Winning the War
Feb 12th 2010PostmasterLife and Death
Wow! What a great experience I had being interviewed on the Andy Barrie show yesterday. It was my first time on the radio but Andy has a way of making you feel very comfortable. It was like having a conversation with an old friend.
While we only had a short time to chat, Andy raised an issue we could have discussed for an hour. “When you die,” he asked, “will you feel that you’ve lost the battle with cancer?” I responded that, “If you can look back on your life and feel that you’ve lived a good life, that you’ve helped people, that they will remember you, then perhaps you can say you’ve won the battle if not the war.” I must admit that I do think of that. When you are faced with a terminal illness, you can’t help but wonder how you’ll feel at the end. Fear, yes - Sadness – yes. Anger – maybe. I feel that I am helping people with my writing and speaking and the work that I do, and I will continue to do this for as long as I can. Perhaps this is how I “fight the battle” and, for me, it works.
We all will die sometime and leave behind a lifetime of memories and at least another lifetime of regrets for what we could have accomplished if we had more time. But we can’t do it all and, unless you do something to get yourself in the history books, your existence won’t even be a distant memory in a hundred years. Thinking about that can drive you crazy and perhaps even to despair, but most people don’t think about it. I did and I had to come to grips with it in order to move on.
It is what we do with our lives every minute of every day that defines who we are and if we’ve done some good and helped some others along the way, then we can look back with the confidence that we’ve won a few battles and, if we’re really lucky, we can feel that we’ve won the war.
This is what I aspire to.
Thanks Andy. Check out this link: http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/bad-news/excerpt.html
Posted by Doug
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