Life Is More Than Just Waiting for The End

Each month Kathleen Clohessy, R.N., offers a new perspective on living with a terminal illness. Kathleen comes to SevenPonds with 25 years experience as a registered nurse caring for families and children facing life-threatening illness. She began her career in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Nassau County Medical Center in New York, and, after relocating to California, spent 15 years as an R.N. and Assistant Nurse Manager at the Pediatric Oncology & Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Lucille Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. She uses her extensive personal knowledge and expertise to enlighten our readers regarding the challenges associated with chronic illness and their profound effects on family relationships and human dynamics.  

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver

There’s something almost silly about the term “terminal illness.” After all, life is a terminal illness. We are all born; we all live; and we all die. Not one of us is guaranteed 80 years, 80 months, or even 80 seconds. That we take for granted the fact that we will wake to see another sunrise is a curiously human conceit.

Not even the “terminally ill” have a window into the future, and denial, even in the face of tragic news, is powerful, indeed. A terminal diagnosis doesn’t prevent us from thinking of death as a far away abstraction. But it can be a powerful reminder that our lives are defined by the choices we make.

Mary was a striking, elegant woman of 85 when she learned that she had breast cancer.

The news shocked and frightened her, but from the outset it was clear that she was not going to allow the diagnosis to derail her life.

A “lady” in every sense of the word, Mary was not the type of woman to let her emotions show. Fiercely independent and always in control, she sat unflinching in her doctor’s office, her face a mask.

“What do you recommend,” she asked, a touch of defiance in her voice.

“Surgery to remove the tumor, definitely” the doctor answered almost instantly. “Then some chemo, perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Mary asked.

Her doctor explained that chemotherapy had been shown to be of little benefit to women with breast cancer who were over the age of 80. It would almost certainly cause some side effects, and would most likely not prolong her life.

“Fine,” Mary said–again a bit defiantly. “Then just cut the damn thing out and let me get on with my life!”

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Mary weathered her surgery beautifully. One month later, she left on a trip to Rome with her granddaughter and had, as she described it “the time of my life.” “Those Italian men are so handsome!” she said, grinning mischievously. 

“Nothing has ever freed me to enjoy myself as much as knowing that I have this disease,” she said later. “I can finally let go and do whatever I want to do. What have I got to lose?”

What, indeed?

Certainly, none of us would ever wish for a cancer diagnosis. We all strive for health and vitality, and everyone grieves when it is suddenly taken away. But we suffer so much more deeply when we learn that we are dying too late to enjoy the time we have left — when disease and infirmity have taken over, and we no longer have the stamina to do the things we wish we had done.

Which is, of course, the point.

In his seminal book “A Year to Live,” Stephen Levine writes,

“Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How we appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind. “

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Stephen is gone now, but his words remind us of the inescapable truth that, whether or not we have been told we have a terminal illness, we do.

So for heaven’s sake, live your life.

Say the things you want to say. Find the courage to speak your truth.

Go to Rome.

Live each moment as if it is your last.

Because some day it will be. And not one of us knows when that day will come.