Is Death a Choice? (Eve)

Not what you’d expect. She looked radiant, not like radiantly healthy. No, that would be ridiculous. But, if you saw her, you’d see light shining through her skin. Amazing! This effect, along with her impossible thinness and one hundred percent baldhead, could have had her look like ET. Instead of looking unearthly or gaunt, she was stunning in a way I’d never imagined she could be. The structure and symmetry of her face was always near-perfect but never before revealed in this way. I learned something - that radiation can make you look radiantly beautiful.

My little sister, 51 years old, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer (read: aggressive). Her doctor stumbled on this after farting around for months (read: me being judgmental), thinking that all Sue was experiencing was a protracted flu. And then, stalling even longer, thinking it must be RSI because she began to lose sensation in her arms. The actual reason was she had 60 metastases in her brain. Who is it that counts individual metastases at this point?

I was furious with her G.P. for not catching the cancer in time, angry with Sue for her treacherous smoking habit, and pissed off with Life for serving up a death penalty to someone so relatively young, with two kids still at home.

We, the family, chose to line up on the side of Possibility. Best care, best protocol, best clinic, and, of course, our best positive attitudes. We thought the oncologist’s prognosis of 3 months to live could be beaten. Sue was not old, she had been in reasonably good health before the cancer, and she would want to live because of her girls.

I don’t know if it was completely the result of the cancer, which had set up camp in her brain, but Sue became increasingly anxious and disoriented. Remarkably, she still looked stunning but her behaviour was becoming frailer by the day and she now even seemed elderly.

She didn’t want to fight. She just wanted to be alleviated of any stresses. The most helpful thing I could do was let her rest her head in my lap and stroke her smooth, lovely head. It was soothing for both of us. I felt I could let go of all my anger and judgments in this intimate act and let her be and let me be.

She was my little sister in these moments, not the one I had bullied and terrorised with threats of “telling on her” when we were kids. Rather, she was my precious blood kin, all the more to be cherished because I could hear the relentless clock ticking.

Warren and the girls, up until the end, never stopped believing Sue could be cured. For me, even though it seemed like it was traitorous not to believe, I tried to practice being with Sue without expectations. I could see her, in my company, begin to unclench emotionally and loosen up physically.

I don’t believe for a moment that I chose death for Sue, but perhaps what gradually happened is that I opened up to a kind of choiceless being-with-what-is, discovering that it brought me closer to her.

She lasted just four months from the date of the specialist’s prognosis.

Eve 23/1/10