Goodbye, Jan

Jan Stafl, my friend, died two weeks ago. He was 58. He had lived – and I mean lived – 4 years with an aggressive, incurable form of cancer for which he had received a 9-month prognosis. No, he didn’t die “after a long battle with cancer.” Jan didn’t battle his cancer. He worked with prodigious energy and deep curiosity and extraordinary courage to understand it, to be on speaking terms with it, to learn from it. He worked thoughtfully, patiently, with grace and humor – and I have to say again, with prodigious energy -- to teach himself and those around him how to die in full consciousness.I write about Jan to honor him. But I write about him in this particular forum to make two points. The first is that, sometimes you do everything right, and you still get clobbered. You are physically active, and you eat well, and you have deep and loving connections to family and friends, and you live in a beautiful place, and your work is meaningful, and you have a rich spiritual life. In short, you live the ultimate counterclockwise life. And then you get some weird bad cancer and you die.I know I am not the only person who works overtime to fool herself into thinking she has the ultimate control, that she can avoid all things bad by doing all things good. Of course I know this is not true. But Jan’s death forces me to feel it and deal with it. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.Jan’s illness and death, also, I think, puts the correct focus on why we should choose to live healthy, vibrant lives. We choose this life not to avoid death (ha!) or even, it seems, to avoid random illness. We make purposeful healthy choices every day so that we can live wholly and fully during the years we are alive. We make these choices so that we have the energy and resilience and embodied delight to enjoy the world and to do good things in it.Which is what Jan did.In spades, as they say.