I was lucky enough to tune into NPR and listen to a person I never heard speak before — a Unitarian minister who, as it happens, never imagined after his first operation that he would speak again. His name is Forrest Church, he has esophogeal cancer (his second bout), and he will almost certainly die of it.
“There’s a tendency in the home of one who’s terminally ill to try and control other people’s emotions and feelings,” Church told his host, Terry Gross. “To try to keep things upbeat and in a sense paper over what’s happening.”
That struck me, because time and again, that’s what I’ve seen in many terminally ill people: an urge to control (now that most forms of control are slipping away) the emotions and reactions of those who surround them. “It was a great relief to me to embrace my death,” Church tells people, and given his profession, he fully expected those closest to him to react with the same sanguine feelings.
That desire, as he quickly discovered, was thwarted by his wife and four children: “They had unfinished business,” he reports, even if he did not, and they weren’t about to take orders. Church, an uncommonly resilient man, wasn’t about to insist on getting his own way to the end.
In his new book, “Love and Death: A Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow,” Church chronicles all of his urges and expectations when the shadow fell upon him. And what’s remarkable about him is: he doesn’t lie. Or — forget lying — he doesn’t try to shade the truth and make things bright.
And at the same time, rare in a minister, he doesn’t think he warrants any special treatment from the Almighty.
“I don’t pray for miracles,” he told another interviewer. “I don’t pray to cure my incurable cancer. I have no idea what happens after we die, so I go with Henry David Thoreau, who when he was asked about the afterlife, said, “Madam, I prefer to take it one life at a time.”
I can’t think of any more appropriate (or modest) words on the subject. And it’s only fitting that they come from the latest involuntary inductee into the field of dying.
