The Hermeneutics of Cancer
From biopsies to surgery dates, it’s been a long six months.
From back in November, when Dr. Gupta discovered the specks in my back and used the words “metastasized” and “incurable”, until a couple of weeks ago when Dr. L said I wasn’t dying of cancer, I’ve thought a great deal about death and dying. In our culture, it’s not something we talk about; no one ever teaches you how to die. In fact, we avoid the topic at all costs. I have friends who run the religious gamut from end to end, and friends who believe in nothing at all. They have one thing in common - nobody really has a clue what happens after your body dies. You get some babble in church about living a good life and getting to be with God for eternity, but no one’s ever some back to tell us what it’s like. Since I had very little energy for anything but sitting or lying around and thinking, I tried to figure out how one dies well. How to face pain and terror and the unknown beyond with as little cowardice and as little pain to my loved ones as possible.
As I sat there, I began practicing unhooking myself from everything I know and love. Every hope, every dream, every plan for the future. It all vanished into a cold, dark chasm called cancer. To leave Bill, the pets, my friends, my little house behind forever, and head into an uncertain destiny. To never see the kids in my life finish growing up. To never tell all the stories I have inside me. Because the world is beautiful and my life is sweet, and I have trouble imagining any other place as wonderful as the one I’m in. Since I couldn’t seem to get anyone to say how long I was going to have or what I could expect, I tried to learn how to have no time at all and to expect nothing but death. I cried for hours, searching for courage and some solid place to put my feet down. I prayed for comfort and for relief from the fear.
I decided that the best way to die well was to live well. That for the time I had left, as much or as little as I was given, I would do my best to fulfill my obligations, love my friends, and wrest, squeeze, and wring as much living out of it as I could. To face the dark and whatever comes after it like I try to face everything else - “I can do this.” To not lie down and go quietly, but to fight for every minute of rational consciousness I could muster. Henry Miller said, “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” I’ve never exactly been shy about reaching out for life’s experiences (and I have the scars to prove it), but I determined to suck every last drop of living out the time I had left.
I hope I’m not sounding like a Hallmark Hall of Fame Movie here. I don’t mean to be milking that dreadful cliché of the character faced with death who suddenly realizes the intrinsic value of life. Ick. I was furious at the situation, furious at Dr. G for having told me everything was okay, then turning around three weeks later and telling me that it wasn’t. I have never been so angry in my life as I am at cancer. So, as is typical with my perpetually adolescent, anarchist self, I rebelled. “Kill me, will you? Ha! I’ll show you. Watch me live.”
Then Dr. L reassured me that I had a while yet. That I wasn’t on the edge of the chasm of eternal whatever. I came home after the appointment with her, and sat in the recliner in my living room, and let the future wash back into me. Everything that I’d tucked away in my soul in a box marked “Never, no time”. I felt I’d been imprisoned in a charnel house and was inhaling my first sweet, clean, fresh breath in months.
I’m still determined to die well. Whether I have one year, or ten, or twenty, I have things to do. Some of my friends have described me as a force of nature. You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, folks. I have things to do. I don’t like the idea of being a person “living with cancer”, or that it’s “manageable” or “controllable”. I’m still angry, still red blind with fury over the whole thing. But I have long experience with channeling my anger into action, and I’m a past master at the “nyah, nyah”. Cancer, stay on red alert. Death, you too. Hurricane Sara is making landfall on Life, and I don’t have time to give quarter.