I spoke to a cancer fighter...

Last week, I spoke to a cancer fighter. 

When she heard about the news in November last year, she told me her world collapsed. She cried everyday - before meals, after meals, when she was alone, when she was not, before sleeping and in the morning as she laid in bed. 

In her 50s, she told me that she had gone through a battery of tests and endured chemotherapy for the last few months. 

She also talked about her long curly hair right down to her hip. She said that the hair that gave her confidence as a woman was the first to go. 

She even described to me how her hair fell off. 

Initially, it came off when she combed it. After some time, it came off when she casually brushed her scalp with her hand. Then, it came off when she shook her head, no extra help needed. 

But all this while, when she shared with me her medical ordeal, the draining procedure and the helplessness she felt, she was smiling. 

If a reasonable bystander would to view us from afar, observing only her body language without listening in, he would have thought that she was talking about happy times, even sharing a joke or two. 

While my face squirmed at some of the details she was sharing, her face was beaming with a certain unearthly confidence and hope. 

I guess I would never know how it feels to be in her shoe. That moment was just a causal chat up and it is just the tip of the iceberg of what she has to go through and will be going through. I really can't imagine the intensity of emotions for her at the worst of times, and how it can be crushing. 

One day, it would be my turn to confront mortality, and I wish for her strength and courage after a period of pain, emotional trauma and acceptance. 

More importantly, I wish for her anchorage of hope instead of wallowing in a dark pit of resignation and withdrawal. 

I guess the thought of death truly concentrates the mind fabulously. But I believe this is something the healthy will never fully understand. 

For me, it seems like the world is divided into the healthy, or at least we are led to believe so, and those who have to face a certain dreaded outcome with their future completely uncertain.

But that distinction is an illusion because death comes to all of us, regardless of age, wealth and status. 

Of course, the young has the advantage of biological resilience before age catches up, reverses all that, and sets them on the sobering road towards senescence (that is, the condition or process of deterioration with age; loss of a cell's power of division and growth). 

However, such advantage is not always advantageous for them because they lose the precious perspective that mortality brings to a soul who has to contend with it. 

From my dialogue with those who are nearing death or fighting it, I find that there is a certain admirable, even inspiring, serenity and clarity in their thoughts and focus. 

Before that, they admitted that they had lived their lives as if death were other people. The impression I got was that to them, the closest thing to death was a quick glance at the obituary page and then it is back to the sports news for some uplifting updates. 

Or, it is a quick drive pass a makeshift funeral at the void deck and then it is back to what is playing on the car radio at that time. The distraction keeps us all in the state of pretentious bliss.

But my friend's valiant fight against cancer and for life showed me another side of life, a side we needlessly and often take for granted. 

It is said that we only start living, truly living, when we come to realise how soon we die. And that is why life begins on the other side of despair, that is, of realising that our time here is limited, our worries mostly unfounded and our endless pursuit for things that will not last is largely misguided. 

Norman Cousins once wrote that "death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live." 

For me, what dies inside is perspective. 

When I was boarding the train just now, I saw a young couple kissing goodbye. The husband smiled at her and he reluctantly let go of her hand as he saw her off to work. Simple pleasures and treasured moments like that are priceless, yet it's free or costless. 

How much does it cost one to show affection to another, to savour that affection, to linger in that protected moment of unearthly joy, and to keep those sweet memories in our heart alive as we go about our daily chores or work?

The eminent psychiatrist Irvin Yalom once quoted a letter from a senator in his early sixties after he discovered that he had very serious cancer and this was what the senator wrote:-

"A change came over me which I believe is irreversible. Questions of prestige, of political success, of financial status, became all at once unimportant. In those first hours when I realised I had cancer, I never thought of my seat in the Senate, of my bank account, or of the destiny of the free world...My wife and I have not had a quarrel since my illness was diagnosed. I used to scold her about squeezing the toothpaste from the top instead of the bottom, about not catering sufficiently to my fussy appetite, about making up guest lists without consulting me, about spending too much on clothes. Now I am either unaware of such matter, or they seem irrelevant..."

Oh, how wonderful it is for the rest of us to have this Senator's resilient perspective of things. How empowering it is to have the enduring bliss of being unaware of matters that are irrelevant in the larger scheme of things when we are confronting imminent mortality.

The price of that kind of clarity is a vantage point that liberates us to a much more enriching and fulfilling life where we are never so fussy about appearances, never so spoilt for choices, never so indulgent with self and ego, never so seduced by fame, and never so enthralled by glittering and shiny things. 

I believe at such enriching moments, the sudden dawning for us is that there are brighter colours to all our relationships, greater depth in our effort to heal broken hearts (including our own), and wider impact in the differences we make to the lives of the people we come in contact with. 

So, I pray for my friend's fight against cancer, her swift recovery, and thank her for nudging me in the direction I often overlook. 

We all need such clarity to face our own trials once in a while, like fresh water springs along life's sometimes hardscrabble journey, and to prevail eventually. Amen. Cheerz.