Sharing your Fate

Cancer is a horrible disease. It like most killers is misunderstood and hated because we fear what we don't know or understand. One thing we understand and accept about cancer is it's death sentence. Most of us never experience the Doctor telling us we have about so much time to live and that the last months, weeks, hours and minutes of our lives may be painful and humiliating. To those of us that do...? I have no answer to how that might feel. It's one of those things that I think you have to go through. I can't imagine a lot of things and being told I'm going to die isn't one of them.

I can imagine myself being brave and going on with life as if it didn't matter because, (what's the cliche?) we all know we're going to die, some of us just know when. It would help me to focus on what's important and although my life might be ending it would have more depth and quality because I would do the things that mattered and would take nothing for granted. But this is the product of an overactive imagination that has been groomed by way to many disease of the week television movies and anecdotal conversation.

I have observed this disease killing friends of mine. I must say that all of them died with as much dignity as they could muster and we could afford them. In total, it was not pretty and I would not wish it on anyone.
There was one commonality. I can't remember one of them that wasn't concerned about making people uncomfortable with their fate. It was as if talking about dieing was embarrassing and they simply didn't want to make people unhappy.

Yes, I'm sure that dwelling on their impending death did no good, but I dare say that even alluding to it was out of bounds. Again, I don't know what I would do or how I would feel, but I do know that I'd have to talk to someone. I would hope that I would have the courage to live as well as I could before I had to die and that the goodbye's would be short, sweet and heartfelt.