Claire Frick died today.
You probably don't know who she is. I never even knew her, even. I vaguely knew her brother from German class* in high school, but that's about it.
Cancer's a funny thing. It's a go-to illness for TV shows that want to add drama (Desperate Housewives, Buffy, probably a bunch I don't watch), so that you would think we would almost be desensitized to it, but it is fact in fiction that so many people get cancer that everyone knows someone who has had it. There are cancer memoirs and Relay for Life, and people born in July like me always feel awkward when talking about our horoscope. There is even Seth Rogan's cancer comedy, "50/50," which was an okay movie even though the main character was supposed to be some kind of everyman and thus had no personality, and the movie did a poor job of communicating how ill he was and therefore there was no real sense that he could possibly die. Though I seem to be the only one of my friends unmoved by that movie.
Why should the death of a stranger affect me more than that of a fictional character? Neither exist in my life as more than stories. Yet if I read Claire's story right (the pictures alone will do that), she was not that insipid smiling sick child that the movies are so fond of (The Day After Tomorrow comes to mind). She had her art, and she had her family, and she was determined to live life even while she was sick, and eventually dying. I'm sure she had her pissed off and depressed moments that didn't make it into the article, but she got over it. She was a real person, both in a literal sense and in a storied sense - her story becomes real to the audience, who can then imagine themselves in her place, paradoxically, more easily than with the everyman.
What would I do if I was diagnosed with a fatal cancer?
I would probably write about it. And make myself some cool hats.
Death's a funny thing. People react in so many different ways. I do a literary analysis of it. And compulsively listen to Frank Turner's "Long Live The Queen" (You'll live to dance another day/You'll just have to dance for the two of us. Fuck, that song's even about cancer too, isn't it?).
We don't think about death. Which is funny because in my Psychology of Religion class, I learned that there are some theories (Terror Management Theory) that claim that all human actions are motivated by the awareness of our own death.
We are going to die ->
Luckily, there is an afterlife ->
Except someone else has a different view of said afterlife, creating a paradox - they can't both be right -> so, in order to assert our view as the "right" one, we kill everyone else who believes differently.
Or:
We are going to die ->
We create babies or art or contribute to society in some way so that some influence of ourselves remains after we die, as a sort of spiritual immortality.
But short of going out and killing people, how do we live with mortality salience (awareness of our own death)? It's better than dying. But then what's the point of living if you know it's going to kill you? Is art really enough?
I think it's time to move on to "One Foot Before The Other." Not that it helps. Except it does.
We're here right now and I guess that has to be enough.
I've taken up rock climbing, and usually can't make it to the top. It's more than the fact that I feel like my wrists are about to give out; I don't have the mental discipline, the sheer willpower to keep myself going. I made it to the top today (not for the first time, though that would have made it more dramatic). Just a few feet from the top, and I almost gave up because it was too hard. But harder than fighting cancer? She pushed herself through that. I can push myself through this.
Cheesy, I know, but that's what I got.
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*You have to understand that German is not like other subjects. Maybe it is just the fact that we were the same group of 20 people for four years (and I went to a big school, so that didn't happen anywhere else), but there was a pretty strong group bond - almost like a family. So when I say her brother was in my German class, I mean that I wasn't exactly friends with him, but he was more than just some random kid who went to my same school.
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