He seemed to age 5 years in the passage of a few months. He had been a very youthful 77-year-old before the chemotherapy. His hair fell out, he lost weight, and he was terribly fatigued. But with a poor prognosis, even with chemotherapy, I wondered if he should visit that additional suffering on himself. If chemotherapy offered any real certainty of recovery, I would have favored it. He wanted to live for the sheer joy he felt in life.Īs we talked that day, it became clear that his fundamental question was whether or not he should undergo chemotherapy, which held no clear promise of recovery. He wanted to live for all the unwritten books he felt he still had in him. He wanted, above all, to live and live and live. So the depression caused by his disappointment was uncharacteristic of him, and, in the light of a life-threatening cancer, that loss now seemed trivial to him. He lived almost entirely absorbed in a world of ideas, delighting in what life brought him every day. He fought his way up from the slums of New York and New Haven into a life as a public intellectual that suited him perfectly. Born in a Russian-Jewish community near Minsk, he came to the United States with his parents when he was age 3. If anyone I have ever known loved life, my father did. Intuitively, my father felt certain that there was a connection between the deep sense of loss he had felt and the appearance of the cancer in his gut. Later, his physician found prostate cancer that had metastasized to his lung. Six months later, a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was diagnosed in his abdomen. “I felt like my gut was just torn out of me,” he told me as we talked about the diagnosis in his cluttered book-lined study. Six months earlier he had suffered a deep disappointment about a book project he had been working on. His physician told him he might have 6 months to live. In 1980 my father, Max Lerner, was diagnosed with cancer.

I will tell you three stories about hope in cancer. There is always something worth hoping for in the face of a difficult illness. A wise man once said to a group of cancer patients in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program: “Above all, never give up hope.” The truth in those simple words has stayed with me through the years. This chapter is about the uses of hope in cancer. On Never Giving Up Hope: Three Stories Wrestling with the Angel Paths of Hope and Ways of Healing Chapter One Collaborative for Health and Environment (CHE).The Courage & Renewal Network of Northern California.

Recalled by life by anthony j sattilaro