one person has told me that I seem to have lost my traditional fierceness. Even Josh accuses me now of being a defeatist, that by conceding my fate, I am succumbing to the disease, that I have stopped fighting.
Josh and others have misinterpreted my actions. It is true—I have spent the last few months confronting my mortality, accepting the likelihood of my death from my cancer, trying to find peace with my destiny. But what Josh and others don’t understand is that with acceptance and peace, I have learned to live more fully and completely in the here and now, that I now live with a fierceness, passion, and love that I’ve never known. In what is the greatest irony of all, I have come to realize that in accepting death, I am embracing life in all of its splendor, for the first time. Indeed, the part of me that believes in things happening for a reason believes that I am, through this cancer journey, meant to understand within the depths of my soul this paradox of death and life.
With that in mind, Josh and I planned a trip. On July 2, we will leave for Quito, the capital of Ecuador, where we will stay for less than two days, visiting the old colonial town (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), and on July 4, we will fly to an island in the Galápagos archipelago, where we will board a thirty-two-person yacht that will serve as our home for the next eight days. The yacht will motor from island to island by night, and by day we will hike, snorkel, and kayak in places that few have ever been, where prehistoric-looking animals roam free, having been largely undisturbed for centuries. Josh and I are looking at it as the trip of our lifetime together.
I don’t visit cancer support group sites very much anymore. I don’t research alternative treatments anymore. Alternative treatments require a fair amount of energy to research and to generally pursue, and that for me detracts from my ultimate objective of living in the moment. I don’t research conventional treatments much either these days. I’m honestly too busy living, too busy spending time with my family, too busy cooking, too busy pursuing a huge project that involves the expansion of our home. The time will come when I will have to focus once again on cancer, on clinical trials, on choosing new therapies, but the time is not now. Now, even as death lurks all around me, I live fully and completely while I am relatively healthy and pain-free; now I suck the marrow out of this glorious life I have been given.
That all being said, nothing is ever so simple, is it?
When I went to see Dr. A.C. to discuss the possibility of changing treatment (i.e., switching to something more aggressive that might actually shrink my tumors—as opposed to just maintaining the status quo—at the cost of my quality of life), without Josh present, I expressed to him my wishes. “I want to be clear that I am not one of those people who wants to cling to life by a fingernail, that I will always choose quality over quantity, that facing death with dignity and grace means more to me than adding days to my life on this planet,” I declared. But then I paused. I voiced next what I had not verbalized before. “But in telling you this, I feel like I am betraying my husband and little girls, that for them I should choose to live as long as possible at any cost to myself, that time with them is priceless.”
What will my children think of me one day? How will they judge me? Will they call me a defeatist, too? Will they resent me for not fighting harder, for not expending more energy on figuring out ways to extend my life? Would they admire me more as a woman who lived well in spite of her disease or would they respect me more if I were like that old man being wheeled into an oncologist’s office? Would I be setting a better example for them if I raged or if I went quietly into that good night? I don’t know the answers to these questions. And I don’t know whether those answers should really influence my decisions about my own life. All I know is that I love my daughters.
Hours after I’d expressed my sentiments to Dr. A.C., my sister came over