View from the Edge

Early spring, a close friend was diagnosed with anal cancer late stages. She is undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. Her oncologist believes she will make it through. My friend, I’ll call her Heather, wants to believe this too.

Heather has a serious agenda. Her objective is total healing. And to experience total healing, she must ask life-giving questions. Other questions, like “what’s wrong with the tv,” or “why did I do that,” or “what’s wrong with me,” do not qualify.

If a word emanates life, she holds it like a precious gem. If it sucks life away, she casts it away like cement clumps. Heather’s battle is about the words but also discovery. What is essential? What is worth living for? Answers to those questions bring everything else into perspective.

Listening to Heather reminds me of what I heard Rachel Naomi Remen say to Krista Tippett on a recent airing of the NPR program “Speaking of Faith.”

Dr. Remen said, “the view from the edge of life is so much clearer than the view that most of us have, that what seems to be important is much more simple and accessible for everybody, which is who you’ve touched on your way through life, who’s touched you. What you’re leaving behind you in the hearts and minds of other people is far more important than whatever wealth you may have accumulated.”

Accumulating a lifetime of wisdom through her own battle with chronic illness and her work with patients and doctors, Dr. Remen sees cancer patients or “people who have encountered very difficult experiences in their lives as teachers, teachers of wisdom.”

I agree. And so as I spend time with my dear friend I am seeking answers to what is most important. Heather in her battle to live well is adding to my repository of deep understanding. She is to me a window to treasure found only from the edge of life.