NO MATTER WHAT: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT

It's Hard, I Know

My neighbor, whom I’ll call, Carl, has liver cancer.

I have a knot in my stomach just from writing that.

He’s in his mid-30s and so is his wife. They have an eight-year-old daughter.

It all started when he went to the emergency room for what felt like food poisoning, but after some tests, turned out to be cancer. Since then, it’s been trips to the surgeon, trips for chemotherapy, and a whole lot of sitting around waiting for the next shoe to drop. However, the cancer is shrinking, and the surgeon said he’s had other patients worse off than Carl and they survived the operation to excise their tumor.

A month ago, I dropped off an orchid for Carl and his wife and he was sitting alone on his deck smoking cannabis through a bong on the recommendation of his doctor to help with nausea and other symptoms. I sat down with him, and we chatted.

“I don’t want to die,” he said, his eyes watering.

“I know,” I said.

“And I'm terrified of the operation,” he added.

“Yes, I know it’s so difficult,” I said. “But you’re in the best of hands and things are progressing.”

He smiled weakly at me.

To see this sweet, wonderful man, always with a smile and a positive attitude about everything, a son, a father, a husband - so desolate - tore at me. I must have arrived at the exact moment he needed someone to listen. Because it all came flooding out: the grief, the terror of the operation to come which will leave him bedridden for several months – all in the ominous shadow of the prospect of death.

“I thought if I lived my life as a good person, I’d be okay,” Carl said. “But I’m not. It’s not fair.”

Life is never fair. It is often exquisitely and categorically unfair. But I tell him to keep optimistic. His surgeon believes he has a good chance of beating it and living a long, happy life.

“I want to be there for my daughter’s high school graduation, her graduation from college, when she gets married and has a baby,” he said, wiping his eyes.

“You will. Try to stay positive,” I said, patting his hand. “We’re all here for you.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

It’s hard to talk about death with someone so young. Hell, it’s hard to talk about death, period, to young or old. It is all so final and frightening. (And for those my age and older, it’s closer every day.) But aside from birth, dying is the only other experience we all share. So why do we find it so difficult to talk about it?

For me, and maybe for you, it’s because death seems like erasure, like when my old boarding school closed two years ago for lack of pupils and fancy mansions planted on its land will now obliterate numerous years of my formative past. I always used to visit the school when I went back to England. To make sure it, and my history, were still there. And was always reassured by its ivy-clad buildings and vines of wisteria. Now nothing is left. When I asked my favorite journalism professor in college why he tried to commit suicide, he said, “Because there’s no one on this earth who remembers me as a child.”

Erasure.

Death also separates you from the ones you love and that is hard for everyone. When I lost my yellow lab, I nearly went bonkers. I’m still not over her and talk to her a lot, something my sisters, on a recent trip together, found a bit odd. And then there’s all the attendant anxiety, going toward a darkness that might or might not end depending on what you believe.

But the fact is that death can happen to any one of us at any time. We all ignore that, but it doesn’t make it untrue. Coming to terms with this notion can help us spend what time we have left perhaps more wisely, and to better appreciate what's truly important in life.

Is that some consolation?