[cancer] Talking about life
Further on the question of the nature of my life and my process of death, Ron says:
I considered the posts that I read and saw nothing in them but anger and suffering. If Jay feels that there is more to his life now than suffering, he should post that more often than complaints about his GI tract, his inability to write or even function cognitively at a level that allows any degree of productivity.
(Actually, he said more than that, but the bit quoted above gets to his point.)
Simply put, I still have a pretty good life. I’m miserable a fair amount of the time, and scared almost all the time, but I still have the_child and Lisa Costello and a host of friends and family around me. I still watch videos, read a little (though not nearly as much or as swiftly as I used to), go out to lunch, and even get on planes or in cars and go places. My life is full of love, entertainment and distraction.
But those stories aren’t so interesting. Some of them aren’t even mine to tell.
As I’ve said on multiple occasions, my own story, the tale of my illness, death and dying, is the last story I do have to tell. My happinesses are specific to my own life. My sufferings are emblematic of so many other lives. That’s not ego talking. That’s the experience of blogging my cancer journey these past five and half years, and receiving countless amounts of email and comments and in-person feedback.
When I see a movie, or eat a good meal, or have a nice evening with a friend, that’s not really news. That’s just me living my life.
But as I collide with the limits of my disease and my death, and the financial, legal and medical processes around it, that’s news. It’s information. When I write about it, I put a voice to something many other people experience in silence, and I bear witness to something many other people have not yet encountered.
At any rate, that’s how I see things. And so this is what I talk about on my blog. Just as in fiction, where we rarely tell stories of happy, well-adjusted people whose lives are going well - where is the dramatic conflict inherent in that? - in my blogging, I rarely tell stories of my happy, well-adjusted days. I’m too busy experiencing them.
Not to everyone’s taste, to be sure, including presumably Ron’s. But it’s the story I have to tell.
I considered the posts that I read and saw nothing in them but anger and suffering. If Jay feels that there is more to his life now than suffering, he should post that more often than complaints about his GI tract, his inability to write or even function cognitively at a level that allows any degree of productivity.
(Actually, he said more than that, but the bit quoted above gets to his point.)
Simply put, I still have a pretty good life. I’m miserable a fair amount of the time, and scared almost all the time, but I still have the_child and Lisa Costello and a host of friends and family around me. I still watch videos, read a little (though not nearly as much or as swiftly as I used to), go out to lunch, and even get on planes or in cars and go places. My life is full of love, entertainment and distraction.
But those stories aren’t so interesting. Some of them aren’t even mine to tell.
As I’ve said on multiple occasions, my own story, the tale of my illness, death and dying, is the last story I do have to tell. My happinesses are specific to my own life. My sufferings are emblematic of so many other lives. That’s not ego talking. That’s the experience of blogging my cancer journey these past five and half years, and receiving countless amounts of email and comments and in-person feedback.
When I see a movie, or eat a good meal, or have a nice evening with a friend, that’s not really news. That’s just me living my life.
But as I collide with the limits of my disease and my death, and the financial, legal and medical processes around it, that’s news. It’s information. When I write about it, I put a voice to something many other people experience in silence, and I bear witness to something many other people have not yet encountered.
At any rate, that’s how I see things. And so this is what I talk about on my blog. Just as in fiction, where we rarely tell stories of happy, well-adjusted people whose lives are going well - where is the dramatic conflict inherent in that? - in my blogging, I rarely tell stories of my happy, well-adjusted days. I’m too busy experiencing them.
Not to everyone’s taste, to be sure, including presumably Ron’s. But it’s the story I have to tell.