'The Courage to Face Reality Squarely'

I’m flying to Cleveland today to see my brother who has been diagnosed with cancer. It has already metastasized and he’s in the Cleveland Clinic, waiting to be admitted to their hospice program. Ken turned sixty-nine in April and is two and a half years younger than me. My neurotic reaction is: That’s not fair. I should go first. 

My friend D.G. Myers published the final post on his Commonplace Blog, “Choosing life in the face of death,” two months before his own death from cancer on September 26, 2014. At the time I read it with admiration. It was characteristically learned, loving and blunt. Now I read it as a sort of inverted self-help guide. I’m looking for answers to such questions as: What do I say and not say? How can I help? How can I ease some of my nephew’s burden?  How can I stop thinking about myself and my reactions?   

 

At the time of his diagnosis -- Stage IV metastatic prostate cancer -- David was given three years to live, tops. He lived another seven. David writes:

 

“[D]enial and despair are merely refusals to accept the responsibility of finding, under the sign of death, a new purpose and meaning to life. Denial and despair are rejections of what the great American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor calls ‘one of God’s mercies.’”

 

A decade later, David seems to hear my questions:

 

“We who are dying need from you what we should be demanding from ourselves—responsibility, honesty, the courage to face reality squarely. It matters less what you say to us than how you talk to us—face-to-face, as Moses spoke with God. And after all, who knows but that you might be the one, by your kindness and faith, to give us the strength to choose life in the face of death?”