The Cancer Scolds Explain It All For You (Susan Madrak at HuffPost)

[marmar]

Susan Madrak


03.26.2007
The Cancer Scolds Explain It All For You (44 comments )

I'm not surprised, but I'm still appalled at the number of people who feel compelled to tell Elizabeth and John Edwards what their priorities "should" be. One of the most common scolds is that they have very young children, and so John Edwards should quit running and devote all his attention to his family.

Well, excuse me. I don't see anyone telling Lynn Cheney to quit her job and take care of Dick, what with his serious cardiac conditions. Come to think of it, I don't hear anyone telling Dick to quit his job so he can stay alive long enough to know his daughter Mary's baby.

We have such a strange, conflicted attitude toward death in this country. And when someone is stricken with something like cancer, we (the societal we) rush to the barricades and insist on an all-out fight - well, to the death, which seems to me is only a form of denial. How dare we have rooms in our lives for anything else?

We are a generation of control freaks, convinced we can master anything with enough effort. We can fix it, or we can wish it away. And when you get cancer, people seem to expect that it should become a full-time job.

We forget this is not a binary choice. We are not living or dying; we are living and dying. (As someone once wrote, "Life is a ship we get on, knowing it will sink." The only difference with a terminal illness is, we now have the advantage of seeing land on the horizon.) .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-madrak/the-cancer-scolds-explain_b_44245.html

[pennylane100]

1. Did Katie Couric quit her job to take care of her husband.

If she did not, that would have been a perfect moment for the Edwards to give a lecture about people who live in glass homes. If she did, she would surprise the hell out of me.

[Cha]

2. couric was a full

mode cancer scold.