I posted this in the comments over at
Pocketina's - it's an interesting post. I haven't listened to
the show - I can't listen to people talking about having cancer. No, let me be more specific - I can't listen to Elizabeth Edwards talking about her recurrence. I'm ashamed, but I still run in the opposite direction when I hear about people with recurrence - I truly am disgusted with myself; I come back again, I get over it (I think). I know logically that what happens to other people and what happens to me is completely unrelated; there is no comparison to be drawn but illogically, I panic and think that if it happened to them then it will happen to me (which of course, it might) and I guess I still haven't really processed and taken on board that whole ' we all die one day' thing.
I was particularly interested by the part that P'ina talks about - the 'missing having cancer' bit and various people have responded by saying - silly question - but I'm not so sure (and I'm mostly copying what I left in her comments field because I want to say this to a slightly wider audience.) I mean, of
course I don't miss having a life-threatening disease - I'm not mentally deficient BUT I
do miss some of the things that happened/the way things were whilst I was having treatment.
I miss: (::Sigh:: some of these I'm not proud of)
- being cared for rather than doing the caring;
- being 'allowed' to take a back seat - not insisting on 'doing it myself';
- being allowed to slow down;
- not having to do things I didn't want to;
- feeling free-er to say 'no';
- being the focus of my family for a while - the priority;
- people being aware of how important it is to *say* and *show* how they feel;
- being able to say 'I'm not OK, it's not fine';
- the shocking immediacy of everything that made me feel more 'alive' than I had for a long time.
When I say 'allowed' in this context I mean allowed by myself - not others and I know that, somehow, I ought to be able to carry some of this over into the 'now' but it's not really happening so much. And I'm mad with myself for not being able to run at life and grab it and get on with it.
1 comment:
(here's me visiting your site again, to talk about the same thing, but...oh well!)
I think I might restate the 'we all die one day' thing as "we successfully avoided dying again today!" thing. You can call it 'alarming optimism of the generally pessimistic', or just 'what an annoying viewpoint!', even. It's my basic thesis that humans take life for granted every day, unless we get reminded by something.
I'd like to put a further twist in the conversation by saying,
"and maybe people wanted to help us more when we had cancer, because they're afraid of karma smacking them with cancer of their own"
And that makes me sad, because I know it's true of some of them (they've admitted as much). Crazy, huh?
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