When cancer patients refuse to just go away quietly

If you've ever taken the journey of being a cancer patient's family member, you know how difficult it is. First you have a routine test that shows something not-quite-right. Then more tests. Then still more tests. And you know that the more the tests escalate, the more likely the news is to be bad. Then the news hits not just the person with cancer, but the entire family, like a ton of bricks, and you ask "What now?" If the cancer is aggressive, and the person gets sicker, not only may you have to deal with friends who back away because they just don't know what to say and because this visible evidence of mortality is frightening, but you find yourself fighting that impulse in yourself.

This is a journey that Tata is going through right now, and while I've posted this before, if you are NOT reading her diaries from Virginia, where her father is at home under hospice care, you owe it to yourself to click over right now and read them. This is how we all wish we would cope when cancer enters our family -- together as a family, with all the attendant laughter and tears and bickering and cooking and generally trying to make sense of it all. It's true that nothing brings even the most dysfunctional family together quite like cancer.

It's still terrifying to watch someone you know and love deteriorate. First there's the helplessness, that there's this beast of an illness that often seems to beat whatever you try to throw at it. But behind that, there's this nagging feeling that you're looking in a mirror at your own future. That future might be tomorrow, it might be decades from now. It might be cancer, it might be Alzheimer's, it might be getting wiped out by a piece of ice falling off a truck on Route 17, it might be another disease. If you're very lucky, it might be a heart attack in your sleep when you're 95 after having spent a lovely day outdoors on one of those early spring days when the ground is damp from just-melted snow and it's an unseasonable 70 degrees. But as I read somewhere recently, life is a cruise ship we all get on with the certainty that it's going to sink.

Most cancer patients choose to fight. They fight using conventional medicine, they fight using alternative treatments, but they fight. They fight because we all want to live. It's just that most of us fight within the confines of our own families, workplaces, and circle of friends. The rest of the world doesn't know of this fight, nor does it care.

Then someone like Elizabeth Edwards comes along, figuratively singing "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going", and because her husband is a presidential candidate, we are unable to completely turn away, because whether we like it or not, Elizabeth Edwards has brought cancer into everyone's family. For some, it brings back memories of journey's taken. I suspect that (along with some strange mandate to give credence to the ravings of Rush Limbaugh) is part of what drove the mean-spiritedness of Katie Couric's questios on 60 Minutes.

For the record, I don't think that's what's driving Limbaugh; I think Limbaugh's ravings are proof that John Edwards joins Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate that scares him (and his American Idiot^TM audience) to death, because either one of them could defeat any of the three Republican front-runners. Imagine how a good-looking, successful man loving his wife even through cancer will look against the thrice-married Rudy Giuliani or the twice-married John McCain. It's enough to make you think the Republicans will put up Mitt Romney just so they can compete on the sick wife playing field.

The battle that John and Elizabeth Edwards face together is just another facet of what is making this campaign so interesting. Bill Maher asked John Edwards just a few weeks ago whether he felt he was at a disadvantage being the white guy in the race. In retrospect, that joke seems kind of poignant, because now the Edwards campaign is, instead of being the least interesting one in the race, yet another representation of the many faces of the American family -- the one dealing with illness. Not to get all Katie Couric here, but that is undoubtedly comfortable "for some."

Walter Shapiro in Salon:

Embedded in Couric's smarmy comment was the implication that any public figure afflicted with an incurable disease has an obligation to climb on an ice floe and sail off to oblivion so that TV viewers in the prized 18-to-35-year-old demographic do not have to acknowledge their own mortality. Or that, at least, Elizabeth Edwards, whose breast cancer has recurred, owes it to the world to spend her remaining years offstage with their two small children, Emma Claire, 8, and 6-year-old Jack.

It will be weeks, perhaps months, before we begin to get an accurate measure of the political ramifications of Elizabeth Edwards' health. The issues raised by the candor and determination she and her husband have shown are too unprecedented to be unraveled by instant polls or interviews with oft-quoted political experts.

One theory is that voters crave presidential candidates with unblemished medical charts and problem-free lives, whose emotional burdens rival those of the contestants on "America's Next Top Model." That would rule out all three Republican front-runners, since John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have had their own brushes with cancer and Mitt Romney's wife suffers from multiple sclerosis. Another theory is that Elizabeth Edwards has touched something deep in the American psyche and pretty soon we will see supportive bumper stickers that read, "I Know Someone with Cancer -- and I Vote."

Voters and campaign contributors will, of course, offer the final verdict on the Edwards campaign. But so far the public arguments raised against the former North Carolina senator's continuing his presidential campaign, with his wife's fervent participation, are flimsy.

[snip]

On the surface, a far more substantive concern is that Edwards would find it difficult to function as president if Elizabeth's health dramatically deteriorated. In truth, however, people become president at a time in their lives when fate inevitably requires them to face up to health crises and the death of the people they love. Unless they amend the Constitution to allow callow 17-year-olds to run, this will always be a major risk in electing a president.

During a few short months at the start of his presidential candidacy, John Kerry endured the death of his mother and surgery for prostate cancer. In 1994, with Bosnia in flames and healthcare reform headed for a cliff, Bill Clinton had to confront the death of the most pivotal figure in his life, his mother, Virginia Kelley. As soon as Clinton left the funeral in Arkansas, he flew to Brussels for a NATO summit.

Being distracted by personal life is part of the terrible burden of the presidency. Both Nancy Reagan and Betty Ford were diagnosed with breast cancer while their husbands were in the White House. In her autobiography, "The Times of My Life," Betty Ford writes about her first night in the hospital for a mastectomy, "Jerry says he's never been so lonely as he was going home to the White House that night. He was more upset than I."

But many of these human details have been airbrushed out of remembered history. No one links the death of Clinton's mother to the way that his presidency almost fell apart in 1994, climaxing with the Gingrich Revolution. No one connects Kerry's personal travails with his maladroit presidential campaign. Betty Ford is remembered for her honesty at a time when breast cancer was a taboo topic, but Gerald Ford is remembered for pardoning Nixon.

Presidential races are often about more than control of the levers of power and the policy direction of the nation. Prior campaigns forced the nation to confront questions about religion, divorce and career-minded first ladies. This time around, especially for the Democrats, everything is on the table: race (Barack Obama), gender (Hillary Clinton), Hispanic heritage (Bill Richardson) and now cancer (the Edwardses). In an election cycle in which the Democrats are poised to surmount age-old political prejudices, outmoded views about the proper conduct of people with cancer deserve to be jettisoned, whether or not John Edwards ever makes it to the White House.

If voters in polls weren't already giving indications that the Holy Trinity of So-Called Values Issues -- guns, gay marriage, and abortion -- were less important than usual, this array of Democratic candidates would shake many people into realizing that a new day really is dawning, and what we're seeing on the campaign trail is something truly extraordinary.

It's an ill wind that blows no good, and whether voters decide that John Edwards is the candidate best-equipped to represent Democratic values in November 2008 or not, the presence of John and Elizabeth Edwards on the campaign trail gives voice to the over 1.4 million people who will be diagnosed with cancer just this year, including the over 178,000 women who will find themselves fighting Elizabeth Edwards battle against breast cancer. The time is long past for cancer patients to just go away quietly lest they upset those who want to think it can't happen in their families. It can. And in millions of families every year, it will.