By Philip Cooper '57
Most
of us take words for granted. They are simply language, our
vocabulary. It wasn't until college, when I began to work crossword
puzzles and had to write papers, that words, in and of themselves,
began to fascinate me. I learned that each word has a very specific
meaning, all its own, and could be used to communicate more exactly.
A part of the quality of a word was its precision.
As a boy, I had, of course, learned that "the pen is mightier than the sword," but I never fully realized the power of words until much later, after I began my business career, when it was often necessary to use words--either written or spoken--to get something accomplished. Then, when I started some serious creative writing, I discovered that words, and combinations of words, like notes or colors, could be used to create written music--or written paintings. Words were beautiful too.
Now, many words have special meaning for me: love, forgiveness, God, to name a few. But there is one word that has recently changed my life. That word is "cancer."
As for most of us, this word was a part of my vocabulary, used to describe a disease that others had or a condition that needed to be cured. I had even suggested in my consulting business that some companies had "cancers," characteristics that could be expunged only by executive surgery. It was a dramatic and effective metaphor.
But no other word has had so dramatic or effective an impact on me as the word "cancer," as used by my doctor when he came to greet me in the recovery room. He had performed a biopsy on my rectum, a place that had been uncomfortable for some months, and although he and some other doctors had used the word "cancer" as a possibility, each had encouraged me to believe that this spot was a fissure--not a pleasant condition but certainly repairable. I was lulled into a false sense of ease, even as I went into the operating room. I was still recovering from the anesthesia when my doctor said, without platitude or prelude, "It is cancer." Perhaps it is just as well that I was still somewhat numb.
Since then, the word "cancer" has taken on a new significance for me. It now has the power to affect me--not only on the sympathetic and understanding me that I present to others but also the visceral me, the me that lives inside me. I am no longer on the outside, looking in at cancer--an abstraction I might use in my business--but on the inside, looking out at those who are still free of what Webster's calls, among other things, "a malignant evil that corrodes slowly and fatally." It's a little like the difference in the sound of a train whistle when it's approaching and when it's retreating.
Now I feel as though "cancer" is a kind of magic password that initiated me to some special fraternity with strenuous rituals and a mystic aura, where people exchange looks like secret handshakes. I did not apply for this lifetime membership but was somehow randomly selected.
The word "cancer" has also become magnetic. It glows from its previous place in the darkness of my consciousness to a brightly lit awareness where it seems to be all around me. It blinks at me from articles in newspapers and magazines, from stories I would never have read before but now devour in my hunger for information. It has drawn my friends, my family, even my neighbors to me, and me to all of them, in a new--or at least renewed--intimacy that I'm sorry we don't exhibit on a more regular, noncrisis basis.
Although I have not yet had this experience personally, I've learned that for some patients, cancer means the invasion of the body by an alien force. They are encouraged to visualize the marshaling of internal armies to repel this marauder. Perhaps this sensation will yet come to me, and I will practice the mental imagery of directing intense blue and healing light to the ulcerous mass two by four centimeters just inside me, on the wall of my rectum.
At 63, I have habitually walked three miles a day and worked out three times a week at a gym. I still have some of my hair, not too much of a gut, and have taken a certain pride in looking and feeling somewhat younger than I am. But last week, still hobbled by my surgery, I had trouble hurrying to cross the street before the oncoming traffic. I've become hyperaware of the ages (many younger than mine) and causes of death (so many from cancer) in my daily scan of the obituaries. "Cancer," glaring at me like some neon sign, has made me begin to feel old.
Oddly enough, the one feeling the word "cancer" has not yet evoked in me is fear. In what I think of as a demonstration of grim optimism, my doctor told me that if I had to have cancer, this was the kind to have. It involves radiation and chemotherapy, with all the discomfort and unpleasantness that both of these therapies imply: loss of hair, sterility, impotence, incontinence. But the chances of recovery are "better than 80 percent," he said. And as the lyrics of a popular Annie Lenox song go, "Dying is easy; it's living that scares me today."
Ghoulish as this may sound to some, I have decided to keep a journal of this whole experience, putting into words the events and my feelings, my reflections on what happens. Somehow I find the process of articulation of the words to be cathartic. By writing all of this down, I can get this experience out where I can see it within some context. Words have now become my comfort.
I'm sure that to some there are other words that may have meaning of equal or greater import--"heart attack," "Alzheimer's," "stroke," or "AIDS." But for me, that one simple word, "cancer," with all of its nuance and various meanings, has a newly precise and vigorous power in my life. I feel confident that I face my coming therapy with a positivism that will be effective and that I will emerge from this among the 80 percent. At that point, the word "cancer" may take on a still different connotation. But one thing is certain. Because of that word, I can never be the same again.
Editor's Note
In My Life is a new department of the Bulletin that features first-person essays. Readers interested in submitting an essay for publication should first write for editorial guidelines. Address: Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397, or send e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu.
