In my life, at different times, I have felt a number of bad fears.

But now, I am filled with fear—worse fear than I have ever felt in my entire life.

Fear so terrible, I don’t just feel it, or even endure it—I deeply suffer it.

But as great and terrible as my fear is, beyond all a priori belief,

Greater and more terrible still, is my grief.

At any moment, in what used to be ordinary life—

And there is nothing more special nor more precious than ordinary life—

My heart now sometimes suddenly opens a flash-flood of tears.

I’m grieving because I’m losing so many of my natural lifetime’s years.

-----------------------

Yesterday, Irma Burke Kingman celebrated her one-hundredth birthday.

She’s not drinking wheat grass juice—she likes martinis—but she’s still here.

She isn’t eating bean spouts and green leafy vegetables , without red meat—

But she has enjoyed the natural human span of time, and then got a lot more.

Why can’t I?  Why should I have to die, earlier than my genetic determination?

Now I look with fear even at a single year,

Which may come and go, and leave me no longer here.

-----------------------

A holistic physician told me: “You gave yourself cancer.”

I don’t remember doing that.  All that I can remember

Is caring about people and animals, and showing compassion, all my life;

I don’t recall hurting anyone.  I don’t recall giving myself cancer at all.  I recall

Eating the food that was set on the table before me when I was a child.

Then, when I went out on my own, I ate the food I found in the stores.

I ate the food I found on restaurant menus.  That is all.

That is all I did, and I don’t know why I should be condemned.

If the food I ate is what gave me cancer,

Then are not the manufacturers and businesses who provided the food to me,

Really the ones who gave cancer to me?

How could anyone say that I gave cancer to myself,

When my heart is breaking with anguish at losing my life?

When my mind is tortured with terror at the very thought of dying--

Chilled and tormented, as days fall from the calendar which will kill me.

When I almost convulse in fear of the pain I shall soon have to suffer.

And then to be told: You gave this great evil, cancer, to yourself.

-----------------------

If I GAVE myself cancer,

I would be guilty of a grisly, horribly masochistic, sick suicide.

But I know I did nothing so wrong--though I may have been wronged.

The victim of fraud and deception is not the perpetrator.

If poisons were packed, unbeknownst to me, in my foods,

Then the poisoners might better be called guilty. 

What guilt could I bear, for being the victim of poisoners?

You know the right answer.

NOT GUILTY.

Cancer is not something that I myself, to myself, gave.

Whatever may be my guilt--in this question, I am unguilty of the grave.

-----------------------

Not guilty.

That is the only true verdict on me.

So, then why—why—why judgmentally sneer at me?--

And then say: “You gave yourself cancer.”

Answer:  Cold inhumanity.  Hot religiosity.

Pretending that there is no inexplicable reality,

No apparently inexpiable blind binds on life, marring mortality,

No unknown, perhaps unknowable, aspects of temporality--

No dark mystery.

A claimed way to justify life grieved with pain and cut by death’s knife,

Collapsing into chaos, as cosmically-caused crippled clay.

A callous way alleged to explain pain. 

======================= 
Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Monday, April 20, 2009  10:27 AM 
Temperature: 780 F.   Winds: 0 MPH
Copyright © 2011 by Michael L.P.  All rights reserved