I think the onus is on the audience to understand that X ailment sometimes can’t be beat no matter what you do. If you’re talking to someone who thinks all cancer can be cured by pyramids and crystals they’re going to assume the patient fucked up no matter how you phrase it. I find that “lost battle with X” tends to lead to fewer follow-up questions than phrasing it any other way.
Did all my relatives dead from cancer lose battles with their individual cancers, or is about half the family engaged in an ongoing war while the other half watches from the peanut gallery?
If and when it helps the mourners describe it that way, I’m fine with it, but too often I hear it from people who weren’t there to help dig trenches.
“Nope” is now losing the battle with “Yep”.
I think that is true but the understanding becomes more difficult when the person is you - or you husband, parent or child.
I used to be very active on some pancreatic cancer support groups about 10 years ago. I only remember 1 patient that was into the pyramid/crystal variety of woo and I actually don’t think this was an issue with her, she probably blamed the shaman she brought in from South America rather than her husband.
I most often saw this attitude with patients that were convinced that the strict dietary and cleansing treatments such as Gerson and Gonzales had value and I was very outspoken against those because they were exhausting and destructive to quality of life. Not being able to eat favorite foods was the least of the damage, the supplement and cleanse schedules ( those quacks loved their enemas ) were very rigid and often made it impossible for the patient to go out and do anything or even get a full nights sleep. These “treatments” often required taking a bunch of supplements every 2-3 hours which made it impossible for the patient to get solid sleep. 4 or 5 enemas a day were often part of the “treatment”
But these patient were convinced they were fighting and the difficulty of the regimen played into these feelings - it made them feel as if they were constantly doing something to kill that cancer. And when these treatments inevitably failed, it was always because they slept through the night once and missed taking the pills or the coffee enema or had a steak that one time. It was like the made a mistake while playing a video game and got killed.
The patients that went for conventional treatments weren’t that much better - when these treatments failed as they usually did, they would find another treatment that usually was less effective with harsher side effects and would continue in this cycle of diminishing returns, always believing if you found that one experimental treatment or that one good doctor that you would be one of the “winners”. And the fact that a couple of people that were in the .01% of pancreatic cancer survivors showed up in the support groups with messages or encouragement didn’t help - they meant well, but the " I did it and you can,too" message really didn’t help anyone.
I used to say that if a doctor told a patient that he only had a one percent chance of being alive in 6 months and he should get his affairs in order, the usual response is “What you’re saying is we’re going to beat this, right?” Honest doctors get a bad rap with cancer patients because patients are looking for a doctor that “won’t give up on them” and will “help them fight and beat this thing”.
I think the bottom line is there is a deep set need for someone that is facing terminal illness to feel like they are doing something, anything … even if the anything is financially ruinous treatments with harsh side effects and virtually no chance of doing anything more than extending the life span by a couple of weeks.
I was really thrilled to hear that a few years ago Sloan-Kettering decided not to use a new cancer drug because they didn’t feel the benefits justified the price - it was groundbreaking because it may have been the first time that “do no harm” was extended to include the patient’s wallet.
My main quibble is that that applies to SOME patients, not ALL patients. My dad, for example, does not seem to feel any need to “do something, anything”. He is not the only person I’ve met with a terminal illness who feels/felt that way.
Now, in my sister’s case, yes, she DID fight her illness for 17 years before it killed her.
In other words, different people are different. That’s the thing. I don’t like hammering everyone into a particular pigeon-hole/narrative. If the person fights, then say they fought. If they didn’t fight, then just say they died of “X”.
Hey! if I die of a disease, that’s definitely what I want my obit to say “Cancer won a Pyrrhic victory against Rivkah Chaya yesterday. Hah!”
I dunno. Opal’s mother wrote an obit that said she was “in the arms of Jesus.” Now, it’s my personal belief that Opal was gone, had no idea, and didn’t give a damn, but I still thought it was wrong to write something she would have hated so much.
I went to a friend’s funeral once where someone who was a friend of his mother’s stood up and spontaneously sang “Simple Gifts.” This guy would have hated that so much. He was a hard drinker who, the closest he got to sentiment was the movie Harold and Maude. He also hadn’t seen his mother in years in spite of living only about 80 miles away. I guess I understood why.
I can’t begrudge his mother anything she found comforting, I guess, but Wow, he would have hated his funeral.
As far as “lost the battle,” my personal hatred of the phrase comes from someone imposing it on my father’s experience when my father had actually elected not to exhaust every possible experimental treatment, to sign the DNR, and end his suffering. So he really didn’t lose a battle. He laid down his sword, and he did it rather than exhaust all his resources for nothing. It was brave, and it was selfless, and it was not a battle to the last for good reasons.
At any rate, my father wrote his own obituary before he died (the one for the paper, I mean), and it didn’t use this phrase. It just said he died after an illness.
Yeah, “arms of Jesus” just sounds so sweaty. Bleech.
If the person recovers from the disease, does anyone say the disease lost the battle?
