There is nothing insane about what I am doing if you live inside my head. There is nothing crazy about what I am doing if you have been where I have been and where I am.
It begins with knowing the needs of the many usually–though not always–outweigh the needs of the few or the one. It begins with the a belief in the gradual perfection of the human soul–with the belief that its is more important to see the humanity in figures like Christ and Buddha than the deity or the mythos–that it is more important to emulate them than to follow them.
Those things, though, are only the raw materials that the fires of life use to forge a human spirit.
Here is the fire: for eight months I consciously watched my wife wither and die. She was sick when I first met her with the disease that would kill her–but neither of us knew that. We both knew she had awful attacks of painful gas that no pill could touch and no doctor could suggest an answer to beyond it was all in her head. We both knew she had frequent bouts of insomnia–but believed–as her doctors believed–that stress was the base cause.
And then her legs began to swell–and we knew that was not because of stress and not because there was something in her head. Then she found the lumps in her liver–and the doctor told her it was probably cancer–but we would not know for sure until after the biopsy. And then we knew–and we knew it was a cancer even most oncologists had only read about. And then we learned it was destroying the valves in the right side of her heart. And her diarrhea was becoming more frequent and harder to control.
I watched her world shrink. I remember vividly the last time she drove her car. I remember vividly worrying about whether she could climb the stairs to from the garage–and very vividly the day she finally could not–the day I had to lift her up one stair at a time because she would not let me carry her.
I remember vividly the day of her heart operation and how it stretched from four hours to six to eight to ten–and the sight of her punctured everywhere by tubes and wires and hoses when they finally let me in to see her.
And I remember the diarrhea and helping the nurses change her bed-clothes and the madness and the comas and the delirium.
And I remember kissing her good night for one final time as she drifted back into the coma she would never emerge from.
I want the day to come when no one goes through what she went through.
I have pledged my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to the task of killing this cancer.
