The literary critic D.G. Myers has incurable — therefore terminal — cancer. He also has a wife and four little children. In this poignant essay, he reflects on the gift that being terminally ill has been for him. Excerpt:

“In a sense,” Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend about the lupus that would kill her at thirty-nine,

sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.

How could it possibly be merciful of God to reduce you to the hyperawareness, every second of your waking life, that death is relentlessly approaching? Even if it is a knowl­edge that most other men and women do not have, regardless of what they may like to say, is it knowledge worth having?

You find yourself on a distant planet, alone, with only your own inner resources to fall back upon. No amount of magical thinking or denial will alter your circumstances. You either accept what you have become, and rise above yourself to attend to the others who still need your attention, or you spend your last months in the confine­ment of self-pity.

Do read the whole thing.

It won’t surprise you that this reminds me of the wisdom Dante acquires midway through his journey through Paradiso: That he can do nothing to reverse his condition of exile, but he does have the freedom to choose how to respond to it. His fate is to suffer in that particular way, but the courageous thing to do, the noble knight Cacciaguida tells him, is to choose to turn suffering into a virtue. Learn its lessons, and realizing that you have nothing left to lose, tell the truth, so that others may profit from what your experience teaches. You sojourn through a strange land, and your adventure teaches you things about life that could help others to improve their own lives, if only by giving them the tools with which to bear their own suffering more courageously.