FROM AGE-ING TO SAGE-ING

A PROFOUND NEW VISION OF GROWING OLDER

ZALMAN SCHACHTER-SHALOMI AND RONALD S. MILLER

WARNER BOOKS      1995

Introduction

• I was approaching my 60^th birthday, and a feeling of futility had invaded my soul, plunging me into a state of depression that no amount of busyness could dispel.
• While my public life was bustling with activity, beneath the surface, away from my teaching and pastoral work, something unknown was stirring in my depths that left me feeling anxious and out of sorts whenever I was alone.
• I realized I was growing old. Feeling alone and vulnerable, I feared becoming a geriatric case who follows the predictable pattern of retirement, painful physical diminishment, a rocking-chair existence in a nursing home, and the eventual dark and inevitable end to my life.
• New questions began assailing me. With an extended life span guaranteed by medical advances and our health-conscious lifestyles, could I convert my extra years into a blessing rather than a curse?
• For all the earlier phases of my life, I had models to inspire and guide me, but when it came to growing old, there were no good models, codes of behavior, scripts, or social expectations to shape and give meaning to my life.
• As a rabbi and spiritual leader, I was supposed to provide answers to other people, but as I confronted my own aging process, I didn’t know how to answer the new questions that life so insistently was bringing to my attention.
• In 1984 I took a 40-day retreat. I was on a Vision Quest, an ancient shamanic rite of passage in which the seeker retreats from civilization, goes to a sacred place in nature, and cries for a vision of his life path and purpose.
• I realized that I was sloughing off an old phase of life that I had outgrown and was being initiated as an elder, a sage who offers his experience, balanced judgment, and wisdom for the welfare of society.
• I instinctively began harvesting my life, a process that involves bringing one’s earthly journey to a successful completion, enjoying the contributions one has made, and passing on a legacy to the future. I asked myself, “If I had to die now, what would I most regret not having done? What remains incomplete in my life?”
• Fueled by a sense of urgency and excitement, I did extensive reading in gerontology and life extension. I consulted with well-known consciousness researchers, such as Jean Houston and Gay Luce, who were doing remarkable work in developing the potentials of older adults. I applied the teachings of spirituality and transpersonal psychology to the issues of aging.
• Most of all, I studied my own eldering process, piecing together from my quest the tools that lead to successful life completion.
• In 1987 I founded the Spiritual Eldering Institute, which sponsors nondenominational workshops that provide the emotional support, along with psychological and spiritual tools, to help people become elders within our modern culture.
• Our culture’s limited, one-sided view of aging is undergoing a profound reconceptualization in our time. We are the first generation to apply the insights of humanistic and transpersonal psychology and contemplative techniques from our spiritual traditions to the aging process itself, giving birth to what some people call the conscious aging movement.
• The Age Wave is coming on like a tidal wave: Consider these facts:
• In 1776 a US-born child had an average life expectancy of 35; today it is 75 and by the middle of the next century is expected to be 86 for men and 92 for women.
• 100 years ago 2.4 million Americans were over 65 (4% of the population); there are now 30 million (12%), projected to be 35 million by the year 2000.
• 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 – the health-conscious baby boom generation, with its interest in lifelong learning, healthy lifestyle practices, and political activism  – will reach retirement age early next century.
• People are casting off the negative images and expectations that sentence older adults to the junkheap as social outcasts and hoisting the banner of successful aging, an activity-oriented approach that promises increased physical vigor, continued intellectual growth, and meaningful work during the elder years.
• We don’t normally associate old age with self-development and spiritual growth. This book proposes a new model of late-life development called sage-ing, a process that enables older people to become spiritually radiant, physically vital, and socially responsible ‘elders of the tribe.’
• The contemporary sage draws on 3 sources: the traditional tribal elder; state-of-the-art breakthroughs in brain-mind and consciousness research; and the ecology movement, which urges us to live in harmony with the natural world.
• Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on technological knowledge that often was beyond their ken, elders lost their esteemed place in society. Today, as the Age Wave crests we confront existential questions about the purpose of our extended longevity.
• The model that I’m proposing does more than restore the elder to a position of honor and dignity based on age and long experience. It envisions the elder as an agent of evolution, attracted as much by the future of humanity’s expanded brain-mind potential as by the wisdom of the past.
• With an increased life span and the psychotechnologies to expand the mind’s frontiers, the spiritual elder heralds the next phase of human and global development.
• Until recently, the techniques for spiritual eldering were unavailable to the public, but from the 1960s the once hidden teachings of yoga, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, shamanism, Sufism and Kabbalah (the mystical teachings of Islam and Judaism) entered mainstream Western culture.
• The same period witnessed the growth of humanistic psychology (with its emphasis on an expanded human potential), transpersonal psychology (which uses meditation as a therapeutic tool), and the brain-mind revolution, which uses contemplative techniques and the latest technology to expand our vast mental potential.
• Once elders are returned to positions of leadership, they will function as wisdomkeepers, inspiring us to live by higher values that will convert our throwaway lifestyle into a more sustainable, Earth-cherishing one. They will also serve as evolutionary pathfinders offering hope and guidance to all those searching for models of a fulfilled human potential.
• According to the new picture of aging presented in this book, extended longevity calls for the development of extended consciousness to help offset the physical and social diminishments of old age.
• Part One, consisting of the first three chapters, provides the conceptual understanding and historical perspective to help you begin your journey into elderhood.
• Part Two, covering the next 4 chapters, presents psychological and spiritual tools for transforming your life, such as meditation, life review, and journal writing. You will also learn how to broaden your understanding of time, live with the intimations of eternity that are part of the elder consciousness, and how to approach death consciously as an opportunity for spiritual awakening.
• Part Three, covering the last three chapters, focuses on becoming a mentor; healing the family, the community, and the planet through elder wisdom; and creating the social structures for elderhood to emerge as a significant force in the near future.
• I sincerely hope that From Age-ing to Sage-ing will help you recontextualize aging as the anticipated fulfillment of life, not its inevitable decline, a badge of success rather than a mark of failure.
• The book affirms, despite all the invalidations of our youth culture, that elderhood is a time of unparalleled inner growth having evolutionary significance in this era of world-wide cultural transformation.
• I invite you to accompany me into our unmapped potential. I urge you to undertake this journey not only for your own personal well-being, but for the health and survival of our ailing planet Earth. Together, we will help give birth to a new civilization of unprecedented human development, spearheaded by spiritual elders working with people of all ages to create a peaceful and harmonious global society.

