Living With...

I chose the title “Living With…” for this blog because I think it’s important to affirm the idea of living with cancer, not dying from cancer. From the moment we’re born, we are dying. That’s a fundamental aspect of life itself. And people tend to die from something. Few keep going until their bodies simply wear out and stop. So why focus on death?

If I were omniscient, I might sit in my favorite coffee shop and notice the people around me. The college boy hunched over his computer will succumb in a few hours from a fatal drug overdose. The woman giggling over scones with her teenage daughter will be the victim of a head-on car crash in a couple of weeks. The older man sipping a latte and reading a novel is a month away from the sudden heart attack that will claim his life.

But none of us is omniscient. That’s the point. And until science can pinpoint future death with some certainty, which can’t usually be done until days or hours before the event in the case of any disease, then there’s no point focusing on dying. A person living with cancer may have an increased probability that the cancer will prove fatal at some point, but I or anyone else in that situation could just as easily be hit by a bus long before the disease proved fatal. Life is uncertain.

Each of us, I remind myself, should be focused on living each day to whatever constitutes its fullest. Living with a cancer diagnosis quickens that realization. Focusing on death, whether one is ill or not, is unproductive and life-diminishing. Recently I ran across a 1993 novel by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He came to prominence in the early 1960s as the voice of a new generation of poets. He was among my late wife’s favorite poets. I picked up the book as much for its title as anything else. It’s called Don’t Die Before You’re Dead. That’s sound advice.

I look around and see many people whose life conditions are more dire than my own. I have cancer. So I’m dealing with it and the issues that come with treatment and side effects and all that. I’m living with it.

Since childhood I’ve claimed an old Sanskrit proverb as guidance. It goes this way: Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

I’m endeavoring to make every day well-lived.