your relationship with certainty vapourises

I thought that this was so well expressed: "For most of us who live in the affluent western world, the future is predicated on some sense of certainty - but after cancer your relationship with certainty vaporises". I've not had cancer but I have been diagnosed with elevated cholesterol levels and seen my mother nearly die from a heart attack from the same cause which has, quietly, been a sobering thing especially as after 45 years of age the risks are increased. I would say that my relationship with certainty is vapourising. Especially as we're seeing a lot of death that touches us personally. This morning we had the news that my wife's nan just died, just over a year ago a friend of ours who was about my age died of a cerebral haemorrhage ... Yep, I've definitly reached that age when intimations of mortality turn up the volume just as the first signs of physical deafness seem to be hinting at their existence [got my dad's genetic heritage to thank for that one, I suspect].

And this article is pretty helpful; you don't need to have gone through quite such a dramatic health scare to begin to realise at a gut-level that mortality is a fact not a tale told of far away places you will never visit. For some people it is unavoidable; the insecurities of living in poverty, areas of warfare or famine or with AIDS .... that is the everyday reality for millions. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the psychology and spirituality of living near death in international relations ...

Certainly we clearly need to learn how to better respond to those living plausibly closer to G Reaper Esq than we ourselves. The article points out all those bad habits borne of embarrasment and unwillingness to accompany the suffering and dying in their journey through the valley of the shadow of death. So what are the words we should say, the questions we should ask? What difference should it make to our lives?

""En el mundo del Destine, no hay statistica" - In the world of destiny, there are no statistics (attributed to Martin Alberto Filches and quoted in Stuart Archer Cohen's The Stone Angels" That's certainly true; the stats can't tell you which category in the stats you're going to be in; when the existential moments come the fact that you're more likely to be this, that or the other makes no diference: Schrodinger's cat is either dead or alive you or I are one thing or the other and the stats won't change that: they simply assimilate you in one category or another, but we have to live it.

It is here that a life kept hidden in God for eternity becomes something of a comfort; it's here that the living One who who died, walking with us, makes a kind of sense, it is here that resurrection bwecomes more than a cipher for simple immortality but rather a strength to face the processes of mortality ...

I also found this reflection helpful:
" I read obituaries and always look at the dates of birth. Those of my vintage have often died "after a long battle with cancer". People with cancer have enough to deal with without feeling that every day of their lives must be a battle with the disease. People with bad hearts aren't assumed to be at war with their bypasses. You don't see "X died after a long battle with heart disease" - why should people with cancer be expected to take up arms? It is better to see cancer as a journey. Everyone says that being positive helps you to come through, and being positive during a journey seems easier to me than being positive during a war in which the enemy is all around you.". I'm interested in the metaphors we use when they have a military air: often they expose a reliance on the myth of redemptive violence, which in a case like this may be fair enough [at least no other people are harmed in the playing-out of the metaphor]. However, there is a serious point here: given that we live by metaphors [yes I'm pretty convinced by Lakoff and Johnson] which ones help us to face [there's another one] the trials [and another] of illness and impending mortality? Perhaps journeying is less stressful than a battlefield ... and therefore more helpful to recovery? Can we be helped to heal by the metaphors we live by?

And the final reflection is also ponderful: " wondering how this interesting journey has changed me so far. I think I'm not as mean as I used to be, as quick to relish blame and find fault, as inclined to jump on board the mean ship schadenfreude. I've got a life and I'm going to keep it " ...

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Melanie McFadyean: 21 things I would never have known if I'd never had cancer: