Borrowed Time

It's the Ides of March, it's actually SNOWING (and pretty hard) outside my window, and Easter is only a week away. Met yesterday with my new medical oncologist, who yes does seem awfully young to be a real Doctor, and who pretty much told me what I'd already expected to hear all along: it IS a tumor, it is malignant, and it is already fairly well advanced. The good news is that there is no sign of any metastasis to my brain, so my former wife's quip about that as a possible explanation for my stubborn, pig-headedness is absolutely without scientific foundation.

Surgery isn't really an option (since one of my lymph nodes is already involved -- something I also already knew from the very first X-Ray), so the treatment plan it to begin fairly aggressive chemotherapy the week after Easter. Probably COULD have started the week before Easter, but I'm really looking forward to preaching on Easter, especially since a lot of my family are going to be here visiting, and I want to be in tip-top shape when I step into the pulpit for what could well be the last time in a long time. Or at least in as tip-top shape as someone with a fairly-advanced inoperable lung cancer can be before starting aggressive chemotherapy....

I'm not going to go into much more detail about the medical aspects of my illness; it's just trivia, really -- important for my medical caregivers (and for me to understand personally in order to make sound decisions about my course of treatment), but apart from that simply a distraction. My struggle is really more of a spiritual one -- coming to terms with what my friend and colleague Forrest Church (now also struggling with cancer) has called "the dual reality of being alive and having to die." I've quoted that passage in virtually every memorial service I've conducted in the past decade, including at my own mother's service last summer. I quote it because it's true, and because I can't think of any way to say it better myself.

We're all living on borrowed time, whether we think about it much or not. It's a little like having a mortgage -- you don't think that much about the fact that the bank REALLY owns your home until they actually show up to foreclose. So long as we can keep making those monthly payments, life is good; but we ignore the amortization table at our own peril. À la Mort -- to the death. But I don't want to seem too morbid about it either. Because every day also offers us a new lease on life, if only we are willing to seize it.

The most amusing thing about all of yesterday's news was how often I was told (by trained medical professionals, no less) that I was "still a young man in good shape." It's certainly been a long time since anyone has said THAT to me with a straight face!