At Echoes Of The Heart we continue to try and reach out and inspire. The following "Essay on Cancer" we think is thought provoking and inspirational. Please feel free to email us your thoughts.

Essay on Cancer

I have been given a diagnosis of cancer---I'm going to give it back.

My mother died of cancer some 40 years ago. My wife died of cancer 20 years ago (and I came to hate it up close). My persevering daughter has had cancer for some 6 years. Other family members and friends have "contracted" and died of it. In my lifetime I have learned much of this disease---which tends to travel in silent rage throughout our cells, into our body organs. It is also called tumors, malignancies, lesions, melanomas, sarcomas growths, nodules, etc., and appears as small cell or large. And it comes in stages---zero to four, with A and B as further divisions. It has as many or more names as the Eskimos have for snow, and snow is so much a part of their lives---what does that tell you about the place of cancer in ours? Cancer represents a failure of the immune system, a madness of unlimited growth. And it is mad, for since it preys on healthy tissues exponentially, it is killing the very thing it feeds on---so, eventually it is killing itself-that seems quite mad to me.

Some days I come to understand it as a metaphor for our dominant way of life, figuratively depicting over many decades our eroding, sapping, corroding, advancing stages of declining resources for living. So on those days I call cancer symbolic, an invasion against fairly living out one's life, seems we are all subject to malignancies. As people we seem thoughtlessly agreed to living a lesioned life---where the body politic in its belief in the reasonableness of endless growth suffers, greater or less so, apparently without awareness, meaningful cures or palliatives.

When first I hearing my diagnosis I immediately heard something else: "It doesn't matter." That is what I heard, in my mind---a strong unmistakable, countering response that flooded into me, stopping at my soul. And soon the response made perfect sense to me . . . not an evasion, not a denial, not a refusal-a simple correction in my perception of the diagnosis. It doesn't matter because it isn't real. It's a fictive convention borne of the belief in the reality of sickness and, if one doesn't believe in sickness having any reality, then a diagnosis of illness really doesn't matter!

So, how can that be? How can anyone loosen from the long and tight bonds of conventional wisdom and medical practice? Well, what of "spontaneous remissions" we occasionally hear of . . . those occasions where the march to death has been reprieved somehow (though often dismissively explained by calling these cleansings a misdiagnosis of the disease itself)? Perhaps there is something to these healings? And then there are some who have doubts of the reality of body itself!

What if --- yes, what if we are living consensus realities we've always simply accepted as true, and never thought to question? What if we are living, as Shakespeare wrote, a dream and we (our essences) are not "really" here at all?

Heady, I know, but why not? Why must we believe that our assumptions really are as they seem, when they just as easily could be "viruses of the mind" . . . unexamined acceptances conventionally passed down, spreading and gaining currency over generations, made unequivocally real and "true" because people have always believed so. So, other than quantum physicists, why would anyone doubt what seems to be "out there"?

And thinking further, what it we took away all the names we've given the various forms of cancer? Of all diseases? What if we considered that giving illnesses names gave them power over us, gave them the only reality they had . . . and that denying them the seeming certitude of a name caused them to slowly evaporate and disappear as though they never existed? Wow! That could be "the start of something grand"; perhaps leading to an un-naming of our prejudices, of the idea of war, of anything---even of all our insecurities---anything that disrupted our tendency towards serenity. Wow again! Eventually we could exist peacefully in an un-named world---a world without complexity, without tendencies toward obfuscations. Just loving each moment as it came. Why not?? Who really knows what is possible? Could we just have stopped imagining possibilities like this long ago?

In denial---some will say--- this essay is essentially a denial of inevitability, and perhaps Elizabeth Kubler-Ross comes to mind. The very first state upon one's hearing of a life-controlling illness is denial. Therefore we don't need to think over other possibilities regarding illness---this man is not yet capable of accepting his fate. Perhaps . . . perhaps not.

The above kinds of contrary thinking tend to come easily to me---I am at a place where metaphysics---and a belief in an unequivocally loving God---appeals as a worthwhile pursuit in a world where almost all conventional explanations of our existence seem stunted, self-serving, or irrelevant. I am open for possibilities . . . again, why not? Anyone else? And I'll start by giving up my name. This essay is now anonymous! A name may reduce the possibilities.

Coda . . . In traveling along the above pathway I offer you the following health affirmations a friend gave to me regarding cancer. "I lovingly forgive and release all of the past; I choose to fill my world with joy; I love and approve of myself."

I have been given a diagnosis of cancer---I'm going to give it back.

Copyright 2010 F.G. and Echoes Of The Heart. All rights reserved.