PART ONE: THE THEORY OF SPIRITUAL ELDERING

PART TWO: SPIRITUAL ELDERING AND PERSONAL

TRANSFORMATION

PART THREE: SPIRITUAL ELDERING AND SOCIAL

TRANSFORMATION

Appendix: Exercises for Sages in Training

Bibliography

About the Authors

About the Spiritual Eldering Institute

Index

SPEECHES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

THE STORIES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF THE MOMENTS THAT MADE HISTORY

QUERCUS PUBLISHING         2005

Introduction by Simon Sebag Montefiore

• Many of these speeches contain eternal truths, particularly a classic such as the Gettysburg Address, or less well known orations by those such as Vaclav Havel, dissident and future Czech President, or Chaim Herzog, Israeli President.
• For me, the best speech is one that marks no great event but merely pinpoints with splendid language, moral rigour and righteous fury, the essence of all decent civilization, a theme that runs through so many of these speeches: Elie Wiesel’s millennium address on the ‘perils of indifference’.
• We should know ALL these speeches. But if the reader remembers just Wiesel’s thoughts on history and the private individual, this book will truly have succeeded.

THE PERILS OF INDIFFERENCE

ELIE WIESEL

7^TH WHITE HOUSE MILLENIUM EVENING, WASHINGTON, 12 APRIL 1999

• Elie Eisel witnessed the suffering endured by Jews in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. On arrival at Auschwitz, he was separated from his mother and younger sister and never saw them again.
• As well as being a devoted supporter of Israel, Elie Wiesel has spoken out for oppressed minorities elsewhere, including the Soviet Jews, the ‘disappeared’ of Argentina, refugees from Cambodia, the Kurds, native Indians in Nicaragua and famine victims.
• In this speech, addressing President Clinton and the US Congress in April 1999, he drew on his own experiences to highlight the plight of oppressed and disadvantaged people throughout the world.

“Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know – that they, too, would remember, and bear witness…

We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two world wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations, bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means ‘no difference’. A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practise it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Indifference is always the friend of the enemy

Of course, indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbours are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.

Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the Muselmanner, as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were – strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.

When adults wage war, children perish

Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God – not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.

And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettos and death camps – and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance – but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.

And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew…

The distressing tale of the ‘St Louis’ is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo – nearly 1,000 Jews – was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnact, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people – in America, the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?

But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we call the ‘Righteous Gentiles’, whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honour of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?

And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of Communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.

And then, of course, the joint decisions of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man, whom I believe because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity.

But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.

Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing, and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents, be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?

What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.

Some of them – so many of them – could be saved.

And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.”

THE FIVE GIFTS OF ILLNESS: A RECONSIDERATION

JILL SKLAR

MARLOWE & COMPANY            2007

Introduction

• Years ago, I never would have written this. That’s because years ago I would have been dead.
• Struck by what was then called intestinal tuberculosis, my Great-aunt, Catherine Kiss, suffered all the manifestations of the disease I now have and one that is known to travel genetic lines, Crohn’s disease.
• At the age of 24, delirious with fever and weighing just 60 pounds, she died.
• I, too, have had Crohn’s disease hallmarks and have lived through 5 major surgeries, swallowed buckets of pills, and undergone stacks of tests. But now I have lived 14 years longer than she did and will likely continue to live and thrive, despite having an illness that nearly killed me more than once.
• Because of the advancement of medical technology, there is an explosion in our numbers. Diabetes, heart disease, and cancer patients can, for the most part, look forward to the same things that I do as advances in early detection, diagnosis, and treatments have rendered even the scariest diseases into chronic states with possible acute phases.
• Autoimmune diseases have been identified and treatments developed for them, leaving less of a death toll in that area as well and allowing the individuals who have those diseases to pursue lives as fulfilling as the ones who are entirely well.
• While we share so many of the characteristics of individuals who have never faced diagnosis and treatment for grave diseases, we are different from them and we know it. Once you have had the experience of having the length of your days threatened by a serious illness, you are never, ever the same.
• Life after a diagnosis and treatment for a life-threatening illness can have unexpectedly positive attributes, as this generally is a life of greater strength, of newfound wisdom about what is really important.
• It can be a life in which there is a growing respect for nurturing relationships, where emotions and general tenderness are more easily felt and dealt with, where time takes on a new characteristic, and where there is a greater commitment to the well-being of the body.
• This is where trivial issues and relationships are recognized for what they are and dismissed. It is a life where helping others through the rough times takes on a greater significance than it ever did.
• Individuals have a hard time accepting the loss of life to which they simply felt entitled, a life that others have and don’t seem to appreciate. Now, however, we are given a life marked by grief over the loss of what we thought should have happened and the impenetrable sadness over what has happened.
• We struggle with a life that did not return to its normal and anticipated trajectory following the experience of diagnosis and treatment, yet will continue for a long, long time.
• We are blessed by our good fortune of having second or more chances and haunted by the experience of having stood at the abyss, knowing that someday we must return.
• This new state of survivorship is something that has not been written about in the past. There is an expectation that continues to be held by the medical establishment and by those who have not experienced illness that once treatment is successful – no matter how scary and physically awful it was – the patient will no longer be a patient and that life will return to its prediagnosis state. There is little in the way of programs to facilitate social and emotional well-being for long-term survivors.
• This is one of the first books exploring the lives of survivors and to look into the positive and negative aspects of illness. I now realise what is really, really important in my life, something that usually doesn’t happen until late in life, if at all.
• I started researching the topic and began interviewing over 100 survivors of chronic and acute life-threatening illnesses. That was when my eyes were opened to this huge community, their shared experience, and their needs.
• The book is divided into 3 parts. The first, ‘Starting at Point A,’ comprises the first three chapters, which provide an individual and global view of survivorship; it also lays the groundwork for understanding the five gifts of illness as they are presented in the next part.
• The second part, ‘Finding the Five Gifts of Illness,’ cuts a brand-new path in the understanding of illness – the process of finding worth in suffering. The following five chapters highlight individually each of the five gifts of illness.
• Using excerpts from interviews and information from published studies, I show the positive transformative effects illness has on a person’s life.
• The third and final part of the book not only establishes the value of the five gifts, it offers suggestions for individuals to attain the gifts and for the greater humanity to create a nurturing atmosphere for survivors.
• Books on cancer alone could fill a library, not to mention other common diseases. Those who are sick absolutely should have those books to help make the best decisions regarding the course of treatment and to enable them to become the best advocates for their own health.
• I hope to dismiss for ever the received wisdom, passed down through generations before us, that illness is completely dreadful and entirely devoid of redeeming value. My hope is that the reader finishes this book learning and believing that there are attainable, positive transformative effects within the experience of serious illness – worthwhile and life-altering gifts for those who undergo the experience.

PART I: STARTING AT POINT A

Chapter 1: My Story: How the Hell Did I Get Here?

• You know the feeling – you start at point A, arrive at point B and for some reason the journey was erased by whatever it was that captured your attention. That is how I felt when I stood in the stark October sunlight one afternoon in 2002, watching my son racing through a playground.

