From the Front Page Sections, translated…
If you’re ninety-years-old, and it’s only two days since your husband just died, and the doctor told you, “there’s a tumor inside of your abdomen. The best course of treatment would be surgery, chemo, then, radiation therapy.” But there’s no guarantee, if your elderly body can get through it, and even if your body gets through it, heaven only knows how much longer you will have. Do you have the surgery, or don’t you?
How would you, make your decisions?
Grandma Norma from the U.S. said, “there’s no need!” she’s ninety, lived long enough, “it’s time for me to go.”, she’d sold the house, gotten an RV, and, hit the road with her son, her daughter-in-law, and their dog.
From her home in Michigan, she’d driven to wherever she is, and traveled the U.S. In the final stage of her life, she’d had many firsts in her life: first time on a hot air balloon, to the Yellowstone National Park, and had her very first manicure too. It’s as if, the doctors diagnosing her with cancer had opened up a brand new life for her.
Her daughter-in-law set up a Facebook page, “Driving Miss Norma”, documented the ninety-year-old elderly grandmother’s many adventures. It’s been six months to date, she’d trekked a total of 12,000 kilometers, her 300,000 fans on Facebook would click on her Facebook page, and we’re all curious, “is she really going to, live until she dies?”, and we were all there, bearing witness, to Grandma Norma’s final adventures in life.
In the photographs, Grandma Norma is usually smiling, her wrinkled hand on the green beer bottles; her son pushed her along on her wheelchair, and did a trick in the woods, or they’d gone into the oceans, and treaded the waves. In her ninety-years of life, after her husband died, she was diagnosed with cancer, and, she’s not slowing down at all.
What moved me even more was those photos of her living from day-to-day: her and her dog, Ringo, resting underneath a tree (with a four-legged friend accompanying, it’s WAY better than lying there, alone, on a cold hospital bed); or the one with her colorful bandana wrapped around her head, as she gazed toward the distant mountains, with her lips closed tightly, and that sturdiness from her eyes after the shutter clicked (this, is it then, having life coming to a halt, while on one’s adventures is a blessing in itself).
The final voyage of Grandma Norma made us see, that facing toward the end of the line, you don’t just have the options of “fighting until the very end”, “a fighter in life” methods of approach.
When the medical fields found an assortment of treatment options, no matter how slim the chances, we’d normally followed the standardized operating procedures. Lying on the beds, waiting, for the organs to stop working one by one, as we’d become in a daze, not knowing, that we will never, walk out of this high-tech room again.
More and more people are thinking creatively now: in order for better quality of life toward the end, to get to say goodbye to the ones we loved, we may need to control our impulses for getting treatments; to NOT just try to intervene with medical means, to fix our bodies, and to control how they will deteriorate. The hardest part is: when to move in, and when to let go.
The author, Yoko Sano of “A Cat Who’d Lived a Million Times” carried that stubbornness toward the metastasization of her cancer in a very classical way. She’d asked just two questions: “How many years do I have left?”, and “How much will it cost until I die?”, to make sure, that she has enough money saved up, and she’d immediately told the doctors, “Do not elongate my life.”, then, on her way home from the hospital, she’d walked into a car dealer, pointed to the England Green Jaguar, said, “I’ll have that one!”
“Knowing I have only two more years of life, the depression that I’d lived with for over decades was cured without any medication!”, she said, after learning of her date of death, she’d also, gained her freedom. Yoko Sano is an amazing elderly woman.
It seems, that knowing that one’s life is about to end, there’s nothing bad about that, the important thing is, if we can have enough freedoms, to choose how we will live, until the end of our lives.
So, you can see, these women carried a more than positive attitude toward the fact, that they’re about to die, and, it’s exactly after you’d accepted that your ends are nearing, that you will finally be released, from the worries that had, held you back, because you only have a limited number of months or years remaining, and you will realize how important it is, to utilize ALL the limited amount of time you have left, to finally do those things on your bucket list!