Death and Cancer — Nothing to Fret About
	JuLY/AUGUST 2004

by Don Huntington, Editor In Chief

If you can’t get to 70 by an easy road, don’t go. (Mark Twain)

The last issue of 110° Magazine contained my back page article, entitled “The Pink of Health — the Best of Times,” in which I confidently wrote:

I’m too busy and having too much fun these days, it seems, to worry about circumstances…, or even to worry about the condition of my body.

I’m sure some people reading my self-assured words thought to themselves, “A person not facing personal illness or loss can easily write glib notes like that. That guy isn’t paying the price that would give him the right to say those things.”

Well, this month I feel I’ve earned the right to say that I’m not overly concerned about illness and awful realities because two weeks after my article went to press I found myself having a malignancy removed in a San Francisco hospital on the same day that my mom was being cremated in a Pennsylvania mortuary.

All things considered, it really wasn’t too bad a day.

Of course, cancer is no trifling matter. I was most concerned by how apprehensive my doctor was when he gave me the news. He ordered me to immediately get x-rays and blood work in order to determine the extent, if any, to which the cancer had spread, and initiated the process of scheduling me into an oncology center for an operation.

As I write this, I’m still awaiting the results of tests being conducted on lymph nodes that were removed during the surgery to see if all the cancer was removed.

But I’m not fretting in the slightest. Not only did my surgeon assert that there was only a fifteen percent chance that cancer cells would show up, what if they do?

I mean, even if I die of this cancer how could I complain? My brother-in-law, Rodney, one of the most likeable, fun-loving people I ever knew, succumbed to sarcoma when he was only 13 years old. All of us in the family would have joyfully given our lives to spare his.

Better people than I am have died of far worse things than cancer. Anne Frank died in a concentration camp. The body of the renowned scientist, Stephan Hawking, has been dying by inches for more than four decades. Jesus died on the cross.

I think Heaven never responds to the question, “Why me?” about any circumstance that could arise in our lives because the real answer, bound up in the rejoinder question, “Why not you?” is too obvious to bother with.

And besides, the process of coming to heart-filled resignation is eased by my conscious daily acceptance of a deeper reality underlying all outward circumstances — that my life and my times are held in hands that will not drop me no matter what comes my way. There’s a purpose in every passing circumstance, whether I can discern the purpose, or not.

Coping with my mom’s passing last month was another demonstration of the power of grace over circumstance. I admit that death is an awful thing. It is the great Enemy! The Destroyer! I hate it!

Edna Huntington Tanner is forever gone from us who loved her. An appalling fact! The circle of my life now has a dreadful gap that can never on this earth be repaired.

But something greater than mere desolation and bleakness surrounds the death of any person like my mom. All her life she faithfully served her friends, her church, her children, and (most of all) her Lord Jesus.

I have been comforted by the words of an old stanza about death describing a hope beyond the grave that my mom carried with her through her entire life:

“Then we shall be what we should be;
Then we shall be where we would be.”

I tell people who ask about my mom’s passing, “I’ve done a lot of bawling, but I haven’t been sad for a moment.” And many of my listeners nod their heads and smile. They understand exactly what I meant. There’s nothing unusual about my attitude.

So that Friday when I had surgery and my mom was buried was a pretty good day. I was living above the circumstances of cancer and death. And I later went back to my article from the last issue of 110° Magazine and read again the closing words:

I’m in the pink of health living in the best of times. A principle of grace is infecting my attitudes in both of these areas.

Right on! Still exactly true!