An Anniversary Worth Celebrating
Since college, I have adopted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s instruction to avoid quotes in writing. His point was that people should instead focus on communicating what they personally know rather than sharing what others have said. Yet there is a quote I have long remembered by Edmond Halley, who is most famous for the comet named after him. He is perhaps less famous for creating the first actuarial tables with values of annuities for up to 70 years of life, but it is that work that led to the quote below. After his research of births and deaths in London, Halley offered the following observation:
“How unjustly we repine at the shortness of our lives, and think ourselves wronged if we attain not old age. Whereas it appears hereby, that the one-half of those that are born, are dead in seventeen years time. So that instead of murmuring at what we call untimely death, we ought with patience and unconcern to submit to that dissolution, which is the necessary condition of our perishable materials, and of our nice and frail structure and composition: and to account it a blessing, that we have survived perhaps many years that period of life, where at the one-half of the race of mankind does not arrive.”
Halley lived in the 1600s when London still dumped raw sewage in the Thames, so not surprisingly, the rate of death and life expectancy has changed since then. But still, I thought about Halley’s appreciation of life when talking to my brother this week.
August 21, 2019 was the one-year anniversary of Andrew’s 12-hour surgery to remove the cancerous tumor attacking his sacrum. Before last year, I had never heard of chordoma, its rarity, or its limited long-term-survival rates. The more we learned, the more it reminded about the fragility of life. Death is the indiscriminate conclusion that afflicts us all. And it is never clearer than when it threatens a friend or loved one.
Yet even with the risk of death lurking, my brother remained steadfast in his faith. Andrew is a man of determination, charisma, and perspective, and those characteristics were never more evident than through his diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Despite the terrifying diagnosis of chordoma, Andrew—and our family—remained hopeful and trusting that he would recover. In many ways, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that Andrew’s one-year anniversary of being cancer free would arrive this year, just like any other August 21.
Despite this presumption, Edmond Halley’s observation is worth remembering. Our bodies are perishable and easily become frail, so we should live with gratitude for the time that we have. We should live with gratitude for the loved ones around us, even amid pain and suffering. Quite simply, we should live with gratitude.
My sister, Anne, commemorated Andrew’s year of being cancer free with another quote worth repeating from Charles Spurgeon: “The seasons change and you change, but the Lord abides evermore the same, and the streams of His love are as deep, as broad and as full as ever.” This message is worth clinging to in good times and in bad. The latter is inevitable, but those are the times that forge people to live in gratitude for the good and to better love and care for others when they experience the bad. This week is one worth celebrating, for despite our family’s optimism, it was never a foregone conclusion that Andrew would enjoy today cancer free. But it is not just a point of celebration for those who share my joy in knowing and loving Andrew. As Halley pointed out, we should all celebrate the blessing of life and the joys that come with it. Whether a quoted idea or not, our lives are an existence worth appreciating.
