So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.
This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.
I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could make me stop, and if she died before she had finished comforting me, then I would be left to cry forever.
She cleared her throat. “Bryan, I know you’ve interviewed a lot of caregivers—”“Too many,” Bryan shot back.She inched her chin up a notch. “I’m not your typical caregiver. I’m different.”Bryan laughed with no humor. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before—okay, impress me, Delilah Walker. What exactly makes you different?
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.
Tobin," Mom said disapprovingly. She wasn't a particularly funny person. It suited her professionally - I mean, you don't want your cancer surgeon to walk into the examination room and be like, "Guy walks into a bar. Bartender says, 'What'll ya have?' And the guy says, 'Whaddya got?' And the bartender says, 'I don't know what I got, but I know what you got: Stage IV melanoma.
Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You’re a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You’re a mystery.
Why can someoneget so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick?It’s like the world’s longest exorcism. It doesn’t make sense that I canchat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billionsof dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollarsto just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure outhow to cure cancer without torturing people.
I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.
There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.
Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.
If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
If my love for cats were hydrogen, there’d be enough of it to give you skin cancer if you didn’t wear suntan lotion. The only sad part for me about getting a cat from the pound is that I can only choose one. If I could, I’d take home all of them. Actually, my view is why take them home? Why not just move in to an animal shelter? But my future wife wouldn’t go for that. Though I’m pretty sure she could move into a shoe store no problem.
Almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you re-think everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are ten milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and thats more carcinogens than you're likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!
Everybody keeps talking about 'fighting' the cancer," he said, "everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won the fight against cancer and black blah blah blah.""Okay...and?""I'm not fighting," he said. "It's already inside me... and I'm not going to fight. I'm going to be a good host, let it pass through me.. resist nothing. Sieve. Let it all pass through.
