Cancer, Death, And Living

I like Patricia Knealley's take on the whole Katie Couric/Elizabeth Edwards dust-up. Her discussion of her friend who's fighting breast cancer and of how dumb it would be for the Edwardses to just go home and wait for Ms. Edwards to die reminded me of one of my favorite Saint Stories from my days in catholic school.

Some of the Sisters used to read us stories about the saints on their feast days and although there was a lot, even then, that I didn't love about catholocism, I loved the daily stories of the saints. (Yes, many of them were completely made up, but that didn't make them any less savory.) Anyway, one of my favorites was a story about St. Anthony who was once sitting around with his brother monks having a conversation and someone posed the question: "What would you do if you knew that you had only an hour left to live?" The questioner expected Saint Anthony to say that he'd go off and pray, go to confession, have communion, something like that. What Saint Anthony answered was that if he only had an hour left to live, he'd be sitting with his brother monks debating what to do if he only had an hour left to live. Since that's what he WAS doing, it must be what god wanted him to do and one should always want to do what god wanted one to do. We're ALL going to die sometime; there's no point sitting home and waiting for it.

Kenalley's discussion about her own ideas for dealing with a cancer diagnosis also reminded me of a point that the counselor that my oncologist required me to see made to me. You don't have to decide once and for all how you're going to deal with your cancer. You can deal with it in the way that makes sense right now and, later, when things change, you can change your mind about how you're going to deal with it. It's ok to say that for right now, you're going to fight like hell and to realize that a time may (or, may not) come when you decide to go gently and gracefully and with as much palliative care as possible into that goodnight.

Which, reminds me of the article I read shortly thereafter about a young man dying of AIDS whose friends kept urging him to fight, fight, fight and who finally told them, "Don't ask me to make an enemy of my own death."

Which reminds me of one of my very favorite Mary Oliver poems of all time.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.