of course I loved Charles. I just needed to step out of that for a little while.” The first chapter she wrote there was an analogy about cancer and the change machine, which ingests paper money and spits out quarters. It appears as Chapter Four in the book. “Cancer is a change machine like no other,” Cabalka wrote. “You may go into the experience crisp and neatly folded or perhaps crumpled, limp and slightly torn. The potential exists, however, to come out transformed and shining, all of your value intact, yet somehow more beautiful, somehow more durable, broken down but still shining. “Cancer changes the patient who experiences it in their body as well as the caregiver, whether you want it to or not.” Other chapters include “Maximum Agitation,” “The Sock Abyss,” and “The Lint Trap.” Patricia Dambowy’s drawing of the laundromat appears on the cover, and other illustrations appear at the start of each chapter. Cabalka said cancer is everywhere, and the purpose of the book is to serve the many people who are taking the same journey she took. She couldn’t find a practical guide that wasn’t clinical or preachy. “My hope is that this book serves a very real, very large group of people in some way – mentally, emotionally or otherwise.” A caregiver’s challenges aren’t often visible to the outside, “but they’re equally real and equally painful.” The book shows how to identify a caregiver’s challenges and find ways to cope and grow. A caregiver requires care too, Cabalka said, most often self-care, and she addresses ways to stay healthy in the midst of disease. The book also discusses what she said is the No. 1 thing she’s learned from her journey with cancer. “There is a seed of blessing in any experience,” she said. “I believe that with my whole heart.” She made a decision to seek out the blessing in each experience, Cabalka said. “It’s never what happens to us. It’s how I choose to deal with it that matters.” The author said she plans to produce an audio-taped version of the book and a journal that caregivers can use to write down their thoughts. “Wednesdays at the Fluff ’n’ Fold” is the first of three books about her journey with cancer. The second will be a collection of stories about grief titled “Ironies of Grief, Should I Laugh or Should I Cry?” The third book, “I Love You Too,” will be about starting over after the loss of a spouse. Her vision is that part of the profits will fund a foundation called Oasis to help caregivers and cancer patients with a three-fold approach. Oasis would provide “mind, body (and) spiritual support for people in the midst of this experience,” Cabalka said. “To just care for the physical body leaves out a major part of the experience.”
You can order “Wednesdays at the Fuff ’n’ Fold” through author Elizabeth Cabalka’s web site at www.elizabethcabalka.com, her e-mail at ecabalka@lakedalelink.net, by phone at 274-2778 or regular mail at Healthy Insights Press, P.O. Box 438, Annandale, MN 55302.
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