Cancer Journal #26 March 17

 My sister emailed me an article from the Atlantic by a prominent Christian writer and pastor, Timothy Heller called "Growing My Faith in the Face of Death", March 7, 2021.  He reports that he has received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, a form of cancer for which life expectancy is calculated in months. not years.

Although he had counseled many who were facing death, he reports a challenge in actually doing what he had counseled.  He states that we carry an unconscious assumption of a kind of immortality and are affronted when the assumption falls apart.  But then there is an adjustment to the prospect of impending death.  That adjustment occurs in mental reconciling but also emotional acceptance.  He reports that the old Puritan preacher, Jonathan Edwards noted that people can all say that honey is sweet and you can totally accept that that is true.  However, this is altogether different from putting a spoonful of honey in your mouth.  This was used to describe having an experience with God as compared with just hearing or reading about him.  In Psalms, it says that we are to "taste and see that the Lord is good."   The article is good.  You should read it.  There's more to it than what I have reported.

The thing that really struck me was his report of how sweet his life was now.  How pleasurable every day events were.  He says that he has never been happier in his life.  I had a flash of recognition.  "Hey, yes!  That happened to me!"  It is mixed with sadness as he reports but colors are more vivid.  There is an abiding joy along with the sadness of the Good Ship Mortality steaming right at me as I wrote in a poem (Blog #11).

My prognosis has been good for several months and most recently the PSA # was "undetectable".  I realized that with all the good news, life has returned to more of the humdrum.  The colors have dulled.  Things just aren't as sweet.  The ship is in the mists or who knows where.  The number of my days have gone back to indefinite and do not "dwindle down to a precious few" as the man sang in September Song.

Perhaps you detected the change in my blog entries.  Heck, my last entry was about resistant starch for crying out loud! (Not that we all shouldn't be aware of the benefits of consuming resistant starch--even though, as my nephew comments, it could lead to domestic strife.)  

I am happy to have my PSA# low.  I hope it stays low.  It does mean though that my life has returned to ordinary.



Comments

  1. Jan CMarch 20, 2021 at 7:15 AM

    Charlie, that IS a good article. Thanks for sharing it.

    Isn't that so interesting how life seems more vivid when we are experiencing the most difficult times. When that's happened to me, though I was never facing death, I've tried to carry something of that experience with me into the seemingly more mundane days that followed, to work toward creating a practice of remembering seeing and feeling life as more precious, of nurturing a sense of wonder. At the same time, "normal" days have their own kind of preciousness, their own beauty, it seems to me.

    I'm so glad your numbers are low too!

    Keeping you in my thoughts and prayers.

    ReplyDelete

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