April 11, 2007 - Life Is Short(er)

There's a rather extraordinary interview with Elizabeth Edwards in the April 9th issue of Newsweek. She talks frankly about what it means for her to know that, because of her cancer recurrence, her life will be significantly shorter:

"When I was first diagnosed, I was going to beat this. I was going to be the champion of cancer. And I don't have that feeling now. The cancer will eventually kill me. It's going to win this fight. I come from a family of women who live into their 90s, so it's taken something real from me. There was a time during the day when we were getting test results when I felt more despair than I ever felt in any of the time I had the breast cancer. I have a lot that I intend to do in this life. We're here at the house. I'm going to build paths through these woods so we can take long walks that I intended to take when I was 80. And I have a 6-year-old son. I was going to hold his children someday. Now I'm thinking I have only a slim chance of seeing him graduate high school. How do I accomplish, in what time I've got left, all that I'm meant to do?"

When I was first diagnosed, I went through a lot of that sort of thinking. No sooner did I hear the word, "cancer," than my mind went racing off to the most dire possibilities. I wondered if I'd live out the year. I wondered if I'd ever get to meet the people my kids will marry. I even wondered if it made sense to keep going to the dentist.

Now that I'm in remission, I spend less time in such fatalistic thinking. In my case, it was just borrowing trouble; in Elizabeth's case, with her revised prognosis, it's simply realistic. When people ask how I'm doing, I typically say, "I'm in remission, and we have every reason to expect it will last for a very long time."

But will it? Will the cancer remain at bay, allowing me to live out a normal lifespan? Will I make it to the biblical "threescore years and ten?"...

"The days of our life are seventy years,
or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;
even then their span is only toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away."
– Psalm 90:10

It's impossible to say. I'm only 20 years away from that landmark age of 70. Nowadays, with all the centenarians running around (well, maybe not running), even 70 seems way too soon to roll up the awnings. It was different back in biblical times, when life expectancies were shorter. Seventy seemed like a ripe old age, and 80 was serious geezerhood.

Not so, anymore. My mother's going to turn 80 this summer. She just returned home to her retirement place in North Carolina, after an Easter visit with us. She drove her own car all the way up here and back. My grandfather (her father) died a few months shy of 101. He played his last game of tennis on his 80th birthday. When he fell out of a dogwood tree at age 93, breaking his ankle (having climbed a ladder to prune some branches), we kidded him, saying, "Grandpa, you've got to stop climbing trees – it's not like you're 80 anymore!" That sort of longevity was unimaginable, in biblical times.

Do I have the MacKenzie longevity gene? Whether I do or whether I don't is perhaps moot, now that cancer has come into my life. The knowledge of its life-shortening potential, lurking in the shadows of my consciousness, is part of that "toil and trouble" of which the psalmist speaks.

In the film, The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West turns over a large hourglass, and tells Dorothy that when the sands run out, it's curtains for her. I can remember, watching that movie as a young child, feeling terrified by that scene. Some kids were scared of the flying monkeys, but to me there was something far worse. It was that hourglass: the gruesome inevitability of it.

I suppose the filmmakers meant that, once the sands ran out, the witch would return and do Dorothy in. Yet, with the sort of concrete thinking typical of young children, I thought the witch had cast an evil spell over the hourglass itself: as the last grain of sand ran out, Dorothy, too, would slump over, lifeless.

Elizabeth Edwards finds herself contemplating a similar hourglass, these days. I haven't seen that vision yet, myself (despite my early spell of panicky fatalism). I have tremendous admiration for her courageous realism. The sands of her days are slipping away, but her life isn't falling apart, either. She's determined to live as well as she can, for as long as she can.

It's all any of us can do.