“I would have only a few months to live. It was August, 2017. I was diagnosed with ‘aggressive lung cancer’, in its final stage. At most, treatment could be life-prolonging. My first reaction was: no chemotherapy, no deathly ill last months – quality of life before quantity.
“A new treatment, immunotherapy, with probably much less severe side effects, could still be tried. I started it – and it caught on. Recently I came across the statistic again: of the people with a diagnosis like the one I received, only 5 percent are still alive after five years. I’m well on my way to being in that 5 percent.
“Sometimes someone says to me: ‘John, you were so lucky!’ That feels different to me. Of course I’m glad I’m still alive. But I’m not all happy. That’s just not how I’m put together.
“It has been super intense to first have to say goodbye to life: your children, your partner, your family, your friends. That sadness passed only very gradually in the hope that there would still be a future for me. I still find it hard to believe that. Are you already planning a summer vacation? I find that difficult.
‘When my father died in the late eighties, a friend gave me a Sting CD containing the song ‘Fragile’. That music, that text comes very close to my emotion: ‘On and on the rain will fall, like tears from a star; the rain will say how fragile we are.’
“I listened to this song many times as I came to terms with the loss of my father. Again this song has comforted me over the years, to accept how vulnerable we are, and ‘the rain tells us that, like tears from the stars’.
“Don’t get me wrong: those tears can flow from sadness and from happiness. I have experienced that you can have very beautiful memories of very difficult moments. I got the Sting CD from someone from a group of friends. In this group such wonderful conversations arose because of my illness: they sympathized with me immensely, I had enormous support from them. Our friendship has really deepened.
“I had an intense experience during a PET scan, in which you have to lie still for half an hour. I then had a conversation with my parents, who are both deceased. I myself have never been so concerned with faith and the afterlife. And I’m still not that spiritual. But in my experience, I really had that conversation with my parents. They encouraged me. I said, “I’d like to see you again, but not yet.”
“Whether I’ll ever be with them again, I can’t say for sure, and I don’t need to know now. I have learned from this experience that the boundary between life and death is not as absolute as I previously thought. I find that a comforting thought.”
#Boy #lucky