My life before my illness

• It was 1989; I was barely 20 attending Wayne State University; I was a straight A student; my large extended family was supportive of my efforts; I had a great group of girlfriends; and I had met a really sweet, handsome man. Life was good.

My life with illness

• So when the stomach pains started on the morning of February 1, I didn’t really lend them much weight. I staggered across campus, eventually giving in to the nausea and pain and driving home. Persistent vomiting without any relief from pain forced me to the emergency room at a local hospital. The pathology report later confirmed the discovery of Crohn’s disease.
• He told me how the disease was treated and that there was no known cause or cure for it. But what I am sure he didn’t know was how much my life would change from that moment forward.
• To say that my life truly sucked would be accurate. One by one my friends stopped calling. It has been 16 years since I have seen or heard from any of them. My relationship with Joel suffered. School was not much better but I stuck it out, earning my lowest grade point average ever but retained my scholarship.
• I was depressed. I grieved for the life I had before that moment when I first heard of Crohn’s disease. Even though my symptoms could be traced back for more than a decade, it seemed that I had crossed a line that very second, from being among the healthy to being among the sick.
• I hated my new life. I hated being sick. I didn’t want any of it, and I couldn’t believe my great misfortune.

Life throws another twist

• Fast forward 13 years to that playground I mentioned earlier. I was talking to someone I’d known for a month, someone I discovered had gone though a very serious disease and its treatment and was now in remission. I was struggling through a flare-up of my own disease.
• I suggested that Crohn’s disease, as awful and physically degrading as it was, had a really profound effect on my life in a positive sense. This person agreed and we ticked off changes in our lives – positive things. Our definitions of success had changed. The direction and the meaning of our lives altered because of the experience.
• Now it struck me that the individuals with whom I had spoken were all well and had never gone through the experience of illness. I started interviewing people with acute or chronic potentially life-threatening illnesses. I put my hands on every conceivable research study on the subject, trying to find out what the experts had to say about it. The result is the book you are holding.

Where we are going

• It seems that, no matter what the disease, we all suffered physically, mourned our misfortune, and at some point began to see how our lives had changed in a positive way.
• I can’t share with you a specific process of getting from point A to point B. Everyone is different, and I have learned that every journey is different. We have to meander through a new and uncharted course of learning to let go of what we felt we were entitled to while clinging to our second chance, giving what we can to do it justice, and hoping it doesn’t end too soon.
• Now I am a medical writer, a career path very much influenced by my disease experience. I am not an expert in anything but my own experience, but it was valuable and I hope to share it and others’ experiences with you, the reader.

Chapter 2: Survivorship: A Growing Community

• Surviving chronic or acute life-threatening illness is a relatively new concept in the history of civilization. If you were an American at the turn of the last century, you could expect to live about 47 years on average. If you developed a life-threatening acute or chronic condition, you could pretty much forget about planning your retirement. 20% of cancer patients in 1930 lived to see a 5-year survival or beyond.

A current view of survivorship

• Today, an American has an average life expectancy of 77.6 years. Much of this improvement is attributed to the development of antibiotics and vaccines, and increased knowledge about how hygiene, food safety, healthful diet, and exercise increase our chances of remaining healthy and living longer.
• Medical knowledge has made extraordinary advances creating an ever larger pool of survivors. Cancer accounted for 554,643 deaths in the US in 2003. But whereas the survival rate in 1930 was 1 in 5, nearly 2/3 of all people diagnosed with cancer today can expect to live 5 years or more after diagnosis.
• Diseases that would most likely have killed a person quickly within the past century are now, to a large extent, highly treatable, if not curable.

Survivors reflected in culture

• While medical and surgical science of survival has accelerated, the art of navigating life beyond diagnosis and treatment lags woefully behind. A search of IMDB.com found more than 200 films that mention cancer in the plot with all but two involving the individual dying.
• Lance Armstrong, a champion bicyclist, detailed his struggle with advanced-stage testicular cancer in his first memoir Its’ Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, and again in his follow-up book, Every Second Counts. His foundation (LAF) has made its mission advancing the case of cancer survivorship and a report issued in 2004 sets forth a strategy through education and support services.

A growing field of study

• Studies tend to concentrate on the financial/career extinction burden of illness. Harder to see but no less valid, are the positive effects of illness on an individual’s life, the gifts of illness. Only a small number of papers have focused solely on the positive transformative effects of illness and survival, despite the fact that some significant research has shown that finding positive aspects in the illness experience can ease the transition to long-term survival.

