“What will dying be like?” my father asks his oncologist.
Dad was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 1999. I came home from school and Mum sat my brother and I down to tell us the news, Dad unable to tell us himself. We weren’t given a prognosis, but that didn’t stop us guessing. We thought maybe a few years.
That conversation took place last year—a good 15 years after his diagnosis. It was the first time I think we all realised there was nothing more they could do for him. We certainly didn’t expect Dad to make it to Christmas. But here we are, a new year and he is still hanging on. He’s always been stubborn.
How he reacted when his oncologist talked to him about dying, I will never know. He’s unable to tell me now, and it’s not the kind of question you can ask someone who’s of the “stiff upper lip” generation. If it wasn’t for my Mum telling me he’d had the conversation, I wouldn’t have known he’d even asked.
Watching him now, bed-bound in a palliative care ward in Sydney, cancer gnawing away at his bones and organs like a slow-spreading poison, I’ve been thinking a lot about dying – from a medical, spiritual and philosophical perspective.
So it came as a bit of a shock to read the headline: “Dying of cancer is the best death” on a news site over the weekend. It’s an article written by the former editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith, who argues that of all the ways to die, cancer is the best.
I came across it on the weekend just after I’d flown back to Melbourne from Sydney after spending close to a month by my dad’s bedside. I’d returned home to photograph a wedding after a teary goodbye.
The headline stopped me in my tracks. I thought: has this guy even seen someone die of cancer? Would he like to come with me to my dad’s palliative care unit, to see the people, my father included, losing their dignity, their voice, their continence, their ability to think and reason, to breathe?
The answer to the question, “How will I die?” is something only few of us will be able to know with any certainty. We could be aboard a plane that crashes in bad weather, or we could receive a diagnosis like my dad. Richard Smith says the latter is preferable because we can plan, we can prepare, and we can do what we like with our remaining time.
He writes of the benefits of dying from cancer: “You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion.”
This he says is “achievable with love, morphine, and whisky.” Before calling for a stop to “wasting billions trying to cure cancer”.
The reality that I’ve witnessed is not so rosy. Endless appointments, constant conversations with people about how you are, dark nights of despair and a battle to remain positive, all the while nursing a silent, private grief that no one else really understands. Yes, there are the moments of joy that pierce through the cloud that hangs overhead: a good meal with friends, a night out at the theatre, listening to a favourite song, a wedding, a hug from a loved one. But overall, there is no escape from the knowledge that your life is ending. As my friend who recently lost her own mother said to me so eloquently in a text message the other day: “cancer is poo.”
And as for stopping research into a cure for cancer… if it wasn’t for new (expensive) drugs, I wouldn’t have known my Dad as an adult, he would never have walked me down the aisle at my wedding in 2013. We would have said goodbye to him a long time ago. Should children with cancer be hopeful one day there might be a cure? Or are they to be thrown onto the heap of people who were able to “die well”?
No doubt when he asked the oncologist how he would die, my dad was also informed of the many ways modern medicine could ease the pain and was reassured that there was nothing to be anxious about. It’s true; there are many routes available for “symptom management” at end of life (as they like to call it in palliative care).
But there is one symptom no one can treat.
Dr Megan Best, who has worked at the Hammondcare facility where my dad is currently residing said in 2013 at a Council of the Ageing event: “…suffering is not a medical problem. There is no medical answer. Suffering is an existential problem that extends beyond physical pain. It’s influenced by psychological, cultural and spiritual factors… Often the physical pain can be dealt with, and the suffering will remain.”
You can be physically painless and still tortured mentally by the fear of death, of loneliness, of failure, of regret, of the fear of the unknown.
Of course, the reality is, whether or not we have a “diagnosis”, we are all dying. But most of us manage to push that thought from our minds. A diagnosis just brings our mortality into clear view – a place it never really leaves.
The truth, which Richard Smith misses entirely, is that there is no such thing as “the best death”. Even Dr Best speaks of “a good death”. Yes, there can be a physically “pain free” death. But I don’t believe there is such a thing as a good, or a better, or a best death.
Death is death. Whether it occurs under the shroud of morphine, in your sleep, while going for a run, crossing the road, fighting a bushfire, or flying over the Java Sea, death is still the victor. Death robs us of our personhood, our relationships, our hope. It is the final curse, which only God can undo.
Watching my dad slowly die, losing his mind as the cancer throughout his skull affects his brain, watching his movements and speech slow, his appetite decline, I see the raging indignity of death and I want to scream at Richard Smith: this is not the best way to die.
The best way to die is knowing that death has been defeated, that there will be a day with no more tears and pain, where there is no sun, because God himself is the light. Richard Smith, you can have cancer. I will take hope any day.
Sophie Timothy is a staff writer for Eternity Christian News. She’s been writing for Eternity since 2010. She’s also a wedding and portrait photographer, based in Melbourne and married to Tom.
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