Apropos of the recent death of the great Sir Terry Pratchett, he died of Alzheimer’s, the London Standard there reports “Fantasy novelist Sir Terry Pratchett dies aged 66 after losing battle with Alzheimer’s”. This isn’t unique to Alzheimer’s, but for some reason the wording of ‘losing a battle’ to refer to someone dying of a disease really rubs me up the wrong way, as if the disease has some sort of will and the person wasn’t ‘strong’ enough to overcome it or something.
Is it just me? Why don’t they just say ‘having suffered from’ [disease] or ‘as a result of’ [disease]?
I know people who had terrible diseases and from what I saw, it was a battle. A battle to keep taking medicines that made them sick, a battle to be strong for kids and family, a battle to enjoy their life in the face of fear and a battle to make hard decisions about treatment plans and stick to those choices. Some lived and some died but they all faught in one way or another.
I’m not saying for a second that life with these awful diseases isn’t a struggle, although how much ones ability to ‘fight back’ as it were may be limited due to the nature of the disease, but it hacks me off that they are described as having ‘lost’ to an unthinking condition. Like it ascribes a will, that the person slipped up somehow or was too weak and the disease conspired to ‘win’, and thus killed them.
Someone wrote that about my father in an intra-departmental memo, when he died of pancreatic cancer. It really rubbed me wrong. Especially since my father had a DNR, which meant that technically, if we want to use war metaphors, he surrendered.
Only in metaphor. Have you never felt that you were “battling” or “struggling” with a difficult task or circumstance? Have you never felt that you “overcame” some such, or were “defeated by” it?
Well, no; you’re just dead. But with a number of diseases- cancer, most notably- the pathogen doesn’t outlast the victim. You die, but so does the cancer. That’s not a loss, it’s a tie- a Pyrrhic tie, perhaps, but a tie nonetheless.
Of course, but I’d be annoyed if I died of something I had zero hope of surviving and then everyone said I ‘lost a battle’ (well more accurately I’d be dead, but you get the idea). Usually one fights a battle in hopes of winning; there’s the overt implication that the thing was two-sided. I think the metaphor rather falls down when applied to dying of a disease you can do nothing about.
ETA; On the same subject in regards to Roger Ebert, found a good blog post from an MD, who puts it better than me on treating diseases (cancer especially) as a game of winners and losers;
Not necessarily- you can fight for things even if you know you won’t win. You can fight for a principle, for example, or to prove a point. The fight isn’t always about winning, but what the fight means to you. I know a man who fought his disease long and hard, with no hope of winning, just so his kids knew he tried everything to stay with them. He may lost the battle, but the battle itself was meaningful to him.
But why say that they ‘lost’ the battle (or fight, if you prefer)? Why not say it plain; they suffered from a disease which claimed their life, which would be more truthful and have none of the implications of being ‘beaten’, or that those who survived the disease fought harder or somesuch. Who would want to acknowledge that some disease ‘won’?
I don’t think there’s any person who doesn’t understand that no one is saying “what a loser, he let the disease win”. The point if the expression, as cliched as it’s become, is that being sick can be unbelievably hard and treating it can be a physical and mental battle of wills. The sick person is not a passive recipient of the disease but the struggle they went through deserves respect.
The point of the saying isn’t the “lost” part but the “battle” part.
my doctor’s cured my cancer five years ago last month. I always say I endured cancer because that is truly how it was. Never really thought that I fought it.
By the same token, is there anyone who doesn’t understand that Alzheimer’s, cancers and so on is a struggle? Although to be honest I think wrapping it up in a win/lose metaphor makes it sound like you’re engaging with the disease in a straight up fight of wills and denigrates the conditions of the actual disease to the level of cliche. There’s the related but not nearly as infuriating (to me) phrase that someone “…died after a long battle with [disease]”, which keeps the idea intact without overtly implying that a disease won despite your efforts.
