When you have terminal cancer, here’s the deal. You will not just die; you will suffer and suffer increasingly along the way. You can decline that deal; see my discussion of Medical Assistance in Dying. However, if you want to stay alive as you sojourn toward your death, you must learn how to suffer.
Bear with me while I illustrate this point. Lung cancer is the most common fatal primary tumour. What does lung cancer do to you? It can deform or destroy so much lung tissue that you do not have enough healthy tissue to absorb the oxygen you need. Chronic oxygen deficiency leads to weakness, which can harm your vision, make it difficult to swallow or speak, impair your thinking and judgment, derange your personality, and reduce your memory. You may need to pull an oxygen tank wherever you go. Lung cancer can cause severe pain. A close friend told me that her first symptom of lung cancer was pain similar to a broken rib. It got worse from there (her cancer was terminal, although she died by suicide).
Modern people do not learn how to die, and few of us learn how to suffer–Tour de France riders and Navy SEALs excepted–and even they do not train themselves to deal with suffering caused by severe illness. We have scientific medicine, and we hope, with some justification, that it can reduce suffering. To be clear, I do not want to experience unnecessary suffering, and I do not want you to either. But I will have to suffer, and if you get cancer, you will too.
Where can we turn? Ancient people lacked scientific medicine and lived in what, by our standards, was a terrifyingly dangerous world. We segregate the dying and suffering from the daily world of the healthy, while the ancients kept them at home. We pretend that medicine can solve everything. The ancients could not, so they thought deeply about suffering.
In a series of posts this month, I will discuss the teachings on suffering from three traditions: the Stoics, the Buddhists, and the Christians. I discuss these because (I imagine that) I know something about these traditions. Of course, there are many other traditions and views that deserve consideration; but that will need to be done by someone more learned than me.
In the next post, I’ll start with the Stoics.
Was reminded of a reflection - https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-MkSrxtr/0/23ea7a47/X4/i-MkSrxtr-X4.jpg
I will continue to restate that you are an amazing human being. I respect and admire the way you are dealing with your own journey by sharing it with others and in a way that can provide strength and hope to others. It is amazing to me the way in which the universe (God, Karma, Seredipity, whatever it is that one chooses to represent their own spiritual connection to something bigger) works. I have only met you and your wife once at your home in a quaint gathering. I have been enduring my own personal variety of suffering for the past 18months and your posts together with intermittent communications between your wife and I have provided me an enormous amount of encouragement and strength along my own journey. I think it’s important to honor and recognize the ways in which we make an impact on the lives of others through which we are completely unaware. So thank you, my friend.