Whether or not you’re one of two people with a cancer diagnosis or one of the 40% of that 50% whose deadly prognosis of a metastatic cancer came down like Maxwells Silver Hammer, please ask yourself one simple question. It’s fair for me to ask you to ponder this for five seconds or five decades, if youre an insightful type.
It’s also a circumstantial question with many dependencies such as family, whether or not you’re a parent, religiosity, cultural upbringing, current socioeconomic and financial positions, physical and mental health, risk aversion, spontaneous adventurer or ardent planner, shopoholic lover of material belongings, artist, creative type, traveler or homebody, number of dependents, caregiver, planning capability…well you get my point.Forget all that and give yourself a green field and ask yourself this: if you found out you had a terminal illness today and you had no real idea of when you might die but you’re going to die sooner than later given there’s currently no cure for your disease what would you change about your life as it exists today?
Would you change anything at all? Would you leave your spouse your family your children? Would you travel the world? Would you quit your job? Could you quit your job? Do you have enough money to just take off and leave to follow that lifelong dream? Do you have what’s known as a bucket list, or as I like to call it a kick the bucket list, that you’d like to check off? What would you do? For the most part I bet you won’t or cab’t change very much. “I like to change a lot,” you might think. But alas as in most situations not much can or will change. That’s because your life as it exists now is your life as it existed before you were given your prognosis of death.
A Bifurcated Mind
What metastatic cancer has taught me is that there are two worlds that exist: the one that you had before your diagnosis and the one that you had after your prognosis. Chances are you’ll have quite some time to think about this question, which may keep you up any number of nights a week. You might suffer from insomnia, wondering if you’re doing the right thing or if you’re doing the right thing by the people that you love. Perhaps you don’t think anyone loves you much at all. The fact is they probably do but maybe you have low self-esteem and you just don’t feel it. Perhaps you hate your job and you want to quit. This might be a good time to quit actually. Leaving my career, which I didn’t necessarily want to, turned out to be a rather good thing for me.
I found out that I had an artistic side and I followed it. I also followed my hunch that there was a lot of waste going on in the world and that for my own special purposes I would sell things that were not made from new materials because they’d be all antique or vintage. I feel pretty good about that. But not much else in my life changed.
Except everything.
So ask yourself this question what if anything if you were given a diagnosis of metastatic cancer and a prognosis that you would die in the next two months to two years to 20 years: what would you do differently with your life? I leave you with this question on the last day of the year. Perhaps you can write your New Year’s resolutions for 2020 with it. 2020 vision is considered a great form of hindsight isn’t it?
And yet have you thought about what you might do for the next two years or 20 years if you have them? I can tell you this much, I certainly don’t do any New Year’s resolutions anymore. In fact last year I wasn’t supposed to live past February but here I am so…
Ask yourself this question what would you change about your life today even if you weren’t given a prognosis of death in the shorter term than you thought you had. If you can change some things maybe you should ask yourself what those things should be? Then if you were given a prognosis such as I have, you wouldn’t have to ask yourself this question night after night day after day questioning the people around you looking at them as though maybe they were your enemy or maybe they were not. I’m not sure sometimes but I will say this I do have some things in my life that I wouldn’t give up for anything.
I might change small things, huge things, things that might make a difference for other people or things that might just make a difference for me. I guarantee it’s a combination of a whole bunch of things but you’ll have to think long and hard about it. Give the question justice because it’s your life.
So, you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness and you must ask yourself the following question: what would you do differently in your life or change about your life so if any given week might be your last you’d be happy with it or at the very least okay with that week?
“That’s not a fair question.”
My husband reacted with a sense of injustice, but I don’t agree in its fairness. Just as there’s no stupid questions…No, every day isn’t a great day…that much is true.
However, built upon the foundation of modern western culture insure to that, due to no fault of our own, all of us were born into a time of rampant materialism. Noting we buy delivers on its promise of satisfaction. There’s the cliché small print that spells out a guarantee of no satisfaction. What it does guarantee: you’ll never see any money back should anything go awry. A broken warranty means by simply using a product said guarantee is null and void. A manufacturer’s guarantee is akin to cancer in some ways.
By living in our bodies with the environment at a time of great threat to its own mere existence, we are swimming in chemicals and stress and we’ve not evolved to handle it nor should we.The point I’m trying to get across is that by merely living in a physical body we are very highly susceptible to illness and specifically cancer. The warranty on our physical body while living in the post industrial, sedentary, sugar infused world with melting ice caps and chemicals in our air, water, and food there’s no guarantee of any kind. Now, keeping that in mind, ask yourself what would you do differently if anything given your own personal special circumstances even if you’re not hiding “a cancer” if you were to be diagnosed with a terminal illness?
By the way, I deplore that phrase – the article in front of cancer removes it from our body’s boundaries giving it a life of its own of sorts.
Regardless of all this philosophical pondering just be happy. The year 2020 is my year of hindsight, to help me find the foresight, to live in this moment in a way that’s just right for me.
Stay Tuned…
You’ll find my answer to this question in: A Fair Question Part II.
My heart and my soul go into this blog and these words and to the people who read it I thank you and I hope you continue to do so. I hope you leave a few more comments in the next year. I love your feedback. I really like hearing from you so I can feel as though I am not writing a little vanity blog. It’s healthy to receive both criticism and accolades. Your interactions let me know writing on the cancer bus isn’t for nought. By the way I consider you my friends and my extended family so here’s a big hug.I mean, for fuck’s sake, if you read this you know some of the most personally intimate things about me. So I trust you’ll ask yourselves this question and put some time into answerinng it. I guarantee if you’re not metastaticly inclined, you’ll have a much better idea of what it’s like to have a death sentence. Most of us can’t do much but focus on remaining alive, keeping a few people around us who care, keeping our lights on and some gas in the car.
If we are lucky.
All my love,
Ilene