Elizabeth’s Choice: The End of Terror

You are going to die.  Everyone you love and care about will, too.

That does not make you unique.  The same will happen to me, of course, and everyone else who is living today, just as it has happened to everyone who preceded us.  Humans are mortal.  Even if one believes in the afterlife, we know that it is just that–the afterlife.  When we die, our time on this earth is at an end.

As might be expected, this is not an easy thing for any of us to face.  It’s hard enough being human without thinking every day that in but a scant few years, decades at most, everything you’re doing will be done.  Each of us is born dying, and if you spend too much time thinking about that you’re liable to just want to go sit in a corner for a few dozen years.  And so we do our best to ignore the unpleasantness as best we can, and resent those who remind us that none of us is getting out of this life alive.

People like Elizabeth Edwards.Elizabeth Edwards is dying.  She has stage four breast cancer that has spread to her bones, and possibly her lungs.  She may die slowly — good and proper treatment may give her several years.  But she doesn’t have forever.  All too soon, despite her doctors’ best efforts, the cancer will spread.  All too soon, it will kill her.  It is, as she herself noted, treatable, but not curable.

That dos not make Elizabeth Edwards unique; there are thousands, if not millions, of Americans dying of something incurable.  It may be cancer,  AIDS, diabetes, hypertension or simply too many worn-out systems from a long, healthy life.  They may be acutely aware of it each of the seven times a day they take their medication, or they may be blissfully unaware of the mortal threat until it is too late.  But they are, all of them, dying just the same.

What makes Elizabeth Edwards unique is that her husband is seeking the presidency. 

There was much speculation when news first surfaced of Edwards’ recurring cancer that her husband, John, would suspend his campaign, and go home to be with his wife.  To grieve with her and simply spend the rest of her life waiting for the inevitable.  It had to be tempting. 

But Elizabeth Edwards decided to go on.  And I say that deliberately; I do not believe this was her husband’s decision, but hers.  And I believe that like most of us, she believed in someone she loved and believed in doing the best we can in the time we have.  This is going to be John Edwards’ last chance at the presidency; he’s not going to be a player in 2012 unless he wins.  Elizabeth knows that.  And she knows that whether John is president of the United States or a guy who quit running to stay with his wife, she’s still got the same chance of being alive in 2010. 

And so she chose to live, to view cancer as what it is: the thing that will kill her some day. 

We all have something that will kill us some day.  Elizabeth Edwards just happens to know what her something is.

The American writer Frank Herbert once wrote, “To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”  That is how Elizabeth and John Edwards are living their lives: free of terror.  Elizabeth will die someday, perhaps someday soon.  So will you.  So will I.

On “60 Minutes,” Elizabeth Edwards said, “You know, you really have two choices here. I mean, either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday, or you start dying.”  That’s the choice all of us face: to surrender to fear of our own mortality, or to accept that we will die some day, and that while we live, we must live.