The Procastinator / 3

Filled Life

Lung cancer, stage 4 with metastases.
Those were the words of my oncologist, Sebastian, at the time, out of respect, Dr. Denker.
From there begins a whole process of tests, analyses, and scans to understand the real gravity of the diagnosis.

One test in particular, the PET scan, is meant to show how widespread and active the metastases are. The procedure involves a scan using a glucose-based contrast agent, a reagent that, to put it simply, stimulates the cancer cells and detects their activity.
To do this, after the infusion of the contrast liquid, the patient must stay completely still in a bed for an hour, alone in a room, surrounded by medical equipment, a wall photo of windmills in the Dutch countryside, and a massive clock that, in my opinion, ticks slower than a normal clock.

So the first PET becomes a meditative process, where you're left alone with yourself and given time to reflect.
The first PET is decisive; it will reveal the true weight of the diagnosis, probably the moment in which death is no longer a distant, random possibility, but becomes tangible.

And it’s there, in that waiting, that I began to think, to look inside and back, to relive every single step of my life.
What kind of life had I really lived? Who had I been?
How sincere had I been with myself and with those who loved me, and those who didn’t?
The love I had been capable of giving, how much I had let myself be loved, the harm done and received, how honest with myself I had really been in my life.

A video, a clip from a movie I had seen some time before on the web, surfaced among my thoughts and brought with it a melancholic smile.

In this scene, De Crescenzo, a Neapolitan actor, comedian and philosopher, explains to his students in white tunics the “graph of life.”
Life, he says, can be seen as the horizontal line of the x-axis, no surprises, no adventures or problems, an infinite flat line, which he, for practicality, limits to 100 years.

In the graph, the vertical line of the y-axis represents the “fullness” of life, made of events, brave choices, mistakes, adventures, loves, and the more “experience” one has lived, the more that flat line turns into a wave, rising higher the more life has been filled.
So where the linear time marks 40 years, the verticality of the experiences lived means that the graph’s shape stretches those 40 into 60, even 70 years of “real” life.

As the good De Crescenzo explains, life shouldn’t be extended, it should be filled.

And that was exactly what I felt in that hour alone inside that hospital room, at the moment when the horizontality of my life was being threatened by cancer, its verticality, made of experiences, sometimes magnificent, sometimes difficult, had definitively filled it.

I found myself at that point with a life lived intensely, guided more by the heart than by reason, made of love, of choices sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but without regrets.

If death wanted to come and take me by the hand, then let it come.
Even with some sorrow, I was ready.