The Cancer Scolds Explain It All For You

I'm not surprised, but I'm still appalled at the number of people who feel compelled to tell Elizabeth and John Edwards what their priorities "should" be. One of the most common scolds is that they have very young children, and so John Edwards should quit running and devote all his attention to his family.

Well, excuse me. I don't see anyone telling Lynn Cheney to quit her job and take care of Dick, what with his serious cardiac conditions. Come to think of it, I don't hear anyone telling Dick to quit his job so he can stay alive long enough to know his daughter Mary's baby.

We have such a strange, conflicted attitude toward death in this country. And when someone is stricken with something like cancer, we (the societal we) rush to the barricades and insist on an all-out fight - well, to the death, which seems to me is only a form of denial. How dare we have rooms in our lives for anything else?

We are a generation of control freaks, convinced we can master anything with enough effort. We can fix it, or we can wish it away. And when you get cancer, people seem to expect that it should become a full-time job.

~Snip~

Life was funny that way, I said. No one really knows how long they have; I might leave the hospital that night and get hit by a bus, crossing the street on the way to the parking garage. "You can spend whatever time you have left resenting the fact that you don't have more time, or you can just live," I said. "You have a life ahead of you, whether it's a few hours, a few days or a couple of weeks. It's up to you what you want to do with it."

He nodded. The next morning, he died peacefully while they were doing a liver scan.

My point is, I guess, is that whatever Elizabeth Edwards and her husband decide to do with what time she has left is nobody's else's damned business.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-madrak/the-cancer-scolds-explain_b_44245.html