Beginnings and endings. This week has had a bit of both. Sharing the excitement with my daughter at her college orientation. Being around hundreds of kids beginning a new chapter in their lives. A future full of hope and endless possibilities. It was hard not to feel a bit wistful about paths taken in ones own life, and feeling a bit jealous of the opportunity before her and her fellow students.
Upon returning home, the other end of the spectrum slapped me in the face. The husband of one of my wifes' closest friends, who has been battling cancer over the last eighteen months, found out that it is essentially over. The throat cancer which has caused him to spend more time in the hospital than at home over these past several months, and is not going to respond to further treatment. he can choose more chemotherapy, and prolong the pain and suffering, or go into hospice care for the time that remains. Not much of a choice. He has decided to pass on further treatment, and now at most, a couple months remain.
What does one say? How do you give encouragement in a time like this? I am more aware than ever now, that we were fortunate, that our daughters course of treatment went in a different direction. Just four short years ago, when we heard the words "brain tumor", we feared we would be faced with this type of impossible situation.
So as Emily faced the future, a cancer survivor with hope and endless possibilities, a good man faced an unfair early end to his possibilities. Children and a wife left behind struggling to make sense of it all. If there is a plan in this world, times like these make it difficult to comprehend.
In addition, there is the nagging reminder that is never too far from a cancer survivors mind. What if it comes back? I know Emily is thinking about it, as are her mother and I. All we can do is push that as far out of our mind as it will go. Concentrate on the future. Encourage her to look forward to the learning, both educationally and personally that is to come.
We will do what we can to support our friends. I will also hope that one of those bright, fresh young faces at orientation , is on a path to help us all. Perhaps, a path to be the Jonas Salk of cancer. Among those facing a new beginning, there may be one who can stop the premature endings that too many must now face.
I'm sorry to hear about your wife's friend's husband. I don't know what you say to those going through such a thing. I think you can only be with them to the best of your ability. Spouting platitudes would be insensitive.
ReplyDeleteI think, if it's someone you know well, you tell them what they have meant to you, what they have brought to your life. A childhood friend's mother is dying of cancer, and I wrote her a letter to tell her what a special part of my childhood she had been, and to thank her for her daughter, who I have known since I was a year old.
If you don't know them well, I think you can do practical things: cook, mow the lawn, get the car tuned up...all the things that they won't have the energy or the will to do. Free them up to be with their loved one as much as possible.
But as to the fairness or unfairness of this pending death, or the comfort of believing in a divine plan of some sort, or the need to make sense of illness, of death...I think we bark up the wrong tree. I think the true miracle is that we are alive at all -- that we slithered out of the primordial ooze and evolved, that the planet even exists... I know this probably doesn't help those going through what you and your family went through, or what your friends are going through. But it gives me comfort, in a way that I think few understand, to see it all as random. Wonderfully random. Isn't that better than asking 'Why did this/is this happening to me/her/him/us?' Isn't it more comforting to believe that life is random, rather than to believe you have been 'targeted' by some heartless diety? "It's all for a reason," they'll tell you. No, it isn't. We only say that because we are afraid of the abyss of meaninglessness. But it doesn't change a thing.
If cancer is 'unfair', then so is being born with a heart condition like my brother was. He was 25 when he died. Is that fair? Would it have been fairer if he had died in a car accident instead? Not too many generations back, people our age would have been considered...well, dead. Life expectancy is growing steadily longer. There are so many ways to die. Is death always a tragedy? To what age does a person have to live in order for death to be fair?
As for watching Emily among the other kids: What a GIFT! What a triumph! I'm sure her life will continue to be full of new beginnings. Hopefully, her fear, and yours, will abate with time.
Some people say, 'Live each day as though it were your last'. To me, that's as bad as saying it's all for a reason. Just live each day, and when moments like the ones you experienced with Emily this week come along, treasure them.