Cancer is not evil. It is, in fact, quite innocent and, to the great dismay of life on Earth, very good at what it does. It grows and expands, it pushes into and forces out of. Cancerous cells are extremely successful at what they do—their mothers must be quite proud. These cells are mutations, minute ones. But cancer continues to mutate. It multiplies, it spreads, suffocates, starves, and massacres. It is cold, ruthless, unforgiving, cruel, perhaps unusual, yet it is not one thing: It is not evil. Cancer has no malice, no idea of vengeance, no enemy to squash, no quarrel with anyone or anything that it inhabits, yet it is nonetheless a warmonger. It stockpiles an enormous reserve, builds fortresses of toxicity, and hits a body with the firepower of a micro-cellular militia. It is a host’s unfortunate burden to bear, to carry, to watch as it grows, colonizes, sacks, plunders, and raids, doing exactly what it is meant to do.
Of course, there are treatments that hinder the cancer’s advances. The cancer does not know better, and the cancer does not know worse. It is scared. It writhes naked and blind in a warm, mushy swamp of a human’s insides. We do not start peace talks with cancer before we are sure we can eradicate it completely. Poor cancer, really. In our utopian vision, it would rarely get the chance to be fulfilled. In the non-utopia that is our reality, if it does achieve self-actualization, it often destroys itself in gross, inflated overconsumption. What a farce.
Cancer knows no morals, no ethics, no poetry, no music, no joy, no sadness. There is no way to plead to cancer, to reason with it, to politely ask it to stop. You cannot, no matter how one may try, make cancer understand the pain that it inflicts on its hosts, on its host’s symbiotes—our families, our friends. My mother’s cancer knows not what it has done to her family, to her body, to her mind. It only knew to grow, to survive in a very strange land that proved hostile to its final goal, oblivious to the well-being of my mother. Humans are no different in our conquest for survival. But humans, the only mangled amalgamations of cells on the planet with conscious choice, are most definitely one thing: evil. There is no force in this universe or in the next that has the inherent capacity for evil except for the force of humanity. Humans are a cancer, a conscious cancerous tumor on the face of our mother, the planet Earth.
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A cancer grows here. A cancer has grown here for quite a while, festering. It spreads rapidly and without a reason to cease. A cancer grows on our Earth, in our nation, in my home, in my body. A cancer grows on my father’s skin, in my mother’s chest, in my grandfather’s spine. A cancer grew in my grandmother, Donna. It spread to her pancreas, to her ovaries, to her lungs, to her soul. That cancer fought diligently to grow, to succeed. Donna fought to kill it, to stop it blind, but it had enough munitions to force its host into submission. We had Donna for four years while that cancer raged inside of her. We loved Donna more than her cancer, more than her treatments, more than her diagnosis. I loved Donna more than I could have ever successfully communicated to her, to you. That is a sorry excuse for the vast volumes of words I regret not saying to her while her cancer stewed. Although small, that cancer conquered. That cancer was not evil. That cancer started as one cell. One cell. Tiny, impossible to see with the naked eye. Not one iota of one quark of one proton of one atom of one molecule of one organelle of one cell of Donna before her cancer had been evil. And even as she endured cancer, evil was not present in the body. But it grew fast, until it devoured its host and killed her.
I still dream of Donna, of Grandma before cancer, before I thought of cancer as innocent. Cancer did not take Donna because it is evil, even though I thought it did. Cancer did not take Donna because she was evil. Cancer took Donna because it wanted to survive desperately. It needed to. It needed to spread just as much as Donna needed to banish it from her body, to purge it from its withering host. I needed Donna to do that, to beat her cancerous opponent. I needed my grandmother to vanquish cancer; I needed her to stay alive. I miss her more than I believed I could. I miss her even with that cancer, that non-evil, ever-multiplying cancer. Donna suffered; she endured a lifetime of misery within one-seventeenth of her Earthly existence. Cancer made her suffer. It made her mind weak, her resolve susceptible to collapse. I see Donna at night, in my memories, in photographs, as my grandmother. I see her in cancer, in images of tumors, and in mention of suffering. She chose kindness, she chose humanity, and she knew, above all, that her cancer was not evil.
On a personal level, one that I hope to never have the displeasure of knowing, Donna got to know her cancer. She was first acquainted with it as a pest in need of immediate extermination, but grew to coexist with her new fickle friend. We are all interconnected with life on this planet. Donna chose not to alienate cancer, but to connect with her parasitic visitor. I only wish cancer could have known Donna like she chose to know it. I wish cancer had known who she was, what she meant to her environment, the niche she filled. What she meant to my father, her son, to her daughter, to her husband, to her grandchildren, to me. I would only hope that if cancer did know Donna, it could have spared her, given her the license to live without its influence, abandoned its purpose, waved its white flag above the smoking battlefield, and chose, on its own volition, to do no more harm. Donna is no longer here; she passed along with her cancer. My mother’s cancer has retreated; she is still here, but is forever changed from her funny visitor’s all-too-long tenure. With a cancerous tenant dodging rent, it is easy to antagonize, easy to slander and to libel. It is truly a gargantuan feat, however, to know it as a part of one’s being, a part of one’s whole. To sit with it, to understand and accept its inability to choose. I find myself choosing great empathy for cancer, as I know it is not evil, but a battle cry, one that I refuse to hush from my barbaric yawps from the rooftops of the world, and one I am willing to share with you here, now, and always: fuck cancer.