I take it back: It's NOT Simply There

I've been mulling over the excerpt I posted the other day from the Boston Globe, in which Judy Foreman wrote:

"Fight, Ted, fight!"

This mantra, chanted over and over to give moral support to Senator Edward M. Kennedy as he faces brain cancer, drives me nuts. The caring behind it is wonderful; the metaphor is not.

Cancer is not a football game. It's more of an involuntary dance with a partner you didn't choose, more judo than battlefield warfare....

It calls to mind Susan Sontag's book-length essay, "Illness as Metaphor," in which she argued that cancer--like tuberculosis in the 19th century--too often serves as a metaphor to explain outward ills of the world and inward failings of the person. To quote from our dear anonymous friends at Wikipedia:

Sontag shows how both diseases have become associated with personal psychological traits. In particular she demonstrates how the metaphors and terms used to describe both syndromes lead to an association between repressed passion and the physical disease itself. She notes the peculiar reversal that "With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses."

The Judy Foreman piece had resonance, probably, because to chant "Fight! Fight! Fight!" at Ted Kennedy and his newfound brain cancer seems so over-simplistic, naive, and ultimately self-serving. And, you know, you get a certain amount of this from the world at large when you become "a cancer family": the naivete, the sentiment that serves the teller more than the receiver, the ill-conceived advice, even the simple blameless not-knowing-what-to-say of it all. I say all this knowing that I could say harsher things, and yet even these may have overstepped, broken the contract that insists on careful civility--on both sides, really; the cancered and the cancer-free. But I digress.

Resonance.

On the other hand, how can something like cancer--so difficult to get your head around when it happens to someone you love, so mysterious in its causes and outcomes--how can it not take on aspects of metaphor? I mean, look at this Mount Rainier climb: the whole thing is a metaphor. Indeed, even as Judy Foreman argues that cancer is not a metaphor, that "it's simply there," she uses metaphor to try to explain cancer's true nature: it's not warfare, it's judo, it's an involuntary dance with a partner you didn't choose.

Metaphor, like some poetry, reveals its truth by misdirection or sleight of hand, and sometimes it reveals a deeper truth in doing so. And as we dance around the elusive truths of cancer we're trying to uncover (or simply describe) something about it that can't be uncovered directly. But yelling "fight! Fight! Fight!"???? More than anything, this metaphor fails because it doesn't do justice to the complexity of cancer. We're all trying understand the nature of cancer, and to know how to respond to it. But it's clearly not a football game, and chanting at it is simply inane.

So is "climbing it," for that matter. And calling this blog "Cureclimb" is, in itself, kind of inane. We are not going to cure cancer by climbing Mount Rainier. But as a personal act (by the father of a leukemia kid), this climb "works" for me, metaphorically speaking. And I am grateful to everyone who has chimed in with words of support, donations, advice, whatever. One climb will not cure cancer. But hopefully we'll get there, eventually, and cancer can stop carrying all this metaphorical baggage around. A disease, or a set of diseases; preventable, treatable, survivable. THEN it will simply be there.