Thursday

The death this week of a friend has set me back a bit. Her name was Julie and she and Beth became friends while they were doing chemotherapy together. I'm sad because of the inexplicable death of someone so young and beautiful and more than a little angry that someone who was as young as she had to suffer through something so wasting and terrible. It, once more, brings home our helplessness in the face of lung cancer. Once a disease that took older people and heavy smokers, it is now claiming a younger generation who are healthy and people who should not, as far as we can tell, be susceptible to this.

I'm sad for the family she left behind, her husband and her son, and for the friends she made so easily. I'm sad that these young women, and there are many more, are losing there lives and no one can explain why. I'm sad because we are losing our wives and friends and family at an age when they should be starting families of their own, worrying about car payments, groceries and what to do with their finances.

Think about this. When Beth was diagnosed she was 25. Julie, I believe, was 28. They were the youngest people in this area to have contracted lung cancer. Not any more. The doctors at the cancer clinic tell me that the number of young women with lung cancer has jumped. The youngest is 22. Healthy, non-smoking, active and physically fit people getting lung cancer at 22 is inconceivable.

Life, for most of us, involves choice. You choose who you are, what you want and when things don't go well it's good to remember that we have a choice to fix it or not. We are all living, breathing examples of our freedom to live as we choose. Now imagine having that freedom stripped from you and imagine being told you'll die. You have a fatal disease that you shouldn't have and no one knows why. No choice, except to put one foot in front of the other for as long as you can.

Julie did make choices, however, and they were to fight as long as she could, be as good a person as she could and to be as happy as she could until the cancer finally won. She, and Beth before her, showed us that we can choose to be whatever we want, even in the face of death, and I think that we all have an obligation, in remembering them, to make the same choices right now.

It's taken me a long time to reach this point and right now I worry for Julie's family. This is what they've dreaded since the beginning and nothing will make any of this better. No choice. Think of them, and with everything you are, strive to be what you know you can. That's the only good that come of this.