Photo-Essays of Death

Though it is nothing she would have wished for, in a relatively short time Nancy Borowick became an expert in photographing death.  Both of her parents had advanced cancer with poor prognoses and she chronicled their lives during their final years and months.

Borowick’s photo essays document a series of progressions toward death, taken by a professional photographer who knew what was coming.  These photos are moving and instructional.

See: A Mother's Illness, a daughter's Duty (NY Times, January 30, 2015) and Side by Side, Battling Cancer and Sending Off the Bride (October 18, 2015)

Photo from the Times Collection

The Median Is Not The Message

by Steven J. Gould

From the Web: Stephen Jay Gould was an influential evolutionary biologist who taught at Harvard University. He was the author of at least ten popular books on evolution, and science, including, among others, The Flamingo's Smile, The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life, and Full House.

Gould's The Median Isn't the Message is the wisest, most humane thing ever written about cancer and statistics. It is the antidote both to those who say that, "the statistics don't matter," and to those who have the unfortunate habit of pronouncing death sentences on patients who face a difficult prognosis. Anyone who researches the medical literature will confront the statistics for their disease. Anyone who reads this will be armed with reason and with hope.  

PDF of Gould's classic article

I Can't Go On. I Must Go On"

The title is a phrase from Samuel Beckett that appears in Paul Kalanithi's essay in the NY Times Sunday Review (Sunday, January 24, 2014): "How Long Have I Got Left?"

Kalanithi, who recently completed a neurosurgical residency at Stanford Medical Center, is used to looking at CT scans of countless patients. What he's not used to, is looking at his own, but that's what he did last year. His CT scan showed that at age 36 and never having smoked a day in his life, he had stage four lung cancer. "When I first saw my scan, I thought I didn't have very long for this world," Dr. Kalanithi said.

This NY Times reflective piece will give you much to think about.

Graphic from NY Times Essay

Cancer in Kids

The film, "The Fault In Our Stars" brings the problem of cancer in children and adolescents to the forefront.  Susan Gubar, a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of "Memoir of a Debulked Woman“ which explores her experience with ovarian cancer, discusses the books on which the movie was based.

Gubar's NY Times article, June 14, 2014

Books:
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

This Star Won't Go Out by Ester Earl and others.

Movie
The Fault in Our Stars - Movie Trailer.