As I sit with a dear friend who is in her last days, perhaps her last hours, with colon cancer, so many thoughts run through my head.
“What did I do wrong?” she asked me when the outcome became apparent.
“You did nothing wrong,” I replied. “You lived, you loved and you gave yourself to the world.”
Forgive me for waxing philosophical, but bear with me.
So many of us blame ourselves when we become ill. Whether it’s a cold or a broken leg or diabetes or heart disease or cancer, we think we have some blame in our illnesses.
Yes, you made choices that may or may not have influenced
your health. If you indulged in the chocolate-fudge-cake-double-bacon cheeseburger diet or if you smoked or if you were a couch potato, you contributed to your diabetes or heart disease or cancer. Guilt will only make it worse. Science shows us that changing what you can change can also have dramatic and far-reaching effects.
If you ate only the best, purest diet possible and still became ill, you may have doubts about your choices.
It doesn’t matter. The choices you made are the choices you made.
You also had to breathe the air gray with auto exhaust, petrochemicals, eat foods and drink water polluted with chemicals we can’t even know about, work in an office where furniture and carpets off-gas carcinogens, shampoo your hair with products made from cancer-causing chemicals and wear clothes saturated in pesticides and on and on.
This could become a rant against the consumer products and food industries for the poisoning of America and the government for allowing it, but I will restrain myself and stick to topic today.
Most of us didn’t even know about these everyday health hazards
for decades of our lives.
Heck, my mother smoked unfiltered cigarettes in my face while she breastfed me in 1948. Those were the days when cigarette ads featured doctors urging people to smoke so they could relax. She didn’t know any better.
I believe we all do our best. That’s all we can do.
So please, don’t blame yourself for illness. Worse yet, please don’t blame your friends and family if/when they become ill.
We all will die. I don’t know of anyone who has escaped alive. Death is a healing of its own way.
A life well lived in love, laughter and service is the best tribute any of us can expect.
Thank you for the article “Its not your fault” I am sure a lot of us have asked the same question.
Well said, Kathleen. We all ask ourselves questions full of blame and guilt. This is what I have to say about that.
When you start to feel self-critical, know that this is a LEARNED response, not a natural one! There are no other animals or creatures on the face of this earth that feel regret or shame in doing what they do naturally. No lion has ever felt remorse at the kill. No bird has ever felt ashamed fighting a predator from her nest. No tree has ever felt guilt at being generous with shade and shelter. No ocean has ever felt disgrace at following its currents. No volcano has ever felt humiliation at its eruption. Nor should we, when it comes from our honest depths.
Some days are better than others, of course. I need to remember this lesson as much as the next. But on the good days… oh, they’re good!
Thank you for supporting your community. xoxo
My friend died peacefully on Friday. I was telling another friend about it and recalling how we had lunch only a week before and how our now-deceased friend had really enjoyed the key lime pie. For me, it was a happy memory, but for her it elicited the response, “So the key lime pie is what killed her?” Wow. That prompted me to take a pledge that I will not judge anyone by what they eat or how they live. I am an educator, so I can gently (I hope) guide them to healthier choices. I don’t always make the best choices myself, so how can I judge someone else? Guilt and blame are destructive.