cancer

No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.__t's the mark of a very, very young soul,_ Mr. Whittier used to say, __o try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.__e have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.

Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles__ll move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound.

I__ not scared of death, Dad,_ I told him. ____ scared of not living. I don__ want to die with any regrets that I didn__ get to do the things in life that I__e always wanted.

It__ as if everyone got cancer the day I was diagnosed, except I__ their tumor.

Please don__ preach at me__ feel bad enough already.

God dramatically slew one monstrous opponent and then threw us into the arena against a stronger and more vicious foe.

You die in the middle of your life.

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.

In God's strength I could battle the giants. Alone, I was just a grasshopper.S

No hair? Don__ care!!

Although often perceived as one disease, cancer is a number of diseases subsumed within one diagnostic label.

I want to be remembered as a kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose

I just want it to stop. All of it. The pain. The suffering. The fucking cancer. I want it gone. I need it gone, Jean. It__ tearing me apart inside. God, I hate this. Even all the lying I__ doing to Parker. It__ breaking my heart.

Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying.

In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:"There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and _ no time to think _ out you go."You descend. You hit the ground....But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?...No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?"The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making.

The devil sought to destroy me and discredit my testimony. But God wanted me where I would testify to others about his saving power.

According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.

Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely.