Sorry to be so dark right in the midst of the holiday season, but, as any writer knows, when the inspiration hits, when the muse smashes you over the head with her invisible magic wand, you kind of have to move on it.
Ok, two things have prompted this post. First of all, I am in the middle of grading student analyses of John Donne's "Holy Sonnet X," otherwise referred to as the "Death, be not proud" poem. For the most part, they're doing just fine and I'm happily validated in my curriculum planning and execution of sonnet form and content. Thank you for asking.
The other catalyst here is the recent news that a dear family friend kind of "backed in" to the knowledge of Stage 4 kidney cancer and may have "two weeks to live." While some family members are taking the news as if they themselves were dying of cancer, the event has brought me into some ruminations about how I would react to the news that either a closer loved one (my husband, child, parent or sibling, for instance) or I had been diagnosed with potentially fatal cancer.
Let me pause for a second to acknowledge the fact that back in 1997 my then-23-year-old sister-in-law was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pre-menopausal breast cancer--from which a prognosis of a few months was announced. Her response to the gut punch was to not believe, for one single solitary second, that it would be the end of her. She punched back--at her own body mainly--with an aggressive treatment plan. The chemo regiment itself carried with it a 50% risk of death, and she had to give herself her own bone marrow to save herself. That might be the epitome of Emersonian self-reliance. No one is supposed to be dying at age 23, so the fact that she survived the ordeal was less of a shock to us than if she hadn't.
Since that time, I have lost peers to cancer, suicides, car accidents, and drug overdoses. I have lost close relatives to cancer and old age. I have experienced a community reeling from the untimely deaths of teenage students and children of friends. My parents and in-laws' catalogues of friends and relatives are every week being picked off by cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia. Death has become for me (as I am rounding out my mid-thirties) a very central part of life. And, I started to wonder, as the recent information of this family friend's "time left" has surfaced, how would I respond to the same news?
Let's just say that if anything ever happens to my children while I am alive, it will be the end of me. I may go on physically, but with a broken heart that will disable any capacity for deep joy or ambition. I know myself well enough to know that.
But were I to learn that my days were numbered (which, if we're being honest with ourselves, we understand to always be the case!), I truly think I would be okay. I have accomplished enough to not feel like a failure, am in touch with enough people to know I am loved. I would be sad for my children and others who cared about my departure, but I do not think I would resist the departure itself. My mom says this is the benefit of a young and invincible attitude--that when the time comes to face my own mortality, it will bother me. It will feel like it was not enough time--even if I'm 100 years old. But maybe she says that because, at age 75, she still refuses to fly on an airplane because she cannot instruct the pilot from the cockpit backseat. Clearly, she's not ready to go yet. And the people I see who resist death the most--like, they don't even want to talk about it--are the people who feel that they actually possess some modicum of control over the events in this world.
Maybe it is possible to be a happy, fulfilled person who does not fear death because she knows it to be something she cannot control. And, out of control is more her comfort zone.
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