I really set myself up yesterday, promising to reveal the meaning of life today. You know I was just kidding, right? I mean, I’ve got all kinds of gems of wisdom I can pull out of my ass on a moment’s notice, but the meaning of life is not one of them.

The thing I was getting at, right before I sabotaged myself with that meaning of life thing, was that knowing you’re going to die someday is very different from knowing you’re going to die someday soon.

In those dark days and weeks, I felt things I’d never felt before, and I felt them in ways I’d never imagined. They weren’t even big profound things, they were small, simple, heartfelt things.

In retrospect, I think I was grieving. It’s a strange thing, grieving your own death.

GC and I love to poke around in bookstores. One evening during the dark days, we stopped into Chapters and it was an entirely different experience for me.

I found about a dozen books I wanted to read. There’s nothing unusual about that; it happens every time I go into a bookstore. I talked myself out of buying them, which is also normal. What was different was that normally I would remind myself that I have all kinds of unread books at home, and I should check the library or wait until I see them at a garage sale, and if I need to buy them now, well, they’re almost certainly cheapter at Amazon.ca. But this time it was simply that there was no point buying books to read ‘someday.’ I should just buy the one book I most want to read today. I had reached a place where it only made sense to buy things one at a time. There was no need to stock up or save for a rainy day. Today was the rainy day. It was time to start living.

It’s not such a bad thing, living for today. But it was a startling thing to have my relationship to the future revealed to me in Chapters.

You might remember that I was busy implementing the Getting Things Done system when I got diagnosed. The irony of that is delicious. I stopped Getting Things Done immediately; it was enough to simply get through the days. The only thing that mattered anymore was knowing what really mattered.

There’s something liberating about thinking you’re going to die soon. I mean, it’s kind of a kick in the head, and you’d rather live, but if you’re anything like me, you immediately start looking for the silver lining.

For a brief moment there, during the vast unknown phase of cancer, during the information-gathering process, between the ultrasound and the bone scan, between the biopsy and the MRI, between the diagnosis and the prognosis, between life and death – for a brief moment, I faced my own death with a philosophical shrug.

It’s not so bad, I said, to be dying young. To be getting on with the business of dying rather than the business of living. To be retired, rather than laid off. To be deciding what’s important enough to bother with, and what can be left undone, forever. To write the book or the story or the poem or the blog post that will be the last. To have it all be now, instead of later. To finally live like there’s no tomorrow. It’s not so bad.

And then the test results started trickling in, and it became apparent that life will go on for awhile yet. I’m laid off, not retired. I must get on with the business of living. Of putting things off and Getting Things Done. There’s still the luxury of an endless succession of tomorrows.

If you’ve made it this far, I’ll let you in on what I’ve discovered so far about the meaning of life: The meaning of life is about finding pleasure or joy or meaning in the ordinary. It’s about loving your morning shower. It’s about appreciating who you are and what you have. It’s about not craving more all the time. It’s about putting more emphasis on the present than on the future or the past. It’s about surrounding yourself with the people and things that make you feel good. It’s about helping other people feel good. It’s about having a few things that you love, not a lot of things that you don’t. It’s about quality, not quantity, in all things, including life itself.

But you probably already knew that, right?

Although I’ve always lived with an uncomfortable awareness of my own mortality, my cancer diagnosis brought it careening into the foreground for awhile there. I’m feeling pretty good these days about my prospects for surviving, but in the early weeks I thought I was a goner.

One of my blog readers wrote to tell me that she had survived cancer, and the part I was going through was undoubtedly the most difficult part of the journey. She assured me it would get easier. I clung to that, and she was right. I’m still closer to the beginning than the end of this journey, but it’s already much easier than it was in the early days.

In the beginning, I had to deal with the sheer enormity of having cancer. The word ‘cancer’ carries so much emotional weight, and the diagnosis felt like a death sentence. I don’t know why I have such a visceral reaction to cancer. I don’t have it with heart disease, which is probably just as likely to kill me.

Remember that episode of The Twilight Zone, where the guy suffers through the extraordinary pain of having an earwig eat its way through his brain, and then finally the earwig emerges from the other ear and he thinks he’s survived the ordeal? And then the doctor says “I’m very sorry to have to tell you that the earwig was a pregnant female and she laid eggs all through your brain.”

Finding out I had cancer was like that. Shocking. Horrifying. Surreal. It took me a few days to even say the word without crying.

While I was dealing with the shock I also had to deal with many unknowns as I underwent all the imaging tests that would define what cancer meant in my case. The tests themselves are nothing; it’s the waiting that’s painful. It didn’t help that some of the tests had to be repeated because of suspicious results. As I awaited those crucial test results, my imagination compulsively explored the possibilities, like a tongue exploring the hole where a tooth used to be. I had fantasies about my own funeral.

Meanwhile, every ache and pain felt somehow connected to the cancer. A headache was a brain tumour. A backache meant the cancer had spread to my bones. I visualized it spreading, growing, claiming territory, taking over my body.

At the same time, I was trying to educate myself without freaking myself out even further. It’s amazing how little I actually knew about cancer before I found out I had it. I saw it as a sinister invader, a black menace, an insatiable, malevolent, malignant thing.

Now that I’ve lived with it for awhile and read a fair amount about it, I no longer see cancer as sinister or even as an invader. It’s just part of me. It’s just my cells, with a defect that allows them to keep dividing when they shouldn’t be. It’s just life, trying to achieve immortality. Learning about it was instrumental in coming to terms with it. I think I was just starting to get to that point when I wrote Warts, Wars ad the Language of Cancer. That was twelve days after I received the diagnosis.

I had intended for today’s post to be about locking eyes with my own mortality, and how that changed my life. However, there was a lot more prelude than I expected, and the prelude ate up all the space. Tune in tomorrow, when I will finally reveal the meaning of life. 😉