Every cancer patient grapples with what is truly important. To bear witness to their attitude can put one’s own life in perspective
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Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The writer in me marvels at how Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize winning poet, captures so accurately the question at the heart of so many of my conversations with my patients. Young and old, curable and incurable, in remission and on the edge of death; every cancer is as different as its management. But, of course, what lies just underneath the convoluted medical discussions is a quest for meaning.
Ranjana Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. Her latest book is called A Better Death
