Cancer: Load your Rifle and Charge….?

“Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,” she told him. “Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.”

Jenny Diski, author, from her obituary in the NYT

I like to read obituaries.  I don’t think I am alone, nor am I morbid, or obsessed with death.  In fact, if anything I am obsessed with life, and want to peek inside the lives that others have lived.  I had never heard of Jenny Diski until I read her obituary today.  Now that I know what I have just learned about her life, I want to read this writer.  But more, finally I have found someone who says what I have always thought about how to describe a person’s death from cancer.  Too many obits of people who have died from cancer say it was a brave battle that has been lost, as if they were a soldier charging the enemy on the battlefield.  

Cancer is a disease, as difficult as many others, like AIDS, or Parkinsons, or diabetes. For some reason people don’t feel compelled to describe Alzheimer’s as something to courageously fight until the last.  I have never read an obituary that says a person died from heart disease after engaging in a courageous battle to fight it.  Cancer sucks, like all serious illnesses, and the treatments require the sufferer to become sicker than the illness itself.  Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy; too many needle pricks and visits with medical people, all is a nightmare to endure.  But that doesn’t mean other illnesses aren’t just as horrible, that the suffering associated with cancer is somehow more admirable. 

The worst concept is that it is somehow in the power of the patient to heal themselves if they fight hard enough.  See that word “fight”? As I am writing, I have to resist the urge to describe an illness in battle terms.  Part of the treatment of cancer is giving the patient a kind of brainwashing; “if you believe you can get better, and you are willing and tough enough to suffer the treatments, you will be cured.”  Excuse me?  That is a vicious manipulation to lay on a sick person.  So, if you die from cancer it is your own fault for not being brave enough?  Not fighting hard enough?  Not thinking positively enough?

Since I am a cancer survivor, I am qualified to be a bitch about this:  I cringe at every obituary I have ever read that says the person died of cancer after “fighting a courageous battle.”  So, let me be clear:  if I should die from cancer, just see what Jenny Dinski told her husband he should not say, and do not say it.