Farewell

I knew AW for only a brief time. We shared a shift as volunteers on a breast-cancer hotline until a few weeks ago, when her metastatic disease flared up and she moved away to be closer to one of her adult children. A few days ago, I tried to call her and couldn't reach her. Yesterday I learned she had died at the age of 86, many years after her initial diagnosis. Even in the short time I knew her—less than a year—AW taught me some valuable lessons by example:

1. Carry on with your commitments, no matter what, even if your legs are so swollen and inflamed with lymphedema you can barely shuffle in your walker, because "what am I going to do, sit around at home and feel sorry for myself?"

2. Read like a madwoman. Borrow books. Lend books.

3. No matter how often people inquire about your obvious discomfort, change the subject to ... fiction. Disease is boring. Fiction is interesting. "I just finished this. Want to read it?"

4. Take the lead in staying in touch with old friends. Call them, sympathize with them about their troubles. Do not dwell on yours.

5. Reach out to the newbies. Resist feeling threatened by their (relative) youth and their, say, computer skills. Take advantage of those skills. Let them log your calls for you. And let them listen in on your calls and learn life lessons from you.

Things that go bump in the night

One of the awful aspects of having a life-threatening disease is the constant awareness of death and the overwhelming significance it lends to ordinary activities. I remember when I was a kid hearing the word deathbed for the first time and being delighted by the possibilities. My elder brother and I spent a hilarious afternoon coming up with silly death terms: If deathbed was where you died, then deathpanties were what you wore to die in, and deathtoilet was where you had your last elimination, and deathfood was your last meal, and deathjuice your last drink, and so forth. It was excruciatingly funny to a 5-year-old.

But it's not so funny to a 50-something. One of the things I fear about the possibility of getting a diagnosis that my cancer has metastasized isn't so much the shortening of my life, though I fear that, or the pain, though I fear that a lot, but the unremitting awareness that each action might be my last—the last book I read, the last letter I write, the last thought I utter, the last movie I see—and the heavy responsibility of choosing well and making it count. All that hyperconsciousness and hyperconscientiousness would take the haphazard pleasures out of the end of life and make the whole thing so damn stressful.

Cheating for atheists

If you're an atheist, as I think I am, the scariest thing is the notion of death as total annihilation. It may be cheating, but I've allowed myself to find comfort in a passage of Ram Dass's Still Here: "To be here for fifty to eighty years only to be annihilated at the end just doesn't make sense. Nothing else in the universe is that inefficient ... A Tibetan friend of mine, Gelek Rinpoche ... says that the universe is made of matter, energy and consciousness. How can we deny this when we encounter the existence of our own and others' consciousness every single day? And how can we assume that consciousness is annihilated just because the body, the matter, gives out? Matter and energy are not destroyed—just converted into each other. I'll bet that consciousness can't be destroyed either."

Yoga and death

One of my teachers once described yoga as practice for death. I'm not sure precisely what she meant, but it feels true to me. Indeed, the final and most important pose in every practice is savasana, or corpse pose, in which you lie supine on your mat, often with a blanket draped over you (like a shroud), and release all your muscles, allowing the (dead) weight of your body to sink into the floor. As in meditation, you focus your attention on your breath and resist the temptation to scratch, fidget, adjust your limbs. Slowly, mysteriously, you begin to detach from your physical self. Dispassionately, you observe itches and twinges almost as though they were happening to someone else. And as you lie there, relaxed, dispelling discomfort with your breath, and accepting any residue that remains, you begin to feel that this might be something like death—and, incredibly, you can handle it.

For the year or more during which I was undergoing intensive treatment for breast cancer, I was beset with relentless anxiety about dying—except during yoga. The deep, slow breathing alone helped calm me on a physiological level. And the twists and stretches and flexes seemed to wring out the nervous energy that otherwise coagulated in my gut as dread. Letting go of any "goal" for each posture and focusing instead on the process, the actual experience, allowed me to yield to the present. Being fully in the present freed me (temporarily) from my fears about the future—particularly my fear of death.

In addition, there was something about recapitulating the movements of thousands of generations of yogis before me that made me feel as if I were part of an ageless process, and ageless myself—like a rock or a drop of water or air, eternal. And strangely, it was comforting instead of terrifying.

Maybe that's just me. And even I, enthusiast that I am, can achieve that equanimity only for moments at a time. But those moments are delicious and leave me hungry for more.