Part 13. Epilogue: Final Thoughts
Cured or dying, our spirit enlightens every day.
Despite all I have said about goals and planning and patience and responsibilities, I have to say that, when the end is near, I will be inclined at last to leave the map on the bus and take my beloved Phantom, still a part of me, into the Wild Blue Yonder, my last adventurous rebellion.
––John Roberts
Let a man accept his destiny, no pity and no tears.
––Euripides
Growth is the only evidence of life.
––John Henry Newman
Everyone is broken by life; some people are stronger in the broken places.
––Ernest Hemingway
If you keep backing away because you’re afraid of what might happen to you––and you keep backing away and backing away––what you were afraid of in the first place is going to happen to you.
––Admiral John S. McCain Jr.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest SOB in the valley.
––The Universal Motto of American Fighting Men in Vietnam
Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
––Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, 1839
At every crossing on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand appointed to guard the past.
Maurice Maeterlinck, 1862-1949
Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.
––Percy Shelly, Prometheus Unbound, 1820
As I finish this book, I do not know if I will live to see it published. I still feel great, and am doing all I can to stay that way for a long time. It is too early to know how all my fighting actions and attitudes may have prolonged my life. Writing this book has enabled me to understand and do things that most others might never attain. Even if my efforts do not lengthen my life a day, I would be glad to have made this book an important part of my last years, and even happier if it helped others.
So, I continue to fight optimistically, because cancer has a surprising way of changing erratically, for some, the nature and degree of its threat. Treatments have a way of being more or less effective than we expect from our uncertain position on the bell-shaped curve of survival. Above all, I am certain that my efforts will add some time to my life, possibly a lot. And, the scientists are laboring away in their labs, increasing their gene control and trying to refine the applications. I still have time for the Magic Bullet.
I saved this little space for a few final personal thoughts to my readers which I will update when I feel the end coming and still have the strength to speak. I may have the opportunity to revise them a few times when, with mild surprise, I wake up to enjoy another day.
My son, Jim, who fights by my side, will pick up the story from there in his Epilogue, simply to give closure to the story. He has been my best friend in these last years and we have talked frankly about everything. That has given me great comfort, and everyone with cancer should have someone with whom they can communicate about these matters.
The writing of this book has helped me to inspire myself to good attitudes and serious effort, and I know that Jim is a better man for the experience and his new, personal understanding of love, fighting and death, however painful.
As we die, we may discard some of our dreams, now unreachable. And, we must close off many memories and regrets from the past, which do us no good to remember. This allows us to clean our mind, concentrate on the present and the near future, and make the absolute most of precious days.
