Sunday, September 26, 2010

Losing Andreas

Andreas passed away recently. He was 44, and had brain cancer.  Losing him was another one of the losses in the midst of this journey through cancer.  He was a great help to me in my walk and I hope I had some small impact on his cancer experience as well. His cancer was the more deadly of the two of us, but I'm not being competitive.  I suppose it's a silly thing to think.

He modeled so well a perseverance of character, curiosity, and humor in his attention to rehabilitating himself after each surgery and throughout his treatment. And now, when I feel as if I am losing my patience with the treatment plan I'm on, I think of him and try not to  become the impatient patient that I fear I have become.

It sounds odd... and possibly offensive... to say that any good can come of a thing like cancer. Yet it was in the shared turmoil of treatment regimens that our relationship was deepened.  True, it might have done so in time without cancer, but we never get to know what might have happened, do we?  So, in the sense that I came to know and love this unique wonderful man in the midst of sharing a similar focus on what was immediately important and what was not, I can say something good came out of something most (if not all) of us would consider bad.  And I ask for forgiveness if by saying that I have offended anyone.

We laughed over the tragic things that were happening to us in our pursuit of living. We shared tea and talked about the healing effects of meditation and mindful walking.  I suppose my point is this: without community and shared experience the cancer walk would be a lonely, scary walk indeed.  But there is more to this... and here I expect I might wander a bit because I know my thoughts are scattered.

Losing Andreas was a big loss for me.  And just before Andreas passed away, my father-in-law died... and I was close to him.  And the treatment regimen I chose has taken things away from me that will never come back. Physical functions that I assumed would degrade with time - but still be there - are no longer a part of what I can call "me".  A close friend asked me, tenderly, what it was like to lose some of the sexual function, and I answered, but realized I was close to tears in the midst of my answer. Surprised at my emotion, I realized I have not walked through that particular grief completely.

Lest this turn into a maudlin crying fest (and I have those as well), I know this is just a compacted, telescoped experience of what is, to borrow a phrase from Robinson Jeffers, "...exactly conterminous with human life."

We lose all sorts of things all the time.  Some of the losses are significant (Andreas and my father-in-law are recent examples for me) and some are less so. But all of them, big or little, seem to point to something else that is much bigger, I think.  I know that I am so tied to my body that I have no conscious perception of what losing it will be like.  But I have a very clear, and sometimes painful, image of what loss is about.  And so, I think I have a picture of what that final loss might be like. I don't know, of course, and have no way to know until I get there.  For now, the ones I can handle are enough.

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