Cancer and the Priorities of a First Year Gryffindor

The Script of Discomfort

Let’s face it, as common as it has become, cancer makes people uncomfortable. Over the years I’ve heard every message of goodwill and story of someone else’s miracle simply because no one knows what to say. Even as a survivor, I wouldn’t know what to say to another except to be there even in silence. Sadly in our culture silence is just as uncomfortable as the disease itself so people fill the silence with hopeful sounding buffer phrases like, “You are so strong,” or “Once this is over you are going to feel so much better.” Then again anyone who has gone through a life changing trauma rarely ever feels like any of these statements are true. This script people follow, makes it difficult to be honest about how you actually feel, so you end up just agreeing to move the conversation along.

The coup de grace buffer phrase people love to use most is, “At least you have your life.” For so many survivors and patients, nothing can be farther from the truth. The problem is people confusing living with existing regularly. Living is going about life in a forward manner; existing is the ability to breathe and go through each day until you sleep again. Often survivors can feel like they are just existing because even if they are cancer free so much from the experience and treatments lingers into years and years of their lives, and then there is the constant fear of recurrence.

Of course it is not usual for a survivor to admit this because then everyone wants to evaluate their mental health and put them on suicide watch. Know there is a possibility to consider your death without thinking of taking your own life, it’s really just owning up to your personal mortality. Survivors often are left with a gap in their lives that often make survivorship feel worse than we expect death to. An example I often go to on this is a cleverly written line from J.K Rolling delivered by 11 year old Hermione Granger.

Hermione's Priorities

In the first Harry Potter novel, Hermione Granger rebukes Harry and Ron with the line, “I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed — or worse, expelled. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to bed.” to which Ron Weasley retorts, “She needs to sort out her priorities.”

What is meant to be a bit of comic relief about Hermione’s studious characteristics, shines light on the priorities of those with and without magic.

Ron Weasley has grown up in a magical family his entire life. It surrounds him and is always a part of his day to day even if he is not the one casting the spells. We can assume from Hagrid’s backstory that expulsion from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry does not mean an end to magic in the life of those students, except the extent of what is learned in a classroom setting. If Ron had been expelled his first year, he would have moved home where magic is still prevalent. Then after coming of age under the rules set forth by The Ministry of Magic, he would have picked up new spells from his family (we can’t rule out the idea of magical homeschooling) and he would have gone about his magic filled life without a proper education.

Hermione Granger is a regular kid with no magical parents. In fact they are worse than non-magical, they are dentists. Hermione’s life drastically changed the day an owl delivered her Hogwarts acceptance letter to their rather mundane home. This normal child whom only dreamed of a world full of magical things learns that her dreams are real and she will do anything to hold on to this version of reality.

Hermione tries very hard not just because she wants to be a Straight-A Student (do they use grades in Hogwarts?), but because she does not want to lose this connection to the magical world. This is why she perceives death far lighter than being expelled. Imagine being a normal kid, then learning about this incredible side of the world you couldn’t even dream of, then having it taken from you. Once death has come there is nothing more to worry about, and in Hermione’s case losing magic and having this deep void in her is a fate worse than death.

If Hermione is sent home, she is disconnected completely. No one in her home life is a magical being, she would t never be taught anything more and go about her mundane life into adulthood. Without having that connection, who is to say she would find her way into the magical world knowing very little magic from her childhood.

The Muggle Survivor.

True the real world doesn’t have magic and magical creatures that leave that emptiness but a true student and thinker will learn to miss all they had still going for them if they had not been expelled. Kids in high school often question why adults want to talk to them about college or share past experiences. The truth is, often those were the best times for all of us. We were closest to our friends with a certain degree of freedom not found in adulthood, we were learning at our best and we had hope of what was to come for us, and we see that hope renewed in the younger generation. And just like the generation before us tried to get us to appreciate it, we will do the same, as will they when their time comes. Adulthood, brings with it a gap you don't have in school, it could be how much time you spend with friends, how much hope you have, or how much you just enjoyed learning new things.

In this same way, survivors live with this gap in their lives that nothing seems to fill. Cancer creates a gap of a time, "before I was sick". It can form a gap with it's many side effects survivors must now live with. Much like Hermione, we long to hold on to the reality we once had before we ever thought cancer would be a part of our life. This is why sometimes when a survivor reflects upon their life, we see a time when our life was more than fighting everyday just to make it through to the next. While we don't necessarily want to die, there is a time when the human spirit can only take so much suffering and you just wish there was a way to forget it all at once, even for a moment. Viewers from the outside thing this way of thinking is dark or hopeless, but realistically it is just the brains way of giving the body momentary comfort.

In my personal life, making the most out of the moments I can forget about being sick, and the myriad of side effects are the moments I am alive. The best moments are the ones you are truly free, even free from just existing, you have achieved something beyond that, a great moment in life, even if it is just a distraction. Distraction is the best medicine as it also comes with the added benefit of creating memories with the people you love, memories in which you will live on long after you are gone and even long after they are gone if you are lucky.