An oft-echoed theme in Western culture; perhaps best stated by Orson Welles: "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."
Of course we are, and remain always, alone. Anything else is merely an illusion created by the social fabric of our identity. This solitude becomes ever so obvious to anything with terminal cancer: as the patient struggles to find a reason to live, the roots of his identity are torn from the ground, ripped asunder, and left to rot.
This is largely due to the interactions between the patient and those people upon whom he relies for his identity. Put another way, people just plain act weird around the patient. As though death was not only imminent in the patient, but was also contagious. People apparently do not know how to interact with others who have a proximity to death.
Thus, paradoxically, the patient's identity becomes not only static - never changing, never evolving, never growing - but it becomes defined as only one thing: death. Death is something we all understand at an intuitive level; to identify another person only as having an intimate relationship with death, and no other social ties, is to label that person a pariah, an outcast, a wizard, a guru.
That person becomes somebody to whom a normal human cannot just speak. Some inexorable force prevents normal human interaction from taking place; this phenomenon is well known by mental health professionals practicing in the palliative care setting. It is equally well known, but in a different way, by all terminal cancer patients.
At the same time, there is an inexorable force drawing people to the patient, perhaps in an irrational quest to answer the most pressing question: what is death? This force of attraction is also well known to terminal cancer patients.
From my own experiences, people who only knew me in passing - speaking to me once or twice in the course of 10 years or more - suddenly act as though there is an intimate connection between us. Other people write me notes which are literally non-sequiturs. Yet others urge me to try this latest cure, or that latest medication, and ask me the "heavy" question: can I imagine, for a moment, how badly they would feel if I died without having tried this alternative treatment which they know will work?
Apparently, the force of death overrides the concept of personal liberty, and the notion that while they might feel badly - despite not feeling that badly for ignoring me for 15 years - it is my body and my death we are discussing, and they have apparently decided that my own wishes are irrelevant.
I can provide more cases of this strange behavior, but the key notion is this: these people are seeking me out, telling me that they want to help me, but in reality, they are looking for an answer to a profoundly important question which they have become convinced I have: what will they feel, experience, and think when they die?
