Another Essay for the Cancer Support/Writing Group at the Cancer Support Community Benjamin Center

Topic Assignment: What do you say, or how do you respond to those who offer unsolicited or unhelpful advice?
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Everything depends on what they say. If they tell me how good I look, I understand that they mean that I look much better than your average dead person who’s been in the ground for the past few months, but that doesn’t bother me. I just say, “Thanks.”

If they tell me that I should immediately switch to a macrobiotic diet or some other diet du jour, I smile and tell them that a person has to have priorities, and food is one of them for me. You can tell. Just look at me. I’ve had lots of hospice patients whose wives made them stick to one miserable diet or another, and they died anyway. It’s never the husbands who get insistent on particular diets, it’s always the wives.

If they tell me they’re praying for me, I thank them and point out that I’m not good at praying myself so, just in case prayer actually works, I appreciate their help. If there’s time, I point out that there was actually a controlled study that showed that remote intercessory prayer seemed to have a beneficial effect on the patients who got the prayers as opposed to the people in the control group who didn’t get the prayers. The prayers were quite remote. The people doing the praying didn't know what hospital the patients were in. They were just told the patients' first names. Unfortunately, when the study was repeated to see if it would work again, it didn’t.

So far, nobody has advised me to get a mango colonic. I like mango juice, but I'm not a fan of colonics.

Cancer Support/Writing Group Strikes Again

Assigned Topic: "I have learned that in life, there is sometimes a second chance."
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This topic seems to me to be about what you do to re-order your priorities when you get a cancer diagnosis. It’s not just that a cancer cure gives a person a second chance. It’s the very diagnosis that brings you the opportunity for figuring out what the second chance ought to be. Good thing about that, because not everyone gets cured from cancer.

Of course, there’s a downside to this opportunity for a second chance. If you die of, say, getting hit by a piece of space junk that comes down from its orbit, traveling at 17,500 miles an hour relative to the surface of the earth, and kills you instantly, you don’t get that opportunity for a second chance, but, on the other hand, you don’t suffer very much, or for very long. With dying from cancer, the process is slower and, sometimes, unpleasant.

So maybe the best option is to get the cancer diagnosis, but when the time comes that the treatment is failing, go stand outside during a meteor shower.

Woody Allen once said, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” But everyone has to die sometime, of something. There wouldn’t be room on earth for new people if the old people didn’t kick the bucket. The key thing is to make your life count for something, and, sometimes, it takes a bother like a cancer diagnosis to give you a second chance to figure out how to go about doing that.

For what it's worth, in my particular case, I haven't figured out what to do to make this part of my life count for something.

Yet another essay from my writing/cancer support group

Assigned Topic: Write about how an enforced discipline either made me, or didn’t make me, into the person I want to be.

The term, "enforced discipline," needs to be defined by me.
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My definition of an "enforced discipline" is something I was forced to learn that I’d have preferred not to have had to learn.

Thinking…

OK, I never really wanted to go to Hebrew School. I didn’t mind hearing about the bible stories or the stories behind the Jewish holidays. It was the Hebrew language that I just couldn’t get my head around. And it wasn’t the fact that they write it backwards. I actually thought that was kind of cute, and the Hebrew letters were reasonably nicely designed. I just am not the sort of person who’s good at languages. I took a year of French in high school and two years of French in college, and I’m not very good at French either. Heck, if it weren’t for the fact that I was married to an English teacher for forty-three years, English would be a language that I wouldn’t be good at. Looking at the previous sentence, I still may not be all that good at English.

So Hebrew school was an enforced discipline for me. What sort of person was it supposed to turn me into? Well, a Jew. And I am a Jew so I guess that worked even if I didn’t enjoy the process.

But the topic implies that I should decide whether I wanted to be a Jew. That’s more difficult to figure out. Clearly my first experience with Judaism, the circumcision at day eight of my life, a process that may become illegal in Santa Monica and San Francisco after the next election, was probably not subjectively pleasant, but I don’t remember it well enough to know if the drop of Manischewitz wine they gave me at the time was enough of an anesthetic to overcome the discomfort. I guess I can’t actually figure out if I wanted to be a Jew or not. I just am one.