Courage
Art: Jane Mjolsness
I often read the obituaries. I always refer to them as the Irish sports pages, because that’s where the Irish used to look for upcoming wakes.
Often, I’ll see a familiar line in the obits — the one that says a person died after a “courageous battle with cancer.” It seems no matter who the person was, somehow he or she managed to die courageously. I’ve always hoped that some honest person would write his own obit and say, “John Prentiss, age 47, died Monday after a rather cowardly battle with cancer. Just gave up after four days.”
But I don’t see that. I think maybe there is something about cancer that does make people courageous. I happen to have several friends at the moment who are fighting this disease. They all seem pretty damned courageous to me.
I also find it surprising that we don’t have a section of the newspaper dedicated just to people who survive cancer. I imagine there’s enough cancer going around these days that while they’re filling up two full pages of the paper with people who die from it, maybe they could fill a few pages with photos and stories of people who live through it. Wouldn’t it be nice to read story after story that say something like, “Mary Tuttle, 39, survived Tuesday after a three-year battle with breast cancer”? You go kick some ass, Mary!
How many people get this disease, anyway? Seems like if you wait long enough, you get it. And the better doctors get at fighting it, the more people get it. Like cancer decides to send in reinforcements. Oh, look, a new chemo cocktail is providing an 80 percent survival rate. Leach some more pesticides into the drinking water and introduce another fast food chain — stat!
You have to give cancer some credit, though. Unlike the humans it attacks, it doesn’t discriminate. Little African American kids get it. Rich white Presbyterian males get it. Latina lesbians and Eskimo Jews get it. You can exercise, veganize, sterilize and pasteurize, and you still get it.
Maybe the only way cancer discriminates is that it looks for people with a propensity for courage. You don’t necessarily have to be courageous to start with; you just have to have a little courage somewhere inside you, waiting to grow.
So here’s to all my friends and associates fighting cancer courageously. Here’s to Jim, Susan, Jodi, Dean, Patrice, Michele and Laura. Long may you fight. Long may you run.
Andy Cier enjoys living in the Wasatch Mountains with his wife, Lynn, and their three children. He manages the Salt Lake City office of RIESTER, a regional advertising and public relations firm.
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