“There is no great love of life without despair about life.” –Albert Camus

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.” –Eric Fromm

 "To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable."  --Erich Fromm

 “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there lay within me an invincible summer.” --Albert Camus

My love of life has little to do with whether I’m succeeding or failing,

At any particular creative project, or at some full-ranged life-plan;

Or at making more money, or at getting more honey;

Or at doing drudgeries, like getting the dishes washed whenever I can.

My love of life is absolute.  No sorrow or suffering can kill it,

Or even diminish it; not even the pain and grief of cancer. 

I love life so much, I want to live forever. 

Never will I understand the thinking of those who say,

Life has meaning because we have to die some day.

For me, death threatens life’s meaning from root to flower,

Shadow-covering the value of the flight of every hour.

I must muster my full mind to maintain my feeling of life’s meaning,

Because I have been pushed close to the edge of my life,

And I face the long fall into unknowable death;

I am not sure anymore if life has any meaning at all,

In the face of that fall.

When all of my memories are destroyed, engrams and synapses erased,

The flesh and blood of my brain decaying, my body a corpse and carrion,

My mind no more, and all that I ever was or could be, deep in oblivion;

Then what will anything, any moment of my life, have really meant?

I will know nothing, I will be nothing—I won’t even know that I used to be alive.

I won’t just be dead, I’ll be death—without memory that I used to draw breath.

What then will be the meaning of my life?  A pitiless universe placed

In me a little walnut-sized organ, supposedly part of human love;

In reality, a deadly deliverer of death. 

Cancer.

Likely a slow pain-wracked wretched dying and desperate death.

My cries do not echo, the silence that they find is too deep.

I hope that God will give me new life, good life, some way, some day;

But I fear death may be permanent silent cold darkness deeper than any sleep.

Yet I still can honestly, and must whole-heartedly, declare,

Out of my sorrow and fear, and this deathful despair,

With my throat bare and unprotected, awaiting the slash of the killer’s knife:

I’m glad I was born.  I still love life.

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Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Copyright © 2011 by Michael L. P.  All rights reserved