Sunday night
With all the murder and mayhem that daily assaults us--the real murders on the streets, in the wars, the faux murders played and replayed on cable—it is not surprising that we have become calloused to the killing that supports our culture.
People’s reported murders on the evening news, people killed in daily traffic accidents, people killed by nicotine, people killed by medical mistakes, people killed by poisonous air and water, people killed in the wars in defense of the National Security State, people killed in defense of profits, all the people collateral damage to some interest or another other than their own, with all that killing, there is still no shortage of genuine mourning. Funeral homes still expand to accommodate the bereaved. Churches still grow and flourish in order to properly dispatch the dead.
Personal death can still touch us even if the death of the nameless can’t—unless they are in trenches filled with the victims of atrocities committed by some former enemy lately discovered. The mass burials of civilians from prior wars—as deadly as the beaches at Normandy were on D Day with close to ten thousand troops killed, more than 20,000 French civilians died as part of the same action. No heroic memorial for them or for the 80 million other humans who died across the continents in World War II from the carpet bombing of European and Japanese cities, from the sieges of cities like Leningrad and Stalingrad. How is it possible that all those deaths past and into the present do not touch us but the death of one of our own can question the reason for our existence.
My wife is dying from brain cancer caused by the need for our federal and state governments to support the success of companies that produce addictive and deadly nicotine. And I am overwhelmed by her courage, her willingness to keep making the choices that have subjected her to months of daily pain, first from the cell destruction of chemotherapy, then the burning rays of preventive full brain radiation treatment, then the opening of her skull to excise a tumor, to the further radiation of four specific areas of her brain to burn out new tumors.
The temporary remission of cancer has not been without its cost to her— the loss of her strength, the loss of her streamless ability to speak, the loss of her normal ability to shed her waste, the loss of her hair, the loss of her dependence, the loss of her job, the destruction of her finances, the multiple medications to relieve her pain and to relieve their side effects. And that is just a partial list. If you have not been intimately involved with the slow destruction of a cancer victim, you have no idea of the cost of their losses.
So the detailed loss of a loved one so committed to living can vaporize whatever callousness we have about the murderous carelessness of our culture and perhaps bring us back, one by one, at least temporarily, to the value of life we so often proclaim by ceding its extermination to our government policies and our military strategies and our deadly armies and our killer industries.
This one woman’s life, her determination to live it, her dedication to defeating her cancer killer, her refusal to admit defeat, almost convinces me in my despair that life really is worth living. But the cancer has made its unalterable decision for her. The stereotactic radiosurgery that she underwent Wednesday
to temporarily allay the progress of the disease turned her into an outraged blithering idiot by Friday night and she and to be admitted to emergency where, after several scans of her brain over hours, we were told her brain was swollen, either from the procedure or from aggravating one of the lesions pressing on some vital part of her brain.
She is recovering in the neurosurgery ward of the hospital this evening and scheduled to be released tomorrow with bits and pieces of her speech randomly recovered, her ability to report her name and her birth date. An uncertain future about the course of the disease awaits her. We will learn more about that after our meeting with the oncologist on Tuesday. But I have said there will be no more medical interventions. Her ability to experience the wonder she has so mightily struggled to save Is more precious than surviving one day as a vegetable unable to experience anything more than breathing.
If we could only relate the value of her life and her struggle to survive to the hundreds and thousands and millions of people whose lives we so callously cede to the institutions of mass murder whose successes grace our daily newscasts without a single tear, we might still have a chance to survive as a people. But it will take all her dedication and conviction and commitment for us to make it.
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