My friend gets out of hospital today, with what looks like a small, early-stage cancer of the stomach extirpated cleanly and successfully.

Although sore and exhausted, and eating spoonfuls of food at a time, all indications so far are that a full recovery is on the cards. This incredibly anxious time for all involved may turn out, in retrospect, to be one where fortune smiled. Stomach cancer is a killer because, outside of Japan where they test for it routinely, (something in their salty diet is thought to trigger it), it is mostly not discovered until it is too late, after it has already spread throughout the body.
My friend may never enjoy a full slap-up three-course meal again at one sitting, which is, indeed, a shame when you live in Italy. But people can live without any stomach at all, it is really only a storage space, and my friend’s much-reduced organ will stretch, in time, to cope with a moderate amount of food in one go.
After all, many people who are obese pay to get their stomachs stapled, in order to lose weight. How anyone would submit voluntarily to painful abdominal surgery like that is beyond me, it seems to be a curious capitulation, a surrender, a declaration of a failure of will.
The complex, subtle relationship between the mind and the body is a vexed one in our culture. It is rife with myth and projection, old wives’ tales and New Age philosophies, that often look to Chinese and other oriental traditions for answers, explanations, cures.
We may recognise that we get colds when we are tired and stressed and need a rest, we may wonder about allergies and eczema and the psychology of debilitating syndromes like ME, and speculate about what that says about our modern world, but the discourse around such ailments is, in the main, reflective and sensible.
But when it comes to potentially fatal diseases, such as cancer and AIDS, we often lose our balance; fear of death propels us to an urgent, often desperate search for answers, for context, for meaning.
For the definitive cure. In our fright we can see-saw between belief systems, be willing to submit our bodies to the surgeon’s knife and the poisons of chemotherapy or the hazards of radiation, and (simultaneously or consecutively) if they prove insufficiently reassuring or effective, we turn to diet and meditation and visualization and homoeopathy and acupuncture and energy medicines, in their bewildering variety.
What everyone seeks is the answer to one of life’s mysteries; what it is that separates the person who survives an illness from the person who succumbs, what quality or characteristic or attitude makes the difference?
For example, tuberculosis can be in our system, but asymptomatic; we still don’t know what conditions, psychological or otherwise, serve to stimulate the germ of disease into a full-blown illness. Allopathic medicine, from the rationalist scientific tradition, still hasn’t managed to explain that, and other similar puzzles, although increasingly it seems that our genetic inheritance plays an important part. We can only play the cards we are dealt, and some of us are short of court cards to trump Death.
But for every case of someone who dies of the same disease that took a parent’s life, there is often a sibling who escapes it completely. Scientific research into the placebo effect is beginning to provide some answers to these questions, but without the funding of the giant pharmaceutical companies to deepen this enquiry (there being no obvious potential for private sector profit), there are still more questions than answers.
The language of fate, destiny and divination often comes into play, we search for ways to ask the universe what our future holds, what is written in our palms, in our stars, what does the Tarot or I Ching or 1-800-PSYCHIC or the lady who reads tea-leaves down the road tell us is our allotted fate? We need to know, we cannot endure the uncertainty.
We have to do something in our culture, we have to re-establish control of our lives, by taking action. Inaction is anathema. Under stress, we can exhaust every avenue open to us, trying to graft Eastern traditions onto Western mind-sets of linear cause and effect, action and reaction: tell me what I can do to ward off the evil spirit, and I’ll do it – if you can prove to me it works.
We look to the East, perhaps unconsciously, because there is a different relationship to death there, in many cultures. What some in the West may regard with hostility and disgust, an unpalatable mystical passive fatalism, the philosophical acceptance of mortality as part of the greater scheme of things, something which lies solely in the hands of Allah or Kali or is part of our dharma, others drink in thirstily, like water in a desert oasis, for we are creatures that need meaning.
At its simplest, a person who has a strong belief in something, “religiosity” as some scientists call it, is less prone to stress, and stress is undoubtedly one of the factors that damages our health, that increases our risk of becoming ill or of not recovering from serious illness.
Blind faith, however, is, like love, not the most reliable of guides. We need to be careful, for it is possible for someone to die of cancer believing they have not got the correct attitude, failed in their attempts to stick to their organic vegan diet of cereals and pulses, and ended up screaming in agony that their meditation routine hasn’t “worked”, or their “healer” has not been able to save them, because they’ve not followed the prescribed spiritual path. As Susan Sontag wrote so eloquently in her monograph AIDS and its Metaphors, such attitudes can serve to destroy our quality of life, and be inhumane, disempowering, and counter-productive.
And yet, and yet. A brush with death offers the opportunity to change our lives completely. Emerging blinking into the light, we can choose to eliminate that which felt burdensome in our old life, and change our priorities to suit our personalities more. Our values can change, quite dramatically. Existentialist psychotherapy suggests that in order for us to live our lives fully, we have to digest and process the inevitability of our deaths. The idea of death is a healing agent, or can be; a catalyst for fulfilment and growth.
None of us knows how long we’ve got. Those who survive cancer, if they can let go of the fear of its return, can often shame the rest of us who half-live our lives, and entire families and communities can be enriched by their zest for life, their decision to live every day as if it were their last. Pluto was the mythological Lord of the Underworld, the ancient symbol for death: his name means riches.