In 1963, Aldous Huxley, the eminent British author of the dark, futurist novel “Brave New World” found himself facing a dark twist in his own future: He had suffered a recurrence of a cancer his doctor thought an earlier surgery had banished.
A revered public figure, the 69-year-old author wrote his son: “Please keep this information as private as possible. It’s appalling how quickly one’s private affairs can get into the tabloids.”
Huxley’s fear of public exposure contrasted dramatically from the attitude of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, 68, who within 48 hours of learning that he was terminally ill called a press conference to announce the grim news.
But in contemplating how he would live his last months, Huxley’s words in an earlier letter to his wife convey, much like Bernardin’s courageous statement last Friday, his determination to make his last months significant and a blessing to others.
“I keep asking myself what I ought to do in the immediate future,” Huxley wrote. “How to be more loving, more aware, more useful or (if that isn’t possible) more content and accepting.”
Bernardin, in fact, said that how he lived his last year might be his greatest achievement.
“As a person of faith, I see death as a friend, as the transition from an earthly life to life eternal,” Bernardin said Friday, announcing that doctors had given him a year to live after discovering that cancer had invaded his liver.
Certainly few people have the Chicago archbishop’s equanimity in dealing with the most wrenching news of their lives. Bernardin’s intense religious faith and lifelong experience officiating at Catholic rituals celebrating the cosmic cycles of life and death make the cardinal perhaps as prepared as any human can be to face his own mortality.
In effect, death is a mirror, and how people die is merely a reflection of how they have lived.
“The person who really lives life authentically–who gets a lot out of it–can experience dying without much angst,” said Shirley Otis-Green, an oncology social worker at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. “But not everybody can do that.”
While Huxley dismissed the Catholic conception of eternal life, he had a profound belief that man’s reality on earth was but a sliver of a larger, mysterious reality that awaited, after the soul floated across “the chasm,” as he put it.
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For those without a grounding in religion or other compelling framework of belief, however, the prospect of living with the knowledge of impending death can produce a reaction far different from the gentle poise of Bernardin, though he himself acknowledged there would be moments of tears.
Shock, denial and terror are common initial feelings upon the news of a life foreshortened by terminal disease. After that, some people spiral into profound, unshakable depressions, experts say. Others abruptly switch religions, casting about for meaning. Others take daring plunges, like starting up new businesses they will never see to fruition. And still others immerse themselves in the balm of family and friends.
Few people, however, fit the Hollywood fantasy projected by such shows as “Run for Your Life,” the 1960s television series featuring Ben Gazzara as a man who spent his last year of life trotting around the globe, grimly milking his last days for excitement.
“You don’t see many people going crazy, running off to (Las) Vegas,” said Rev. Kevin O’Rourke, a Catholic ethicist at the St. Louis University Medical School and an author of books on dying. “Even the most energized people still struggle with fear. Coming to grips with your own death is really a quieter form of adjustment to something most of us never think about, or try not to think about.”
At the same time, it forces many to re-examine what they have contributed–and left undone–in their lives, Otis-Green says. In some cases, the preciousness of each remaining moment can spur people on to take long dreamed-about chances. Artists, such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, produce edgy, new bodies of work while dying. And 19th Century writer Robert Louis Stevenson was still scribbling furiously at his desk when he succumbed to an early death, after years of grievously failing health.
More down to earth, Dr. Sharon Weinstein, a pain consultant at the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, recalls the case of a housewife in her 50s who was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer and who turned her photography hobby into a commercial business.
Some people, O’Rourke said, find faith. Others never do.
He noted how Catholicism has shifted during the past century to make the transition for dying people easier–from an experience of dread that comes with facing judgment, to one of peace and benign acceptance by a more loving God, as set by Bernardin’s example.
Other major religions also have mechanisms to help deal with the grief of facing one’s own end.
“We have some ancient rules that make grieving totally acceptable,” said Rabbi Herman Schaalman, the Chicago representative of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. “With Judaism it’s perfectly all right to mourn. Do not refrain from crying, even about yourself. This lessens the chance for denial.”
And Dyr. Asad Husain, president of the American Islamic College in Chicago, notes how Islam’s deep faith in preordained, divine plans bolsters believers with the stoicism necessary to survive terminal illness.
“That’s why we say Insh-Allah even about meeting tomorrow,” Husain said. ” `God willing’–everything is in his hands.”
Certainly not all terminally ill people turn to religion.
“You might decide you don’t want to spend time on that kind of search,” said hospice worker Otis-Green. “Not everyone works on those issues.”
For every Billy Graham embracing his faith in the maw of Parkinson’s disease–“I have no fear for the future,” he told a rally earlier this year–there is a Gilda Radner, a comedian who faced death from ovarian cancer bravely, and on her own terms, in 1989. Or a Timothy Leary, who broadcast his deathwatch on the Internet. Or, in perhaps the most recent, striking display of heroic dignity until the end, a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, elegant even unto death.
Often, the key to carrying such crushing emotional ballast is family. Attachments become more honest. Long-neglected relationships can blossom when there is no “later.”
“The bonding act intensifies,” said Weinstein. “People often become quite graceful in their relationships.”
And yet, finally, there are those who can’t face the prospect of death under any circumstance.
“It can be terrifying to think life is nearly over when you haven’t really lived it,” Otis-Green said. “(People) will run even when the physical signs they are dying–when they are jaundiced or emaciated–are there. They hold out the belief that (the disease) is not real. Or that their doctor is wrong.”
Ending much, perhaps, like the misguided television series. The Gazzara character was still running, looking for purpose and thrills, when the show was canceled in 1968.