Lumieres Press

Chimera: Living Through Leukaemia, A Memoir Lumieres Press

Being forced to confront death is a profound opportunity to explore what it means to be alive.




In 1999, on the cusp of adulthood and newly in love, Jody White's whole world caved in, taking his breath away. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of acute leukaemia and given two weeks to live. After a whirlwind of intensive treatment, and close to death, he drifted between worlds, dreaming himself into the care of a wizened old cowboy, his own personal SWAT team and an old crone who wanders the desert collecting wolf bones.




That year broke him apart, before he slowly put himself back together again. Anyone touched by cancer or life-threatening events will know how this feels. We are forced to confront our own mortality and nothing can prepare us. Chimera is his attempt to describe how that felt, how a dance with death changes us, exposing the bones, the very core, of who we really are.




Jody spent the two decades since facing facts, recovering and integrating the fractured parts of himself, collecting understandings he once thought impossible. Eventually, he caught his breath. His arduous journey revealed itself as what he understood to be an alchemical initiation - a near-death experience framed by the innate, mythic stories that touch all our lives.