What I Learned About Cancer
And even in our sleep
Pain that cannot forget falls
Drop by drop upon the heart
And in our own despair
Against our will
Comes wisdom to us
By the awful grace of God- Aeschylus, Greek playwright
Recently, there was a death in the family due to cancer. In these one-and-a-half years I would enter a subliminal space to think like a molecular philosopher: combining philosophy with chemistry.
All of us have rogue cells forming every day in our body, with the potential to become cancerous with time. But the body has an amazing ability to repair these mistakes and take care of these rogue cells. The intricate biology that plays out inside is unseen.
Drew Berry, an in-house animator for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia, has visualized the process called homologous recombination. In this process, specialized proteins repair damaged DNA by using an intact copy as a template - failures of which can increase one’s risk of cancer.
The main message: there’s some bad luck involved: you must have a “bad” cell at the “bad” place at the “bad” time, and over a long period. And this is not programmed but largely influenced by random, cumulative changes over time.
During this period, extensive reading and thinking from accounts of cancer survivors made me understand that there is a life beyond cells: it is a function of care, of love, and of willingness to see death at close quarters and to continue to live with eyes wide open.
Chasing productivity is not the priority it used to be. No longer is urgency confused with purpose and meaning. In this digital world, I try to pay attention, to listen more than I speak, and to feel even when it hurts.
I tell my daughters that kindness is the most important thing in the world. For this we have to be awake: we must first notice; to notice, we must care; and to care, we must be willing to be changed by what we see.
The willingness to be changed by what we see is to partly jettison what constitutes our being: what we have cherished and embraced our whole life. This is tough. But the gift of this most distressing situation is that we start to notice, become more aware and caring. We no longer count the hours, we live them. There is no fear, but connectedness to the little joys of daily existence, and the world begins to look so much more alive.
Longevity is no longer passive or drudgery. It is something active: a choice, a practice, a philosophy. To survive is not only to keep breathing. It is to keep noticing. To keep choosing life, over and over, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.
