“I’m Dr. Peter Sweeny,” he said.
“I know you’re a doctor. You don’t have to wave it in my face. Don’t you know the title is only useful for directing mail, to distinguish you from all the unpretentious Mr. Peter Sweenys of the world?”
The doctor reclined his head a couple of millimeters, as if I had been spitting.
“Sorry,” I said, “I guess I’m a little stressed out. So what if you call yourself doctor? You worked hard for the right to plunge your hand inside the human body! Elbow deep in viscera all day, maybe you want to let everyone know you’re a doctor so they won’t offer you offal or a plate of haggis. What right have I to cast judgment on a man’s prefix?”
“You seem pretty wound up, there. What can I do for you?”
“I’m pretty sure I have cancer,” I said. “And I just want you to do whatever you have to do to confirm or deny it.”
“What kind of cancer do you think you have?”
“What kind? I don’t know. What’s the worst sort?”
“Well, prostate cancer’s the most common for men in your age bracket.”
“You’re the same age as me!”
“OK-our age bracket.”
“Well, my cancer won’t be the most common, that much I can tell you. What’s the worst one? And I mean the absolute worst.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes.”
“If I smoked, the cancer I wouldn’t want for myself, for fear of kicking myself all the way to the grave, is lung cancer.”
“Lung cancer. I knew it! That’s the one. That’s what I’ve got.”
“You seem pretty certain.”
“I am certain.”
Even though he was obscured behind his desk, he made a shift as though he’d put his hand on his hip. “All right,” he said finally, “I’ll order the tests. They aren’t pleasant.”
“Neither is lung cancer.”
“You’re right about that.”
I won’t detail the weeks that followed- the intrusive tests, the cruel waiting periods, the stomach-pummeling anxiety. Of course Jasper didn’t notice anything, but Anouk sensed something was wrong. She kept hounding me to tell her what it was, but I was tight-lipped about it. I wanted to be 100 percent sure before I told anyone. I didn’t want to get their hopes up.
It was a month later when I went back to Dr. Sweeny’s office to hear the results. In the waiting period I had been plagued with hope, and nothing I could do could put those pesky optimistic feelings to rest.
“Come in, Mr. Dean. How are you feeling?”
“Let’s not waste time. It’s cancer, isn’t it?”
“It sure is.”
In the old days the medical profession didn’t tell you that you were dying. It was considered a breach of ethics. Now the reverse is true. Now they can’t wait to tell you.
“Lung cancer?”
“I’m afraid so. How did you know?”
Christ! It was true! I was being murdered by my own body! I burst out laughing.
Then I stopped laughing- I remembered why I had started.
I left the doctor’s office in a daze. So! It turned out my lifelong pessimistic stance was entirely justified. Imagine if I had been optimistic all this time! Wouldn’t I be feeling ripped off right about now? Yes, I was in for a slow, violent death. And I don’t sleep peacefully, so dying peacefully in my sleep was out of the question. The best I could hope for was that maybe I’d die fitfully in my sleep. Oh my God- suddenly all the other possible deaths had slipped into the unlikely. How often does a man dying of cancer suddenly choke to death on a chicken bone? Or get decapitated by jumping up and down on his bed, forgetful of the ceiling fan? Or die from asbestos poisoning or obesity? No, there just wasn’t enough time to get really, fatally fat. If anything, my illness was probably going to make me thinner.
Over the following weeks I was an emotional wreck. The slightest thing sent me into tears. I cried at television ads, at the autumn leaves turning brown. One night Jasper came in and caught me sobbing over the death of some idiotic pop star I’d never even heard of. He’d been shot in the head and died instantly, lucky bastard!
What made me cry was the fear that I’d be unable to kill myself when my quality of life dropped below par, when my daily task became choosing between pain and painkillers, between the ravages of the disease and the destruction of the treatment. Even with my lifelong meditation on death, my existence had still seemed something permanent and stable on the planet Earth- something dependable, like igneous rock. Now that cancers were metastasizing to their heart’s content, atheism seemed like a pretty cruel thing to do to myself. I begged my brain to reconsider. I thought: Won’t I survive somewhere, in some form? Can I believe it? Please? Pretty please can I believe in the everlasting soul? In heaven or angels or paradise with sixteen beautiful virgins waiting for me? Pretty please can I believe that? Look, I don’t even need the sixteen beautiful virgins. There could be just one woman, old and ugly, and she doesn’t even have to be a virgin, she could be the town bike of the ever-after. In fact, there could be no women at all, and it doesn’t have to be paradise, it could be a wasteland- hell, it could even be hell, because while suffering the torments of a lake of fire, at least I’d be around to yell “Ouch!” Could I believe in that, please?
All the other afterlife scenarios are just not comforting. Reincarnation without continuance of this consciousness- I just don’t see the point in getting excited about it. And the least comforting eternity scenario of all time, one that is growing daily in popularity, one that people never stop telling me about, is that I will die but my energy will live on.
My energy, ladies and gentlemen.
Is my energy going to read books and see movies? Is my energy going to sink languidly into a hot bath or laugh until its sides ache? Let’s be clear: I die, my energy scatters and dissolves into Mother Earth. And I’m supposed to be thrilled by this idea? That’s as good to me as if you told me my brain and body die but my body odor lives on to stink up future generations. I mean, really. My energy.
But can’t I prolong my existence anywhere? My actual existence, not some positively charged shadow? No, I just can’t convince myself that the soul is anything other than the romantic name we have given to consciousness so we can believe it doesn’t tear or stain.
So, then, the rest of my life was going to be an accumulation of physical pain, mental anguish, and suffering. Normally I could handle it. But the problem was, until I died I’d be thinking only about my death. I decided that if I couldn’t spend one single day without thinking, I’d kill myself. Why not? Why should I struggle against my death? I couldn’t possibly win. And even if by some miracle I did beat this round with cancer, what about the next? And the next? I have no talent for futility. What’s the point of fighting a losing battle? To give a man dignity? I have no talent for dignity either. Never saw the point in it, and when I hear someone say, “At least I have my dignity,” I think, “You just lost it by saying that.”
The next day I woke and resolved not to think about anything the whole day. Then I thought: I’m thinking now, aren’t I? Then I thought: My death my death my death my death my gruesome painful sobbing death!