Death and Dying: Fuck You, Cancer

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When you fight cancer, does cancer become something separate from you? Does it become like an alien part of your body that you are fighting?

At first, it felt like something had invaded me. Of course it's my own cells that are doing that so there's also the idea that it's part of you. But my first response was definitely a kind of a warrior energy. I had to fight. After I had my first radiation treatment I would use mantra and visualization—particularly a wrathful deity visualization—to help destroy the cancer cells during the treatment itself.

Has it affected your behavior? Do you get caught up less in the petty, ignorant, and innocent ways in which we create suffering for ourselves and others around us?

Maybe. But I still have habitual patterns and delusions and illusions, and I get sucked up into life. The deeper question then becomes what does it mean that I am going 'to live until I die'? What does living mean? There seem to be at least two different ways of approaching this: either going into seclusion or continuing to be engaged in this so-called samsaric world. I keep working at my job. I keep up relationships. I keep a certain amount of writing going. I just keep on living. And part of living is very silly. There were times when I thought that I should just go into retreat and try to attain perfect, unsurpassable enlightenment before I die. But at the same time, I felt like, 'Wait a minute, if the whole idea is to live and I'm fighting this in order to live, then live fully.' And that's what I chose to do. Whatever that means.

What do you do with self-pity?

I think self-pity comes along with self. When this first happened, it felt like all my karma was coming and perching right on the tip of my nose, looking me straight in the eyes, staring right at me. And I was staring right back. That's the warrior aspect. Shortly after I was diagnosed, Allen Ginsberg called and reminded me of something that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had said to Billy Burroughs [William Burroughs' son], who had had a really hard life and was having a liver transplant. Rinpoche said, 'You will live or you will die. Both are good.' I don't want to make my death into the enemy. Death is not the enemy. Death is part of us, it's part of our life. Cancer can be seen as the enemy—at different stages. But death itself, however it comes or whenever it comes, is not the enemy. That's something to be embraced. And that's the true warrior's stance as far as I understand it. For the warrior, death is not the enemy. When the samurai went into battle, they brought little purses that contained money for their funerals. If you go into a battle fearlessly accepting the possibility of death you have a much better chance of fighting well—and, in fact, of winning—than if you go in scared. A lot of Buddhist and spiritual practice in general is aimed at removing the fear of our own deaths. The fear of our own deaths is the fear of our own births or the fear of our own lives.

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