These are the three life lessons people try to teach me that, frankly, sometimes feel worse than cancer itself. The first is that I shouldn’t be so upset, because the significance of death is relative. I like to call the people with that message the Minimizers.… A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first.… And atheists can be equally trite by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning.…
The second lesson comes from the Teachers, who focus on how this experience is supposed to be an education in mind, body, and spirit. “I suppose that this is the ultimate test of faith for you,” one man muses, hoping that I will have the good sense to accept God’s will.… Sometimes I want every know-it-all to send me a note when they face the grisly specter of death, and I’ll send them a cat poster that says HANG IN THERE!…
The hardest lessons come from the Solutions People, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. “Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!” says Jane from Idaho, and I am immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.…
There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain. [They] are not simply trying to give me something. They are also, always, tallying up the sum of my life, sometimes for clues, sometimes for answers, always to pronounce a verdict. But I am not on trial.
—excerpted from Chapter 7 of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (Random House, 2018)