Earlier this week, I heard that my great-aunt Alice passed away at the amazing age of 104. Alice’s sister was my grandmother, my father’s mother, and I’ve thought about her constantly during this entire treatment process because she died before her time from cancer.
I have purposefully avoided talking about death in this blog, at least in a very straightforward way. It’s time to remedy that. Alice’s death, and fresh memories of my grandma’s death, just brought it all front and center for me.
My very first reaction upon getting diagnosed was that I was going to die, soon, much sooner than I had ever imagined possible – short of getting plowed over by a bus or somesuch other random accident. My first cogent thoughts after that first week of numbness and disbelief were all about my funeral. I even wrote a letter to Steve, detailing what I did and did not want. I put that letter into a sympathy card, sealed the envelope, and propped it up in a prominent place in my studio where he could find it if he needed it.
Then I got busy being positive and optimistic, even before the actual evidence-based facts – the post-surgical results, the CT scans, etc. – proved me right.
Of course, death has still dogged me this entire time. Those absurd initial doctors’ appointments – dominated by legal forms and lists of potential side effects – were really only about the chance I might die from treatment, and would Steve and I please not sue the hospital if that occurred?
I have also seen death in the faces of other cancer patients in the waiting rooms and treatment areas, and in the tense and frightened attitudes of some friends who’ve come to visit. The former group of people – others on this crazy journey – fill me with sorrow, pity, and empathy. Members of the latter group – people who only come to see me seeking reassurance for their own anxieties – they just piss me off.
I know that I am, in fact, going to die someday. I’m aiming for 104 from natural causes like my great-aunt Alice, versus several decades younger from cancer like my grandmother. But I’ll simply have to wait and see which one it is. If I sound casual or even flippant about those odds, or those choices, let me be blunt: I am going to die someday and it’s going to be too soon. I get that now. I get it and I feel it, so the entirety of my mind is in agreement, but that’s not a bad thing. Far from it: this sense of holistic cohesion is the real-est part of my experience having cancer – which has felt designed at times to convince me that I’m no longer fully alive or even functional.
Therefore, I have to say – because this blog is supposed to be about helping other people – accepting that you’ll die is not the same as accepting that the cancer will kill you. Sometimes it will feel as if those two facts are only separated by a single molecule of something fragile. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you try to make that separation if you’re lying awake at 2 AM feeling terrified. But I also wouldn’t recommend avoiding the subject or idea of death – not if you really want to come out the other side of cancer with your head on straight.
Cancer will try to overwhelm every assumption and plan you’ve ever made. Don’t let it. Don’t let go of the life you want to have and what you want to accomplish with it, regardless of how old you are. Instead, let go of the assumption you’ve got endless time. In my opinion, making that choice is how you allow the treatment to kill what needs killing – and then get on afterwards with being something better, stronger, and fully alive.
medicinal sausage 