05/14/2023
FYI, my presentation at the Conference in Salt Lake City last month in which I spoke about my journey with stage four cancer. I invited participants to reflect on how we are ALL terminal and how the process of dying can be, if we choose, about living fully. My cancer journey has helped me appreciate that a shorter life of profound meaning has beauty that a longer life not deeply lived might lack. I knew that given our death-averse culture, addressing this issue so directly — particularly at a medical conference filled with doctors, scientists, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies — would be confronting, but we need to see a change in our national discourse around death and dying and foster more open and honest discussion. The speech unexpectedly got a standing ovation! I also spoke about the mental health challenges of navigating stage 4 cancer, and how traveling and working all over the world taught me that while everything changes, and while we often can’t control external events, we get to choose how to interpret and live with them. I reflected on all the unexpected beauty in illness, how the courage, resilience, and generosity I've encountered while dealing with this illness has been every bit as inspiring as the unexpected love, grace, and hope I encountered in my professional life in the darkest of situations: prison cells, massacre sites, bombed out buildings, even as survivors recounted to me some of the most vulnerable and terrifying parts of their lives. This tangle of beauty and pain is well articulated by Desmond Tutu : “Discovering more joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken.” I ended by recalling the 13th century poet Rumi’s assertion, “Through love all pain will turn to medicine” and invited everyone to decide on, claim, and implement your own loving way – a way that will help make medicine of your pain. Knowing that, for all of us, the journey to death is inevitable, what is the most important thing you can choose to do, and with whom…. this year, this month, this very day? .
https://youtu.be/k99iUOctQYY
