Finally, this morning, enough — one too many journalistic references to someone's 'beating' cancer, as if cancer was an opponent to be defeated, an enemy to be conquered, a battle in which courage often wins the day.
It's a lie. Cancer is to be endured, that's all. The best you can hope for is to fend it off, like a savage dog, but cancer isn't defeated, it only retreats, is held at bay, retires, bides its time, changes form, regroups.
It may well be that the boy who survives an early cancer lives a long and lovely life, without ever enduring that species of illness again, but the snarl of it never leaves his heart, and you'll never hear that boy say he defeated the dark force in his bones.
Use real words. Real words matter. False words are lies. Lies sooner or later are crimes against the body or the soul. I know men, women, and children who have cancer, had cancer, died from cancer, lived after their cancer retreated, and not one of them ever used military or sporting metaphors that I remember.
All of them spoke of endurance, survival, the mad insistence of hope, the irrepressibility of grace, the love and affection and laughter and holy hands of their families and friends and churches and clans and tribes. All of them were utterly lacking in any sort of cockiness or arrogance. All of them developed a worn, ashen look born of pain and patience. And all of them spoke not of winning but of waiting.
There is a great and awful lesson there, something that speaks powerfully of human character and possibility. For all that we speak, as a culture and a people, of victory and defeat, of good and evil, of hero and coward, it is none of it quite true. The truth is that the greatest victory is to endure with grace and humour, to stay in the game, to achieve humility.
I know a boy with brain cancer. He's 16 years old. He isn't battling his cancer. It's not something to defeat. He is enduring it with the most energy and creativity and patience he can muster.
He says the first year he had cancer was awful because of the fear and vomiting and surgery and radiation and chemotherapy and utter exhaustion. But he says that first year was also wonderful, because he learned to savour every moment of his days,