(warning, rambling stream of consciousness...)
I’ve written a bit about closure and normalization. But over the last few weeks I’ve come to realize that it’s a moving target. And perhaps one without a bullseye.
I’m still struggling with finding a post-career, cancery-life, “new normal.” Unlike retirement, I didn’t plan for (on) this and the decision to stop working came somewhat suddenly. It’s been quite an awakening as to just how much work had dominated my life. Career & work… Isn't it interesting how we use these words to try and compartmentalize what in many cases is really the driving force in our lives?
Maybe the illusion of compartmentalization is universal? How else could so many of us allow a “job” to rule our lives? Ask anyone who knows me well and I think they would say that I was someone who had a full life outside of work. But despite that, the job always won out in the end. If there was a project that needed completing (and there were always projects…) or some other “important” thing that needed to get done, I did it. For many years running, I never used all of my vacation and often had more than half of it left to carry over into the following year. I kept telling myself I was saving up for the “big trip” but never got around to taking it.
Even after I was diagnosed and should have been totally focused on my own needs, I allowed work to keep running my life. I had two major surges in aggressive disease activity that may have been driven in a large part by excessive work stress. Yup, I can be a slow learner…
I would tell myself that working was the best way to keep my mind off the fact that I had stage IV disease and ultimately, a terminal diagnosis. Now in retrospect, what the hell was I thinking?.. That somehow my job was going to make it all go away? Or that I could keep going on like this was just a “chronic” disease? Even more troubling, that I was somehow so important to the “institution” that it trumped my health? And was it that important to my self esteem? All of these questions have been swirling around in my head as I try to make sense out of the whole thing.
Several months ago my buddy Tim who is a Professor of Philosophy, used his considerable skills of reasoning to convince me that my worries about going out on disability were unfounded. I had managed to go off on a moral tangent, thinking that I wasn’t sick enough to become a “burden” on society… And I was also rambling on about how important my "work" was. His arguments being that one; I have stage IV cancer and it didn’t matter if I was still (mostly) physically able to work and two; the institution wouldn’t really care that I was gone. He wasn’t talking about the people I worked with but rather the actual institution, the “thing” that I worked for. Talk about stopping dead in my tracks.
I was already starting to come around to the first argument thanks to the frequent reminders from my Oncology team but number two, that was something I hadn’t considered. It wasn’t that I saw myself as irreplaceable but I rather that I felt I was contributing to something important, something bigger than myself so to speak. But his words cut right through all that. “It,” the institution, would just keep right on going without missing a beat.
People would miss me, and things would change because of my absence but my contributions would begin to fade to the point of becoming nothing more than passing memories. How could it be any different? That’s how the world works whether we want to face up to it or not. It goes back to that Buddhist thing I’ve talked about so often, impermanence. My career was just as impermanent as everything thing else. It ended with no fanfare or accolades (the kind of stuff we aspired to in academia…), no gold watch or retirement, I just quietly slipped away. And now? Now I’ll fade from the institutional memory. It's already happening.
It took that revelation to help me break free of the self imposed “institution of work” as I’ve come to think of it. Over the weekend Tim and I talked about all of this again and it made me realize just how far I've come. And it's ok.
