You Feel Guilty About Your Cancer (1998) (the brain tumor turned out to be benign)

[Cisco99]

You felt shame when you were diagnosed.

There must have been something you could have done

to keep this from happening to your family.

If you had eaten different, more vegetables and fewer orders

of fries, more green tea and less red wine,

if you had meditated, cultivating a more positive attitude.

If you had paid more attention to your body.

If you had been a better man and lived a more giving life.

Waiting for a loved one to die steals your life and makes you

hate yourself for wishing it were over. You think of solutions

that might simplify things, reduce the number of months of waiting,

but they are terrible, too. You wish you had saved more money

and could afford a maid to sweep under the bed or a personal attendant

to swab you clean, so the people you love are not put through that.