ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that there are important synergies that, together, could offer a rich and nuanced sociological perspective and make applicable both C. Wright Mills' sociological imagination and Martin Heidegger's Being-in-the-World. It combines both Mills' sociological and Heidegger's philosophical ways of seeing the world, with the aim of exploring the lived experience of people living with and beyond cancer (PLWBCs). The chapter conceptualizes the key shared experiences for PLWBCs as embodiment, spirituality, temporality, and authentic connection. The spiritual aspect of lived experience, either preceding the illness or newly arrived at or reconfigured through the illness itself, can facilitate meaning making that then becomes a further integral strand of the person's narrative in terms of his or her integration in the social world. Terry Gall and Mark Cornblat seek to extend models of coping and stress to include a spiritual domain of stress appraisal.
