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