Understanding the whole picture

• Even in the most populated areas, the support programs that helped people to accept the diagnosis and rallied them through the initial treatment are generally not designed to support the long-term patient.

Moving on

• In the next chapter, I outline what is known about the grieving process that follows the diagnosis and treatment of a life-threatening illness. This will lay the groundwork for the introduction of the five gifts of illness in Part II.

Chapter 3: Grief: From the Diagnosis and Beyond

PART II: FINDING THE FIVE GIFTS OF ILLNESS

Chapter 4: Illumination: Finding Meaning and Worth in Suffering

That which does not kill me makes me stronger

Friedrich Nietzshe, philosopher

Before seeing these gifts of illness, which are individually highlighted in the next 5 chapters, many of the individuals went through what I call illumination.

Fight or flight

It’s not whether you get knocked down. It’s whether you get up.

Vince Lombardi, professional football coach

Finding a reason for the illness

To survive is to learn to live, because the skills and attributes of survivorship are not innate, they are learned.

Ellen Bushkin, cancer advocate

Finding deeper meaning in illness, in life, in surviving

He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.

Nietzshe

• Dr. Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning details his experience as an inmate in several Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He wrote of the elements of life that helped to sustain him during that time. He survived the nearly unsurvivable conditions and experiences by finding meaning in his suffering, something he believed was an active choice. “If there is any meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”
• How a person handled suffering influenced the meaning conveyed by the experience. “The way in which man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his suffering or not.”
• Sometimes just finding a reason to go on gives people the gumption to continue, at the same time imbuing the lives of the sufferers with greater depth. “When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves. In accepting the challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.”
• “There is nothing in the world that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.” Deriving meaning from one’s life may not be an easy task. It is a journey that people often postpone until such time that they must face their own mortality, experience suffering or undergo a life-changing experience.

Meaning, illumination, and the gifts of illness

• Without meaning, there is no purpose in getting through the treatments or weathering the worries of relapse or recurrence. The gifts of illness were the meanings assigned to particular areas of life that the interviewees discovered or the greater value they found through illumination.
• While finding the gifts of illness seemed to be inevitable, there appeared to be neither a prescribed path nor a time frame involved in their discovery. Usually the positive benefits or effects were always there, but something, somewhere, at some time made these individuals suddenly take notice.
• That moment occurred to Jim when his father said “You know, it really sucks that this is going on with you.” And Jim almost automatically said, “No. You know, it’s not.” By that point, he had realized that even though it was having effects on his life that he didn’t want, it was also rapidly becoming a very powerful method of change for him.
• Most interviewees said that illumination came to them as the gifts were realized, in a slow but rewarding process. Brenda put her disease out of her mind, got married and focused on raising her son. When a particular exacerbation of her disease landed her in the hospital for 3 months and brought her to death’s door, Brenda began to see all of the little things in her life for which she was grateful. “Before the disease, I took my life for granted. I thought I was sort of invincible, I guess. I just thought, you know, I’ll be here forever. I don’t think that way anymore because I don’t take life for granted. I don’t take people for granted.”
• When the body has undergone the assault of disease and treatment, it is not the only part of the person that changes. A newer depth and understanding of life and its meaning alters everything from relationships to emotional reactions, from living in the now to resetting goals for the future.
• The 2001 paper published by the Strangs backs up the notion of self-discovery by saying: “An individual struggling with the questions of life has to find his or her own answers to the challenging life questions and thus find meaning by himself or herself.

Revealing the five gifts of illness

• However and whenever it happened, the interviewees said they found the gifts of illness in this point or process of illumination. We will get further into the 5 gifts in the following chapters, but for now they are briefly summarized below by a handful of participants as they were revealed during their point or process of illumination.

Real story – my illumination

• My moment of illumination, a turning point in my life when I began to see a disease that ravages my intestines as a gift, happened in the first half of September 1999 in a darkened hospital room in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Finding the meaning and the gifts

• Sleep did not come to me that night. I began to acknowledge just how serious the disease had been. I began to focus on the flip side to all of this and on all that the disease had given me – individuals of great character and compassion, and my life was immeasurably richer for knowing them and having them with me through my physical struggles.
• My relationships with my own family and friends had metamorphosed as well. I realized that the illness had a positive effect on the way I treated my body. My reaction to feelings and situations had changed.

Living in the light

• It dawned on me that I had to listen to what my illness was teaching me in all of these small lessons, to fight it passionately, but to live each day more cognizant of its gifts.