*warning: strong language
I’m getting tired of cancer. Right now I wish I could cast a spell and personify it into a being I could kick the shit out, and punch in the face. I could pulverize it with angry strokes from every limb while letting my tongue click away every available cuss word.
Too many people, too young, I know have been diagnosed. This last one hit me the hardest. I’ve known D. (for anonymity) my whole life. She’s funny, intelligent, magnanimous, caring, etc. All those kick ass qualities you want in a human being. She’s only 45 with two young daughters. She’s been given a hard diagnosis. A form of cancer nearly impossible to beat. WTF?
Two years ago I lost a friend and a colleague to cancer. He was 44. Another colleague’s husband is running out of options for his aggressive Leukemia. He’s in his early 50s. A Twitter friend’s wife, whose comic book I support, is fighting breast cancer. All too damn young.
Yeah, I want to beat the shit out of cancer. I’m too spiritual to get viscerally angry at God. Instead I think about the conspiracy theory that there are cures for multiple cancers, but the big pharmaceutical companies are keeping it hush, hush to make more profit. If that’s true, those people are traitors against humanity and should be shot.
That’s anger.
Then I started bargaining. If I pray hard enough, if I fast maybe God will cure them. But, miracles are His province, not mine. I can pray, but I can’t make them better. It’s out of my control.
There’s depression, no doubt. It creeps upon me and pulls down the corners of my mouth along with the invisible strings attached to my forehead.
But, lastly, there’s acceptance. A big lesson I’ve learned in life is that things that are out of my control aren’t worth destroying my peace of mind about. God wants Peace, Love, and Joy for all his children. I’m supposed to praise Him in the storm.
Everything that lives, dies. My friend tells me ten out of ten people die. It’s unavoidable. Death & Taxes. We can’t choose the circumstances of our death. We can’t be Babe Ruth, calling out the direction of our home run, a long life run.
Everything that lives, dies. But, it’s in that space between lives and dies, is how we can choose to live.
My friend has precious time left. All I can do, all that’s within my control, is to bring her as much Love, Peace, and Joy as I can with my own humble light, by the Grace of God.
Cancer sucks. I can’t control how it progresses or regresses with treatment. The flip side is I can control how I react to it. That’s the flip side. Cancer is terrible, but it affords us the chance to treat every moment as a miracle: to consciously choose to live, in and around that comma, before the end.
Lucretia T. Knight 