In retrospect, the first thing that cancer took from me was one of my favorite tiny pleasures in life: the ability to sit comfortably through an entire movie.
I didn’t know it was cancer at the time. In fact, as a member of the long-time back problems club (Fans of Cyclobenzaprine, I call them), I thought that’s all it was; the back pain had just migrated up a few inches from the sciatica where it usually caused me trouble.
Turns out those spots on my back are also where my pancreas sits.
From what I’ve been able to gather, that’s one of the insidious things about pancreatic cancer. That pain is often the first thing people notice. But, by the time it’s causing you back pain, it’s pretty far along. And by the time the back pain is severe enough to go to a doctor for it (and severe enough for the doctor to send you through a CT machine) it’s even worse still.
Oxycodone has since restored my movie-watching abilities. But cancer has taken a lot of other small pleasures from me.
Pain medications have made drinking beer a little bit more dangerous and much less enjoyable.
One of the chemo medications leaves me very sensitive to cold in my extremities and also, for some reason, the back of my throat. Swallowing ice cream can feel like swallowing jagged ice shards. Man do I miss ice water.
Sometimes I feel it’s robbing me of my famously deep well of patience. When I’m nauseous or feeling in some other way crappy, it can be hard to really listen to people or to negotiate a solution to whatever has caused my daughter’s obstinance that day.
There are plenty more things cancer has stolen. But let’s talk for a second about a gift it’s given me.
I once read a media critic who said that you know a columnist is running low on ideas when they start writing about things they saw on TV. I would assert that this also applies to columnists who write about things they saw on Facebook Reels.
Still, at the risk of being washed up as a columnist in only my fourth entry, let me tell you about this thing I heard talk show host Stephen Colbert say in a clip of an interview he did with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
I have been a fan of Colbert’s since his time as a Daily Show correspondent. But, these days, I enjoy him most in the rare instances when he reveals himself to be a well read deep-thinker. I very much enjoyed, for example, listening to him talk poetry and the Bible with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast a few years back.
As a young man, Colbert’s father and two of his brothers died in a plane crash. Though the Reel I watched clipped out this context, I believe that was what Colbert was referring to when he said he had learned to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
The idea that he could find something to love in that tragedy really hit me.
One of the hardest pills to swallow since I was diagnosed is the impact my early death will have on the people I love. My children, my wife, my siblings, my parents — ever since I became an adult man living for people other than myself, I have endeavored to be a positive force in all of their lives. And now, through no fault of my own, I am on the precipice of giving them, through my early death, one of the most traumatizing and negative experiences any of them will ever face. So I really needed to hear Colbert explain what he meant.
Colbert, a deeply Catholic man threw out what sounded, to me anyway, like some pretty deeply Buddhist or even Taoist ideas when he unpacked his statement:
“So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss. Which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it’s like to be a human being and to connect with them and to love them in a deep way that not only accepts that all of us suffer but then also makes you grateful that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people. It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here and being human if you can’t be the most human you can be?”
I didn’t even know I needed him, but somehow the algorithm did and I was able to see how this darkness that is about to descend on everyone I love can, if they’re eventually able to see it that way, ultimately be a gift that adds to the fullness of their humanity. A gift they would all gladly trade to have me in the world, no doubt, but a gift all the same.
If a piano had fallen on my head or if I’d dropped dead from a heart attack, I would not have had the luxury of coming to terms with these sorts of worries and finding my way through to some kind of peace with them. The slow march of cancer might even give me enough time to come up with a way to share some of these insights with the people I love, to help put them on the path to healing from the wound I’m about to deal them.
When the back pain flares up and the nausea gets too bad I’m sure I’ll say otherwise, but, right now, with my faculties at the fullest, I can’t help but be grateful to cancer for, weirdly enough, the time it has given me. It robbed me of years but paid me back with some very precious days. Days I can spend time thinking all of this through and preparing.
Maybe that’s worth having to drink my water lukewarm.
