from
The ABC of Dying
in
Necessary Losses
by Judith Viorst
Simon & Shuster
In 1984, I watched three women I loved very dearly die of cancer. All
of them in their fifties, all of them vitally in life, they -- all of
them in cruel prematurity -- died. One faced her fate straight
on -- she
knew she was dying, she talked about death, she calmly accepted it. One,
knowing death was near and wishing to choose her moment of dying, hoarded
pills and committed suicide. And one, the blond-haired, blue-eyed interloper
I'd known since birth -- my sister Lois -- fought against her death,
until the moment she closed her eyes, with awesome ferocity.
Lois -- the great rival of my childhood, the tagalong pest I had come
so deeply to love -- has died of cancer in the autumn of this awful year,
just as I sit down to write this chapter. She died in her bed at home, and,
watching her during those last hours, I believe that she died free of pain
and free of fear. But as long as she was conscious, she maintained her defiance
of death -- she was out to beat it.
For although Lois knew very well indeed that she had a fatal illness,
she didn't intend to let it push her around. So she wrote her will, settled
her affairs, held some discussions with her husband and children and then
-- having
thoroughly dealt with the administrative details -- she turned from death
and concentrated on life. Furthermore, she concentrated not on mere survival
but on enjoying whatever there was to be enjoyed, refusing to let the limits
imposed by her steadily failing body intrude upon her pleasures or her relationships.
When tennis -- her great passion -- was no longer possible, she bit
her lip and put her racquet away, directing her athlete's body toward more
sedentary activities, becoming a vigorous knitter, reader, writer. In the
last few months of her illness, with her energies further depleted, her
weight at ninety-five pounds, her eyesight dim, she planned new
adaptations -- could
she, perhaps, learn a foreign language on cassettes? In the last week of
her life she sent me her recipe for Chinese spicy noodles (a dried noodle
in the envelope, to make sure that I purchased the right kind), and through
the blur of her heavy-duty pain killers still remembered to ask about my
health. She never became obsessed with herself -- even in the last
week -- obsessed
with her sickness, her suffering, her fate. And she never, until the coma
of her final day of life, broke her connections with the people she loved.
Nor did she say goodbye, because she wasn't planning to leave; she was
planning -- or at least trying her damnedest -- to live. "Some
of us do survive," she once told me, "and why not focus on hope
instead
of despair?" And for most of the hard four years during which she
battled
her spreading cancer, she focused on hope.
Now make no mistake: My sister was neither a martyr nor a saint. She
had her times of terror and despair, times when she couldn't do anything
because her body was wracked with nausea and pain, times when she bitched
and wept and moaned and asked -- only part in jest -- what did
I do? What did I do to deserve this? But most of the time she didn't cry,
and she didn't brood about dying. She was fighting to live, and she was
fighting to win. She believed until the end that if a person really tried,
the human spirit could triumph over biology. And although she didn't beat
death, we watched her play -- she really did play -- a championship
game.
There are people like Lois at every age and with all kinds of fatal ailments
who hang on to hope, who fight to stay alive, trusting in will, in spirit,
in remissions, in brand-new miracle drugs or -- in miracles. "Don't
they know they can't make it?" we may wonder, having heard the grim
statistics.
But they have heard them too, and what they do is tell us, and themselves,
"I'm not a statistic."
In videotapes about a thirty-nine-year-old
doctor painfully dying of cancer, he -- and his wife and a brother and
doctors and clergymen -- describe his harrowing struggle to stay alive.
In his final weeks, refusing to quit, he insisted on being fed through a
vein in his neck and as the pain worsened he grew so dependent upon narcotic
drugs that he underwent -- observers agreed -- a personality change.
Some doctors have said that by his insistence on taking command of his case,
this man prolonged his life -- unnecessarily. But just before he died,
when asked by his wife if his fight for survival had been worth it, he answered
with an unequivocal "Yes."
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