We All Have Cancer

Yesterday I looked through my Cancer library (yes, I have a lot of cancer books) and I pulled down the book, “Anticancer: A New Way of Life” by David Servan-Schreiber.

Servan-Schreiber was one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders and an accomplished neuro-psychiatrist. At age 31 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. His book is about what he learned about cancer, and cancer treatment and cancer prevention.

Some of what he has to say is not new: the importance of exercise, diet, alternative treatments etc. But what is new is his description of roles we play in CancerLand-the patient’s role in his/her own care versus the doctor’s role. He also gives great guidance on how to sort medical info, nutritional info and he writes a lot about the physiological impact of stress. And the stress of cancer. He’s got lots and lots of facts.

But here is the fact that blew me away: “One hundred percent of people have cancer cells in their bodies after the age of fifty.” 

100% of us have cancer after 50. We all have cancer. In some people, it develops into tumors or conditions that become life threatening, in others it does not. But after age fifty we all have cancer cells in our bodies.

That’s wild and powerful information to process. It’s significant when you think about what it means to maintain your health but also relevant to cancer screening and tests for cancer. And it is especially a starting point for wrapping our heads around our consistent denial of mortality and death. Because here is the other absolute health statistic: 100% of us will die. 

We all have cancer, and we will all die. That’s not great news, but it’s not terrible news either. There is a lot of freedom—and maybe a path to peace—in those facts.

Knowing that all of us have cancer levels the field: there are not two camps: the sick and the well. There’s just each of us in some stage of living and dying.

This makes me think of Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, “Wild Geese” in which she asks,

 “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

When Death Comes

Tonight I read an interview with Mary Oliver in Oprah Magazine. Perhaps one of the first interviews that's she's allowed to be really public. She talks about her partner Molly's death and that she decided that she had two choices after her partner of 40 years died: She could buy a small cabin in the woods and lock herself in or she could unlock all the doors and invte the world in. She chose the unlocking. And she says this amazing thing. Five years after the love of her life has died, Mary Oliver says she is the happiest she has ever been in her life. She also talks about doing therapy--at 75 --to deal with a terrible abusive childhood. All of this gives me such hope and a model of a way to be in the world--and in myself.

Here is the poem, "When Death Comes", by Mary Oliver that I am memorizing:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


---Mary Oliver