Having complimented the Telegraph for using the correct title of 'soft tissue sarcoma' in their article about the death of Nick Clarke, I must set the balance right and criticise them for using the hackneyed, lazy and essentially offensive headline "...loses cancer battle."
How I hate that military metaphor and all its implications. Death is the loss, and even for we who believe that death is but the beginning of a new life it is a grievous loss, but cancer is not the victor here nor the dead the vanquished. If there is a loser it is the cancer itself for having consumed the very organism in and on which it thrives. Cancer is a very, very foolish thing and nothing that foolish can be said to triumph.
Nor is cancer in any true sense an alien, separate presence - some Manichean evil matter - come to dwell within us. It is a part of who we who have it are - a crazy, silly thing yes, but not an 'enemy within.' Does that mean that one blithely accepts it without demur or complaint? Of course not. One wishes to be rid of it, which is why we accept the knife, the poison and the nuclear bombardment. But you cannot alienate what has become innate. (On a comparable note I also detest the labeling of dementia as 'the living death', for what else does that mean but that they who have it are the living dead?)
No, that is not the way. A far more potent as well as humane approach - understood at least in struggling part by we who live with it - is one of acceptance [which is not acquiescence to repeat myself], one of daring to embrace it as part - but only part - of who we have become in our human journey. One image even is of 'dancing with sarcoma' and if of any who don't have it there are some who can grasp the essence of that notion - a totally positive and life-affirming idea - then you are some way to comprehending life on Planet Sarcoma.
'Death where is thy sting, grave where thy victory?' as St Paul challengingly asked. You won't find me the greatest fan of that largely over-bearing Apostle, but in this moment he was spot on. Nick is dead and that is desperately sad, but he is not vanquished and sarcoma is not the winner.
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