Not long ago Paul Harrell, a favorite YouTuber of mine, released a video saying that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The outlook was not good, as is often the case with pancreatic cancer. His delivery of the news was like all of his videos before: plainspoken, frank, and humorous. In the video, he said the doctors had told him he had about six months to live. Nevertheless, he was committed to posting videos as usual until he couldn’t anymore. He posted a few more videos after that one. At first he seemed just as he had before. Then, in a subsequent video a crutch appeared. Then in the next he never stood up. In his final videos he appeared physically diminished, his eyes hollow, his skin gray, but his spirit seemed unchanged. About six months after that first video he posthumously released his final video entitled: I’m Dead. He had finally passed away and had turned the channel over to his brother.
I was sad of course. His videos were entertaining and informative. To see an otherwise healthy man fade away in the span of six months and to see him determined to carry on as normal despite his illness was beautiful to watch but also tragic. During that span of time I wondered how he did it? How did he manage to maintain his composure until the end? He never expressed any anxiety or fear as I surely would have if I were in his shoes. Indeed, I’ve always been squeamish about stories of young people suddenly struck with fatal illnesses—they terrify me. They fill me with dread and sadness. Sadness for them and for their loved ones and dread for the inevitable questions it raised in me. How would I react to such news? How would my life change? What would I do? I think a lot of this is due to a fear that a prognosis like that would reveal something about my current life that I didn’t like. Was I living to the fullest?
Popular belief tells us that we should live everyday like it’s our last. In many cases, a dire prognosis can reveal an uncomfortable truth: that we are not living our lives to their fullest potential. I’ve asked friends and family what they would do if they only had six months to live and in many cases the first thing they say is they would quit their job. After that, answers vary. They say they would travel, they would devote themselves to their interests that they otherwise can’t do because of their job. They would devote themselves to their family, and to their friends. In other words, their life would be a complete departure from what they’re doing right now. Almost no one I asked said they would change absolutely nothing. For a long time I believed that a prognosis like that would mean that I too would have to do something drastic. I thought it meant that I would need to hunker down and furiously dedicate the rest of my life to the intangible, eternal, hallmarks of a life well lived—not toiling away at a job that has no real lasting meaning. But something wasn’t sitting right with me. Something felt off about this and I could not place it. I imagined myself abdicating my job and going off to travel the world but what would happen when I got home?
These fantasies betray a deep anxiety about the life one currently lives: That it is not being properly lived and that only a dire prognosis could lift one out of it. So then what does it mean when someone facing a dire prognosis decides to continue exactly as they are unchanged? What if someone decides to continue an education they will never graduate from? What if they decide to keep working and not travel the world? Would such a person be wasting an opportunity to live their life to the fullest? Separately, why does it take a dire health prognosis to be the catalyst for some major reordering of one’s life? These questions needed answers if I were to finally stop fearing death.
In the hit tv series Mad Men Betty Draper, a woman of considerable beauty and grace is revealed to have developed a fatal form of lung cancer—most likely due to her incessant smoking throughout the show. She’s just started a master’s degree in psychology, her life has finally turned a corner when she gets the news. Despite this, Betty continues to pursue her degree in psychology knowing that she will never graduate. The last shot of Betty in the entire series is her sitting at her kitchen table with her kids, smoking a cigarette as she always did. Was this a tragic end for Betty? Should she have stopped pursuing her degree in psychology in light of her prognosis and spent more time with her family? Should she have gone off to travel the world? Could she have at least quit smoking? I believe that her decision to carry on with her life as she had before shows that she was finally happy with her life and that stopping it or radically altering it because of the prognosis would mean that she was unhappy with her circumstances. The point is that she was not unhappy with her life by the time she gets the prognosis. Her decision to carry on as if nothing ever happened is meant to reveal that she had finally found fulfillment in life. It’s actually a happy ending for Betty.
I have never faced a dire health prognosis. I don’t know what it’s like, truly, to hear such heavy news. I can hardly imagine what it must be like and my sympathy goes out to all those that have. My intention to explore this topic is not to judge anyone who actually has faced such an obstacle or to dictate what they should do or say what they should have done. My interest in this topic is to explore why stories like these shook me so much and how I eventually stopped fearing them. My inquiry into this topic revealed something surprising for me: That a dire health prognosis should, in theory, change nothing. It revealed that stories like Paul Harrell’s and Betty Draper’s were onto something that could help other people struggling with similar fears and anxieties about life. In Part Two of this three-part essay I will explore why a fatal prognosis should change nothing and how stories like Paul and Betty’s may inform us on how to live when we know we’re going to die.