Cancer

This is rather an awkward subject for many people, presumably because it is about life and death and many people have an awkwardness about death. I have just found out that I have bowel cancer. I have had the tests and now I am waiting for the results to see whether it has spread and if so, how far. It is an odd feeling, knowing that there is a malignant growth inside you. I have a (dis)advantage in that I have seen it. The camera showed it attached to my colon very clearly. It is 7cm long, and that is about all I know at the moment. I have had biopsies and a CT scan and I am waiting for an appointment with the consultant.

I don’t know whether this is going to kill me, and if it does whether it will do it quickly or slowly. I might live for three months, I might live for 30 years, but just knowing that I have cancer means that I am at present confronted with death. On the positive side my main thoughts are so be it. I am not afraid of death. Why should I be? I agree with Bertrand Russell and others that my ego is a temporary phenomenon that appeared when I was born and will disappear when I die. The best we can hope for is to have some self-constructed meaning in that short time we are alive. The individual is the only one who can give meaning to life. In Sartre’s terms authenticity, or from being to becoming.

We are not remembered for long. Once you die everyone gets on with their lives. They might think of you occasionally, they might experience sadness, but in the end their life is more important, along with the lives of their family and friends. A very few people are remembered for what they did. People such as Hitler, Pol Pot, Churchill, George Orwell, Edward I, Florence Nightingale, Charlemagne, Orville Wright, Alan Turing, Napoleon, Piers Gaveston, Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde or William Gladstone, but they are not remembered for who they are but for what they did. It is a tenuous link between the famous person remembered and the actual person known to friends and family.

I really do not mind dying. I am pleased that at the first threat of death I didn’t give up on a lifetime of beliefs and start praying to a ridiculous non-existent bearded fairy who lives on a cloud. The culture of religion and belief is strong. It is not surprising because people want the world to mean something. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean anything. The universe has no beginning that we understand, it has no end that we understand. The only true beginnings and ends for our egos are birth and death. The only meaning is the meaning we place on life. Placing a religious meaning on life is inauthentic. It means taking other people’s ideas (which are usually about the subjugation of the masses) and internalising them as your own. That is essentially inauthentic. It demonstrates a person who has not thought about what their life means.

Am I authentic? I like to think I am but I don’t really know. I tend to behave consistently in certain ways (including being inconsistent), often to the annoyance of others, but hopefully mainly positively, eg challenging the way people unthinkingly think. I hope that in my career I have helped a bit, done a bit of good. I have been closely involved in the education of many people from all around the world. I hope some of them at least have become slightly better (whatever that means) in some way because of my influence. I hope that overall my influence on and interactions with friends and family have been positive. I hope I have made their lives a little better. I have written a few books and a lot of academic articles. In some ways these are a more permanent contribution but do they really mean anything? It is the same as my other interactions. I hope they have helped some people in some ways.

In the end it is not for me or for anyone else to judge my contribution. I have done what I have done and that’s it. I have broken moral codes but I have generally lived by what I hope is a fairly reasonable moral code. I am imperfect, ok very imperfect, but aren’t we all? With free will we are bound to make the wrong choices at times. That makes trying to be authentic in life all the more important, because authenticity is not just about the self it is about the way we are with others.

Of course, this experience of the potential for fairly immediate death may be somewhat premature, then I might look a bit daft talking like this. I hope I do get a bit longer because I still have things to do, particularly post-retirement (write books, read books, go to places, talk with people); but if it isn’t that’s fine.

My other thought is that the usual perception is that family and friends should be supportive of the person who is dying. Sometimes it is the dying person (I am not saying I am dying but you know what I mean) who does a lot of the supporting. ‘It is ok, I am fine about dying, it doesn’t worry me.’

To be continued – probably.