The Lemon Law

As long as I can remember, I have taken pleasure in my body's abilities, my strength and vigor and health. All of my happiest experiences have had some physical component - walking for miles through the streets of New York and San Francisco and Paris, hiking in Point Reyes National Seashore, climbing a glacier in Patagonia, combing the beaches of California and Hawaii and Vancouver, swimming in oceans all over the world. Though no great athlete and certainly no extreme sportsperson, I have always been able to count on my body to help me do the things I wanted to do.

Because of this, one of the more difficult things for me about having cancer is the feeling that my body has failed physically - after so long as my ally, my body is now an impediment. And yet, I have begun to question if my perception of my own physical infallibility was always fundamentally flawed. Prior to having a baby, I would have said that we are born perfect. But anyone who has witnessed birth knows that a baby emerges red and swollen and exhausted, battered by the indignities of entering this world. And after that comes a seemingly endless string of fevers and flus and runny noses, stubbed toes and skinned knees, bumps and bruises and broken bones. Looking back on my lifetime of good health, I can see how fragile I was the whole time.

Of course, it's a long way from those common childhood ailments to cancer. But as Siddhartha Mukherjee points out in his brilliant history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, cancer is viewed as a scourge of modern times only because most people in times past didn't live long enough to die from it. In 1900, life expectancy in the US was well under 50 years old. Pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and diarrhea were the leading causes of death. Infant and maternal mortality rates were tragically high, and in some cities, 30% of children didn't live to see their first birthday. Accidents caused more deaths than cancer. It was only as the world became safer and cleaner, with better water and better drugs, that these other more immediate hazards receded and revealed cancer as the terrifying threat that it is today. Both cancer and heart disease, together now responsible for almost 50% of deaths in the US, are usually more patient killers - but ultimately no less deadly.

Still, I think most Americans of my generation expect to live a long life and die a natural, peaceful death. We act like our bodies are new cars - we assume they will function perfectly from the moment we drive them off the lot. And if they don't, we expect that they will be fixed. We are the children of the Lemon Law era - we take for granted a guarantee that all of our problems will be remedied. We don't expect to get stuck with a lemon.

But there is a much older law that is perhaps more consistent with the reality of the human condition - caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. We accept the gift of life with strings attached, even if we tend to forget them in our safe, privileged society. Life's only guarantee is that it will one day be taken away again, and how and when are largely beyond our control.