The "C" Word

Yesterday, as I rolled into my mother's house with the kids and their overnight bag, and prepared to make a quick escape, I could tell that my mother needed to talk.  It's Christmas time.  I have a gazillion things to do, but I realized that I needed to stop and sit down with my mother.  Instead of dashing out the door, I sat at her dining room table and listened to what had happened to her in the past week.  She has two close friends who are battling cancer.  One friend has repeatedly fought back her cancer only to have it reappear.  Her doctors have finally told this woman that her fight is almost done; she has only several more months to live.  My mother's other friend is currently undergoing radiation therapy for his cancer.  He also has a young, athletic daughter, who has never smoked a cigarette in her life but was just diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.

I personally learned almost ten years ago that there is nothing fair about cancer.  You can devote yourself to healthy living, exercise like a nut, place only organic foods in your temple-like body, and you can still end up with cancer.  Cancer doesn't discriminate.  It visits the old, the young, the healthy, and it can rear up as an additional challenge for people who already have enough problems without it.  Ten years ago, I lost a beloved friend to cancer.

I first met my friend, Jerilyn, in a British literature class.  She was irresistibly confident.  She strode into class every morning with tall, black combat boots, a green army jacket, and pink streaked hair.  Despite her efforts to appear tough and edgy, there was a gentleness and kindness that oozed from her and made her very approachable.  She was an amazing writer and had an irrepressible curiosity that led her to devour books by astrophysicists.  Jerilyn and I were both English majors and decided to participate in a study abroad program that was offered through our university.  We spent a year together in Canterbury, England.  While we initially were enchanted by its medieval buildings and labyrinthine streets, we quickly learned that Canterbury could produce the same type of ennui that we experienced at home.  We resorted to playing poker games with skittles as our chips, taking long walks through sheep pastures in the English countryside, and occasionally escaping to London to visit the zoo and British museum.  We spent countless nights listening to R.E.M. and pondering the meaning of our existence.  We debated philosophy and laughed about our professors.  And then, it all came to a screeching halt, when she was just 28 years old.

For about a year, Jerilyn repeatedly visited doctors and told them that something was wrong.  She had this horrible indigestion that was resistant to any type of over the counter medication.  Because she was so young and healthy, her doctors never suspected that she could be suffering from stomach cancer.  Instead, they sent her away and told her not to worry.  It wasn't until her yearly gynecological exam that a doctor finally realized that she had cancer.  By that point, her cancer had spread to her ovaries and was caked throughout her stomach.  There was no tumor to extract.  Her only choice was chemotherapy that hopefully could be followed with radiation treatment.  Less than six months after she was diagnosed with cancer, Jerilyn died.

I was completely devastated to lose my friend, but as I went through the grieving process, I realized that by dying, Jerilyn gave all of her friends an amazing gift.  She made me face my own mortality and recognize that time is a finite resource that should not be squandered.  Death is universal and unpredictable.  But people react to this inevitable reality in very different ways.  Some people choose to ignore their own mortality.  They skate through life and avoid discussing unpleasant things like cancer.  Other people become almost obsessed with their own mortality and are so fearful of their impending death that they limit the activities they engage in while they are alive.  I have watched people follow an endless number of self-imposed rules that limit their enjoyment of life in a futile attempt to prevent their own deaths.  But Jerilyn taught me that there is another way to live.  Instead of denying my own mortality or becoming so fearful of death that I can't even function, I choose to greet life head on and attempt to wring as much happiness and fun as possible from each day that I am given.  I constantly try to honor Jerilyn by living life to its absolute fullest and embracing the innumerable pleasures that I encounter.