The Evil of Cancer

I read about "the evil of cancer" just now, again,

from a newspaper,

and thought about

my mother, her sister, my paternal grandparents

who all died of cancer.

58, 56, 53, 57.

My paternal grandparents were

in their graves before I was born,

my grandfather a forgotten Don Juan figure

who spread misery and broke marriages,

mostly his own ones;

my grandmother's grave a place of pilgrimage,

dutifully done so that
her ever fewer surviving acquaintances

on their visits to the graveyard

in our old home county

"would see that somebody has been here"

as my father said,

again and again through the decades.

My mother, her sister: Pain and guilt in my mind,

my aunt tied to her eldest son,

my late cousin, 27,

in my thoughts,

rage and grief and more rage in my mind

as I think about them,

and my my mother, my mother

a cause of endless sorrow,

guilt like an open wound

that never can nor should close,

my life one long betrayal of her

during these last 18 years,

all her dreams and hopes unfulfilled,

and I cowardly enough not to be on her side

when it would have mattered.

But the cancers that took them all

were not evil, they just were.

A disease has no mind, no morality,

it doesn't set out to destroy

and end lives like a humans do.

We see it as a kind of human

when we claim that it is evil,

we see it as an adversary

that tries to harm our loved ones

and we are wrong.

We extend humanity out to the world,

give a little piece of Homo Sapies to all things

we see around us,

moral colouring to events

that have none.

A cancer like a tsunami

has no meaning in itself, no goal,

they are just natural results

of events, biological and geological.

It's their results that are tragic,

cutting through lives.

No evil is involved when a submarine

earthquake creates a tsunami,

just geology and chance,

and when cancer attacks a human body

it is the same. It just happens,

beyond the boundaries of the moral universe

we humans have created

and believe in.

The results of cancer are evil to us,

but in itself cancer is just biology,

it just is, separate

from our moral universe,

like the dark matter and dark energy

that guide the physical universe

more than what can be seen.

Like the observable cosmos

which can not influence the dark energy

that is accelerating it's expansion

and taking it towards a premature end -

which to us is also an evil in it's consequences -

a cancer that ravages

our loved ones from the inside

is an evil to us,

but to the universe around us,

to the biological mass living on the surface of Earth

and burrowing under it's surface,

flying high in it's atmosphere,

it just is.

Only us, humans,

can be evil.

17.06.2013