There’s a language which appears to have grown up around
cancer and cancer patients and cancer therapies. I think I’m considered a
“sufferer,” although I’m supposed to be “battling cancer” also. Biff! Bam! Ow!
Those who have managed to overcome their cancers are
“survivors,” and I approve of this term. Cancer, as one of my doctors told me
the other week, usually comes to people as a terrifying and sudden bolt from
the blue. “One of my patients,” she said, “said it was like mowing your lawn on
a sunny day, and then suddenly a big truck comes screaming into your yard and
crashes into you.” Something like that you can only survive; there’s no other
word for it.
Here’s the expression I hate, though: “he/she lost the
battle to cancer.”
Sorry, kids. My mother and father did not “lose their
battles,” nor did my sisters, nor my niece, nor my aunts and uncles. They
sickened and died, as does everyone sooner or later. Most of them were
diagnosed very late in the course of their illnesses, so they didn’t have much
chance to undergo successful treatment.
Much is made of “positive attitude,” and how it improves your odds. Certainly, psychologically, I see the point. It’s impossible, as one
of my survivor friends told me not long ago, to think about cancer all the
time; it makes you crazy and gloomy. You need to cheer yourself, and reassure
yourself that not everything ends in tragedy. As yet another doctor said a few
weeks ago: “If you look at prognosis statistics – and you probably already have
– don’t let them worry you too much. You’ll either be one of the people who
live, or one of the others. There’s no way of telling.”
My mother was a terrible patient, but she lived seven years after her diagnosis at age seventy-two. Her cancer
never quite finished with her; she underwent repeated bouts of chemotherapy
over the years, and each was a little harder for her to deal with; finally, in
her seventy-ninth year, it was just too much for her. She began to decline
seriously in September, and by November she was gone. Along the way, she
exhibited every behavior you can imagine: self-pity, fear, anger, selfishness,
mean-spiritness. Also kindness. Also a strange late-autumn sweetness.
My sister Susan, diagnosed in her forty-sixth year, was an
angel. She suffered miserably with her cancer, but I never saw or heard her
angry or upset. She spent time picking out her own coffin and the clothes and
jewelry she’d be wearing at her own funeral. She was a wonderful person, and I
kick myself that I didn’t see more of her and call her more often during her
last few years.
My sister Darlene: I don’t know. We weren’t close. But I
think she made great use of her last years: she underwent a clinical trial, and
she did community work right up until the very end. She was always tough, and a
good citizen, and I salute her.
My poor niece, who died only a few years ago in her forties,
was surrounded by her family, and comforted by her faith.
None of them were “losers.” They sickened and died, but they
were by no means “losers.”
So don’t speak to me of the “battle against cancer.”
Cancer’s not an ideology or a bad guy or a rebel army. It’s a disease, that’s
all.
We’re all terminal, after all. None of us is coming out of this alive.
All that really matters is how we use the time we’ve been
given, cancer or no cancer.
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