Embracing Death

Yes, it has been a bit, and I apologize to the few people who read this space. Life has kept me busy, and I'm glad of it.

My wife continues to heal from her surgery. She's been in rehab for over a month now, and her progress is great. We both have hopes that by this time next year she will be completely healed and feeling better than she has in a long time.

She also had a sleep study and will be getting a CPAP of her own within the next week or two. More cause for celebration as that will help both her rehab and her overall, general health.

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I realize that the above is an odd way to begin an entry entitled embracing death, but I wanted to get that information out. And in a larger sense, it is part of the topic. In order to embrace death, we have to embrace life. And in order to embrace life fully, I believe we have to embrace death first.

I've been reading a series of articles in this week's Columbus Dispatch, www.dispatch.com, on the trials and tribulations of someone being treated for cancer. And the series has touched me deeply. As you know, in the last few years I've lost a brother, a sister, and my father to cancer. I continue to undergo regular colon cancer screenings since I continue to produce pre-cancerous polyps. So I have a vested interest in the subject.

I want to say here and now that I honor the choices of my siblings and my father to take treatment for their cancers and to fight to live as long as possible and even to entertain the hope, right up to near the very end, that they could defeat their cancers. In my opinion, my father wanted to die. He took the cancer treatments that he had as a means of being more comfortable in his last year and dying with less pain than he would have experienced otherwise. My sister fought to the very end, and again in my opinion, I completely understand why she did. She had two young daughters that she wanted to see grown up to successful, happy young women, and she was in love with life and in her prime herself. My brother I did not know very well in his later years. He had severed his connections with the family and chose not to even let us know that he was sick or dying. His choice; it was, after all, his life and his death.

For myself, though, I doubt that I will take treatment to prolong my life if I'm diagnosed with cancer. It is a lot to put oneself through with only a hope of living longer, a hope that is too often dashed. And it is a lot to ask of one's loved ones to put them through the rigors of being a caregiver and caretaker.

Increasingly, I'm thinking of cancer as one of those signs we get that our part in the great cycle of life is coming to an end. All life ends. We come into existence, live a time, and die. All living things follow this cycle.

Western culture today seems to have the feeling that if we don't live to a dotage filled old age, we haven't lived out our lives completely. My experience of most living things is that they die much sooner than their full lifespans, as we understand them. Disease and destruction claim more living things than old age does.

No, I don't know how I will feel when eventually I am diagnosed with cancer (assuming I don't get hit by a truck first), but I want to have these thoughts somewhere where I can read them to remind myself that all things come to an end. I want a dignified even joyous end, Spirit willing. I have lived a fruitful life. It has been the best life I have been capable of living, and when my time comes I want to embrace that final part of my life and not run or hide from it.

I want it to be said of me, "Gladly did he live and gladly die, and laid himself down with a will."