It Makes the Sweet Sweeter

"I have something to tell you."

My friend leans over the fake wooden table with two delicately decorated pieces of cake sitting atop just as we sit in the bakery, discreetly somber underneath the cheerful exterior.

"I have something to tell you. I have cancer. I have eyeball cancer."

She laughs. This is a line from a terribly bad-humored, two-minute cartoon we viewed years ago in high school. I would have laughed too if this scene had occurred three months ago. I do not find it funny anymore. It is simply a bad joke about a tragic event: acquiring cancer. True, eyeball cancer sounds ridiculous in the cartoon that parodied overly paranoid individuals; however, it is not as humorous when it hits close to home.

Three months ago, I found out that my maternal aunt in her late thirties was diagnosed with stage two cancer of the lungs. This came as a huge shock because she never smokes, no one around her smokes, and our family does not have a history of cancer. The doctor says the environment might have caused it. Whatever the reason, she is now preparing for chemotherapy after taking an MRI to check if the cancerous cells have spread to her brain because she has been having blinding headaches, and a test of seven lymph nodes surrounding her lungs for presence of cancerous cells have resulted in the affirmative.

Life is a series of preparations. As a toddler, you prepare for preschool. Preschool prepares you for elementary school, which prepares you for high school, which prepares you for college, which ultimately prepares you for work in the “real world” and the abstract notion of life. What's next? Retirement. Then death. This is the general trend of life.

I have never before had to deal with the death of someone close to me. Though I’ve had tribulations, they were not life-altering events: My great aunt, whom I did not know, passed away; arguments always subsided and resolved; and my high school volleyball coach recovered from breast cancer after months of chemotherapy. While grief has grazed me in the past, these encounters with almost-tragedies left me unprepared for the present.

I feel somber thinking about the situation, but whenever I see my aunt she has a smile on her face. It is a smile that gives me a new perspective: sometimes, I am too busy to enjoy life and forget simple joys. I understand that is okay to feel sad, and that I should not allow the sorrow to permeate the atmosphere. Her smile tells me that I should look on the brighter side of things and be productive, get things done, rather than sulk around and dwell on the pessimistic.

My aunt's sanguine demeanor is a lesson that I will carry in my mind from now on. Unpleasant events are out of human control, and it is necessary to accept the good along with the bad. As the protagonist of the unsuccessful existential comedy, “I Heart Huckabees,” remarks, "No manure, no magic."

Jeanne Dang '10 is a Crimson design editor in Eliot House.