The Good Short Life
Posted 7/14/2011
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This is a remarkable essay from the New York Times. The author, Dudley Clendinen, has been diagnosed with ALS, not with cancer. However, his thoughts and beliefs will resonate with anyone who has been diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening illness. Obviously, ALS is inevitably a fatal disease. Breast cancer usually is not. However, none of us receive a promise that we will stay well, and most of us struggle with worries re how we would manage should the cancer recur. You may well disagree with his decisions, but do read it. I give you the beginning and a link:
The Good Short Life
By DUDLEY CLENDINEN
BALTIMORE
I HAVE wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.
"We need to go buy you a pistol, don't we?" he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.
"Yes, Sweet Thing," I said, with a smile. "We do."
I loved him for that.
I love them all. I am acutely lucky in my family and friends, and in my daughter, my work and my life. But I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., more kindly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, for the great Yankee hitter and first baseman who was told he had it in 1939, accepted the verdict with such famous grace, and died less than two years later. He was almost 38.
I sometimes call it Lou, in his honor, and because the familiar feels less threatening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/opinion/sunday/10als.html?pagewanted=all
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