Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Missing out?
This week, while talking with my grandmother, there was an aspect of terminal illness in middle adulthood that I realized I had not addressed and that really made me think. My grandmother reminded me of my mother's friend that passed away from cancer when she was 37. My mother was with her for a few weeks before she died and my mother was saying that her friend was so sad and that she kept saying that she would have done so many things differently if she could do it over. While I'm sure that would be the case for most of us, my mother's friend was talking about how she concentrated so much of her life and love on her career and was so focused on being successful that she had a failed marriage and no children. She was saying that on one hand, she was happy that she was not leaving anyone behind but on the other hand, she was sad because she had no loved ones and had focused all of her attention on the wrong things in life. This made me think about the fact that, with a terminal illness comes time, although it is limited, it is still time to think and to ponder and to wish you could turn back the hands of time. This is an aspect of terminal illness that I think would be exceptionally difficult. I take for granted the ability that I have to desire something different out of life and to go out and make it happen and the majority of people with a terminal illness do not have that ability. Regret is a hard emotion to deal with and I just wonder how many people that do have a terminal illness live with regret.
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3 comments:
Interesting thoughts. I was reading over Erik Erikson's stages when doing the assessment for our other class and I reread about the integrity vs despair stage that Erikson says we go through in late adulthood. Reading your blog makes me realize that if you are facing a terminal illness, you logically enter this stage at the time of your illness and in your blog's case we are talking about middle adulthood. So if you enter this stage in middle adulthood you really have even more to have despair over because your kids are probably not grown, you probably have not had time to travel, and you likely have some unresolved issues. My point is that when you are looking over your life in late or very late adulthood you have had more time to accomplish and experience life but when you are forced into this stage in middle adulthood you have only had half the time to create integrity instead of despair. Another point; despair I think is more likely as you would more than likely feel that you are being robbed of the second half of your life by your terminal illness.
I know if I found out today that I was terminally ill, I would have many regrets. I hope that I am never faced with the news of terminal illness, but you never know. Things happen and we have to learn to accept these things or to try and accept. The guy, who wrote the Last lecture, Randy Pausch, was inspirational. He knew of his illness and delivered a last lecture about how to turn childhood dreams into realities. We should live everyday as our last and maybe we can achieve a life of no regrets, but this might be impossible. I did not get a chance to see my uncle before he died. He mostly stayed in his room and slept, but I know it must have been hard for him accept that he was dying.
I think that people with terminal illness do feel a sense of missing out. My husband lost his dad when he was 17 and his mom when he was 20. His mom died about three months before our daughter was born and four months before our wedding. She had two grandkids already but it hurt her knowing she wouldn't see the third. But it also hurt my husband. He feels the missing out as well. His mom nor dad were there for the wedding. I don't have a mother-in-law. Terminal illness has a big effect on everyone involved.
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