A very common trope. Personally I don’t see what’s brave about wanting to live, or conversely, that there’s anything cowardly about deciding that further treatment is not worthwhile.
Is the above completely obvious and the whole thing is just some jive that people trot out because they’re trying to say something nice about the sick/dying/dead person, or do people genuinely believe there’s some bravery involved?
I bravely fight other people’s diseases. Does that count?
My own? I can be pretty wimpy about them.
It’s polite, and confers a sort of dignity about a person about to die. Just as soldiers made “the ultimate sacrifice,” even if it was a stupid mistake on their part, or saying someone “passed on,” or “passed away,” as opposed to “croaked”.
Have you ever known anyone who was battling cancer?
I mean like, you can want to live. Everyone wants to live. But there is actual hard work, pain and suffering involved in the process of continuing to live once you have been diagnosed.
Not just with cancer but even with, say, diabetes. It seems like a breeze if you meet someone who was diagnosed as a 10 year old and manages it without a blip as a 30-year-old. But hitting a home run in the MLB also looks easy when David Ortiz is at the plate. There’s a lot of hard work and pain and scary moments surrounding the whole thing. It takes some bravery to not just sit back and cry.
Quite a few.
That’s true. But I don’t see anything brave in doing it. You want something enough you work for it. You don’t want it that much you don’t. It’s not like you’re willingly taking any risk - the risk part was imposed on you against your will. You’re just doing whatever you can to lessen the risk. I don’t see any connection to bravery.
I agree. Bravery ain’t got nothing to do with getting through an illness. Tenacity, yes. Resourceful, yes. But not bravery.
I hate the expression because it rewards people for putting on a happy face at a time they should be able to feel however they want to feel without anyone giving them any shit about it. And the person who decides to not treat their stage IV whatever isn’t more cowardly than the person who decides to treat it. Maybe the first person doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to pursue every experimental drug. Maybe they don’t a support network that will nurse them through it. Maybe this is the third time their cancer has come out of remission, and they’re simply burned out. Making the whole thing to be about “bravery” oversimplifies a very complicated picture.
I wish people would put depression or other mental/emotional illnesses in the same category. While it’s changing, it’s not enough. I’ve suffered from depression my entire life, and for 9/10s of it, people have said, “Suck it up!” or “Pull yourself together! What have you got to be depressed about?” I’m not saying I deserve pity, but a little understanding about emotional disease will go a long way. Maybe we’ll get there. I feel like talking about depression is like talking about breast cancer in the late 70s or early 80s. We can do it, but it’s still tough for people to mention it.
Your post mentioned cancer, but the part I’m quoting fits with any emotional/mental disease you can’t see.
Naturally, The Onion had to stand this trope on its head:
And then your husband “loses” his “battle” with a cancer diagnosed as terminal from the start, and there you stand, the widow of a LOSER.
Nope
God damn it. I was only minutes away from posting this.
Thought provoking.
I guess just feels right to express that kind of thought about someone who’s obviously going through a lot of pain and anguish, and maybe in some way acknowledge that they don’t have much of a choice (due to laws) but to be ‘brave’ and suffer through it. I’ve been fortunate enough not to have been touched by too many of these kinds of horrors (I expect to catch up, hence enjoying myself unapologetically until it happens) so have no way to know the depths of how horrible it is, but everything I’ve heard suggests “unimaginable”.
I suppose, basically, it’s brave in the same kind of sense as people who were drafted into world wars. Involuntarily brave.
Nobody wants to say it, so I will. I knew someone who battled cancer who was not brave. She cried, blamed God, blamed her family, blamed her friends, called people in the middle of the night to curse them for letting her smoke. Whined about how unfair life was and why couldn’t it have been her brother, the asshole.
Never the nicest or warmest of people, she was nasty and mean and drove everyone away. Then texted people to tell them how horrible they were for staying away. As I said, her favorite thing was to call people in the middle of the night to complain about how her friends and family weren’t catering to her every need and were all bitches and assholes. I was on the receiving end of a few of those phone calls. She was especially mad at me because I quit smoking and she didn’t.
We all tried as hard as we could to make her comfortable. Especially when it was discovered that her lung cancer had spread and given her a brain tumor. But no, she did not bravely fight cancer.
I came here to post this very link.
And what about all those cripples who aren’t inspirational? I spit on those fuckers.
I can see it is an inadequate shorthand. You can have a spirited fight with a prolonged ailment, or face it with dignity and not allow yourself to be beat down by it, and so forth. You can be “brave” in the sense of saying “welp, this truly sucks AND blows… but it’s not like it’s anyone’s fault, won’t help in any way to have a meltdown.”
But really, if you’re told “you have six months tops and it’s gonna hurt bad all the way, and the treatment has a a 50/50 chance of working, in which case you’ll last six years and it will still hurt all the way”, I am not going to judge you for taking it badly. If it were me, I cannot trust myself to be an example of courage or resignation. It may be instead about utter terror in the face of nonexistence (or, if the common belief is true, an Eternity of torment way beyond what any physical ailment may inflict) so I might as well delay the inevitable as much as possible if I can choose so.
I actually had depression in mind as well but didn’t manage to fit it in there. I agree that it can be bravely battled, thanks for mentioning it!
I think Biggirl makes the case that not all disease is battled bravely.
It is even more notable when babies bravely submit to a series of surgical l procedures to correct a birth defect…
The dictionary definition of bravery is:
So, the “thing” must truly be dangerous or frightening - otherwise it is not bravery that allows one to face it, merely delusion. In order for something to be dangerous or frightening, one must also be aware that is dangerous or frightening - otherwise it is not bravery, it’s simply ignorance of the situation. Once aware of a real danger or fear, one has 2 broad choices - overcome the fear or let the fear overcome.
A disease that is potentially terminal is, to most people, frightening. A disease that is terminal in the short term is, to most, absolutely terrifying. Those who overcome that fear and continue to live life as best they possibly can are, by definition, brave. Those who let the fear overcome them and withdraw or, as in Biggirl’s example, lash out are not showing bravery.
Nelson Mandela said:
“So-and-so bravely fought cancer/mental illness/adversity” can be a perfectly legitimate statement.
All of this. I hate being called “brave” or “strong” or similar things. I’m just doing what I have to do to stay alive, and sometimes it is total crap and sometimes it’s alright and sometimes it has me in tears but whatever it is it’s just me doing what I do.
I think it’s because there’s such a tone of pity whenever people use that. I hate being pitied or condescended to, I always have.
But I think there also needs to be some voluntary aspect to it.
Imagine you’re in a battle and you run away while trying to avoid people shooting at you from all sides. That’s pretty dangerous and frightening but not brave - you’re doing it because remaining at the front is even more dangerous and frightening.
So if you’re deadly ill and your only hope is to undergo some extremely unpleasant treatment, that’s dangerous and frightening, but many people find dying even more dangerous and frightening so they elect for it anyway.
[Of course this is not to compare people fighting illness to people running away from battle. This is only to make a very limited point that doing something that is dangerous and frightening is not necessarily brave.]