One message I received in response to my recent RT series on Personal
Mission Statements was from a professor in his early fifties who had
recently undergone surgery for what he called "invasive cancer" and was
getting ready for some heavy chemo. He had picked up on my comments of
having prospective prostate cancer. We started exchanging messages. He
did most of the talking and I did most of the listening.
Slowly I discovered that I needed his ear and shoulder as much as he
needed mine. I found myself talking with him about something I had
started talking with myself in December and even more now that I never
really had wanted to talk about before. And, I'd like to share these
thoughts with you. After all, though we may disagree on a lot of
educational stuff, and disagree vigorous at times, I count many of you as
my e-friends and e-colleagues. And, what are friends for if not to share
deep feelings, especially if those friends and colleagues are
psychologists.
As many of you know, I have faced the very real prospects of two kinds of
death in the past two months. For the moment, death in the distance and
abstract have become very now and very real. And, I began to think, as I
and this professor wrote back and forth with each other these past few
days, whether I would want to die suddenly and unexpectedly, snuffed out
like a candle light, in a car accident or die as my father and
father-in-law did after a protracted battle with cancer. My father died
of bone cancer. When he died he had wasted away to the point he literally
looked like an Egyptian mummy. He had refused to go to a hospital and my
mother laid next to him in the same bed every night. There were times I
didn't understand that. Maybe now I am beginning to. They must have
talked and held, talked and held.
You know, we all toy with the idea of death and voice such cliches that
we're dying from the day we're born. And when I did think of my
mortality, I always said that I wanted to go fast and painless from a
sudden heart attack without notice in my sleep. Well, December was the
car first accident I've been in. And, the last two weeks was the first
time I had to face the possibility of a very serious illness.
To my amazement now, after feeling that I've twice faced the Grim Reaper,
I'm beginning to change my mind about how I want to die. Maybe my parents
were right about the way to die and I had been wrong. I am actually
surprising myself by finding that I just might prefer to die of cancer
rather than in a sudden accident. In an accident, there's no closure, no
preparation for anyone, no opportunity to come to terms with aloneness and
lonliness, no chance to talk about going on and living, no hugs and
kisses, no saying of thank you, no opportunity to express appreciation, no
saying of I love you, no saying of will miss you, no saying of goodbyes,
no tidying up of affairs. Though I haven't talked with Susan about this,
the "now you're here and now you're not" car accident for me just might be
far more surreal and unreal, and far more sorrowful, to my her and the
kids than would be the "fading out" cancer.
Now, I don't know if thess feelings will last, but I think I have to talk
with her and the kids about it.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /~\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\ / \ / /~ \ /~\__/\
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-_~ / "If you want to climb mountains, \ /^\
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