Thoughts on Death

In the course of having cancer, I've spent a little bit of time thinking about death.  And I do mean a very little bit, but probably more than your average, Practically Immortal Twenty-Something In Outstanding Health that I used to be/am again.  I haven't spent hours pondering death, and I've taken almost no time to think about the afterlife.  It's never kept me up at night.  In fact, I distinctly remember my first night in the hospital being much more bothered by the prospect of being stuck in bed with greasy hair for several days than thinking about eternity or the possibility of my life being truncated.  Not a fact I'm proud of but it's the truth (and my hair was already really greasy).

I guess I had been thinking about death some this past spring and summer, usually on long rides down the bike path.  I haven't actually run the statistics, but my guess is I have a much higher chance of being killed in a bike accident than by some weird abdominal tumor aka my right ovary.

Death: It's a difficult subject to approach.  What kinds of questions do you even ask? What happens when you die?  Do you just stop existing?  If I died tomorrow, would I have lived a full enough life?  rich enough?  good enough?   Are there relationships that need mending or more attention before I bow out?
And the all-important: What hymns do I want sung at my funeral?

I don't have answers to any of these, and like I said, I haven't given them a whole lot of thought.  No one else has been asking these questions either.  Maybe this is as it should be.  I wasn't on my deathbed and my prognosis was/is really, really good.  On the other hand, cancer has a (rightfully deserved) reputation of being this super serious disease, so even though my kind of cancer is generally curable, there's this unspoken hint of a possibility hanging over the situation "Is Margaret going to die from this?"  And still no one talks about it.

In our culture, bringing up death is impolite.  It probably would have fallen under insensitive for someone else to bring it up, and it felt like an imposition for me to do so, as if speaking the D-word aloud might give it more of a hold in my life or indicate depression that needed to be worried about.  (Recall that our culture rewards relentless optimism over realism when it comes to cancer.)  But when death becomes part of reality - and ultimately, it is part of everyone's life - talking is important.  Even beyond issues of having a living will or advanced directives, sharing thoughts and emotions among trusted friends seems to be comforting and even vital.  If we don't talk about this big Thing, the most irreversible event of a lifetime, we leave it to be dealt with alone inside one's head.  Now there's a recipe for depression!

And then, when someone becomes terminally ill or dies, we are expected to be cool with it.  Yes, we can experience grief and sadness, but there seems to be an expectation to suddenly be okay talking about death, like it's the most natural, if still really weighty, thing in the world.  Which it is, but that doesn't mean the conversations come easily without thought and practice.  

So I have an assignment for you this week.  Talk to someone you love about death.  Their death and yours.  And this is especially if you're a Practically Immortal Twenty-Something In Outstanding Health.  Now I'll step down off my culturally critiquing soap box and give you some medical updates.

Medical Update:
The short of it: Good news.  My AFP tumor marker count was 7, which is in normal range (yay!).  My CT scan was clear (yay!).  And Dr. Hallum couldn't feel any abdominal abnormalities (yay!).  I'll likely be on blood thinner through May (ugggh).  


The long of it: I went to see my oncologist today, for the first time in almost 2 months.  It was the first time I went by myself, ever.  Walking in with so very much energy in my body and the knowledge that I'd dive right back into my busy life tomorrow felt weird.  But as a healthy person, seeing the doctors and nurses and staff who took such good care of me when I was ill was a joyful experience.


Medically, the news is as good as can be reasonably expected.  That is, it's unilaterally positive except I can't eat greens until long after the good greens season is done in Tucson. 

I had to go to the infusion room for a port flush (to keep my port-a-cath happy it has to be accessed and flushed with saline and blood thinner once every month or so), and of course I would have gone there anyway to visit my nurse Shirley.  Walking into the chemo room was a wave of emotion for me, but soon enough I was sitting in a recliner, swapping stories about female parts gone awry, and demonstrating my favorite headscarf tying method to the first-timer next to me.  While I didn't see them, I learned that my favorite chemo buddies are doing well. 

And I go back next month.  And the month after that.  And the month after that.  Grazelda is one fast-growing cookie, so we're keeping close tabs on her ashes for the first while, but for now she does seem to be thoroughly gone.