As someone with Stage 4 cancer, I was really struck by this quote at the beginning of Mukherjee's "The Emperor of All Maladies:"
"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." -- Susan Sontag
@AndyLowry sorry to hear that, but, yes, you are spot on.
As parents of a young man who passed from ALL just before his 25th, we also understood that when we moved from Vermont to Alaska, we mostly stopped being 'those people whose kid died'. A strange dual identity. Much love and strength to you.
@cajun_cheechako Thanks for the kind words! It's really not that big a deal for me, though I sure was startled for a few weeks when I was first diagnosed. I'm 66, haven't missed out on anything I really wanted to do, and have already made it 19 months past finding out. I'm okay with the dying thing.
24 years is a different kind of thing entirely, and I'm very sorry to hear about your son. The Mukherjee book the quote came from starts with investigations into leukemia, and it's hard to read and think about. I'm sorry you had to live it.