I really don’t have a problem with it. I do like to avoid cliches when I am talking about death, so that’s about the only issue I’d take with it.
The idea of fighting a battle against a disease really does make sense to me. After all, there ARE alternatives to fighting, including suicide/euthanasia. And there are people who remain active in life despite the difficulties of their disease while others might choose to just veg out in front of the TV until they go. I have an inherent respect for anyone who will see the thing through to the end, and that is increased the more they try to get out of life.
I do not necessarily see anything negative implied by “losing” in a battle like this. The judgment of a battle is how you fought it, not just who won. You can see this in real battles, like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo. What a bunch of losers, right?
I suppose the people who hate the idea of disease as a battle must also hate the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, etc. but you guys are just fighting the tide on this one. (hah!) You don’t need an animate/thinking/human opponent in order to have a battle, and language has been structured that way for a very very long time.
And you know how often people in first century Judah bathed.
Well, there are a lot of people, including my father, that you are judging, I guess. But at any rate, no one but me, my mother, my brother, my father’s brother (and I assume his wife), and my grandmother (my mother’s mother-- my father’s mother was dead, but my mother’s mother was there to help at the end), knew exactly how things went, and what choices my father made, so anyone who suggests he “lost his battle” is making some unwarranted assumptions.
If my father had tried every possible experimental treatment, he might have lived six more months, been in pain the whole time, and bankrupted my mother, causing her to have to sell their house to pay bills, and liquidate their stock portfolio. As it is, she is living very comfortably, and able to spoil her grandson, who is also my father’s grandson, rotten; she helped us out financially when he was born, so my husband could take three weeks off work, and she buys him things when we can’t afford them, like private swimming lessons (he really needed private lessons). And nothing happened in the six months after my father’s death, like a marriage, birth or bar mitzvah he might have wanted to live to see-- not even an election. Some of his former students published a book in his honor, and it would have been nice for him to see that, but he knew they were writing it, and it was more than a year before it came out.
But that’s not generally how people react to people who lose actual battles. The defenders of the Alamo are national heroes in Texas,* despite the fact that the Alamo was complete military curbstomp. The soldiers that were pulled off the beaches at Dunkirk weren’t reviled for suffering one of the first major defeats of WWII. The defenders at Masada were for a time synonymous with strength of will in the face of overwhelming defeat. People in the Southern US still can’t shut up about the Lost Cause, and those guys were fighting to protect one of the greatest objective evils of the 19th century. To the mid-century Japanese, the true coward was the person who didn’t die when facing an insurmountable enemy.
As a species, we tend to lionize people who fight against impossible odds as having the most will, the most bravery. The same implication applies to this analogy: the person who dies from cancer isn’t less brave or strong willed than the person who overcomes it, because it’s not strength of will that determines what your T-cell count is going to be, any more than it’s strength of will that determines if you’re going to stop a bullet or not.
*This sentence makes perfect sense if you know Texas
I’m one of those who liked Opal, but if she ended in Jesus’ arms, I bet they were both surprised.
I think its horrible and judgemental
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Not everyone chooses to fight, and not choosing to fight (finding peace with the end of your life) may be the more courageous, harder and more admirable choice.
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You lost. And losers are losers. I see it as a negative statement, one that implies that terminal cancer is something that can be won.
Heh. Choked on my colcanon.
You mean the war on some drugs, right?
Ain’t nobody battling cephalexin, epinephrine, acetaminophen, lisinopril, etc.
I don’t know a single person who hears that phrase and really takes it that way. Really, you hear “lost the battle with cancer” and think “loser?” I can understand not liking the phrase, but it can’t be because you think people really misinterpret it that much.
I lost a brother in law to cancer. I have heard from idiots that he didn’t try hard enough, that he didn’t commit, that he ate poorly, didn’t spend enough time focusing on his health…all the rest of the crap when people try and justify to themselves that something that horrible will never happen to them because they will do what is right. I don’t need to give them any more ammunition with this won/lost battle language.
People are idiots and jerks…and I know a lot of people who have lost loved ones to cancer who do take it that way. The best thing you can do is not describe someone else’s end of life journey in words that - from this poll - are pretty polarizing. There is nothing wrong with “he passed away from cancer two years ago.”
I have lost too many friends to disease and happily had many survive. Many of them took on the battle mantle (including one who changed his Facebook picture to Ironman in full armor) were proud to the end of the fight they fought. As with everything, people vary.
Anyway, the poll asks if it bothers me and it doesn’t for the reasons I gave. I understand what is meant by it and feel empathy for those who suffer. Battle can means a wide range of behaviors, including the decision to fight no more and each decision is worthy of respect.
Or maybe you could just not assume everybody who uses the phrase has your BIL in mind. Quit taking it personally.
I’m fine if other people want to use the “battle” imagery to get themselves through a very difficult illness. I don’t care for it myself, nor do I use it for my own conditions. I am not fighting against chronic migraine, I’m coping with it. I’m not fighting asthma, I’m living with it. I don’t think I’d suddenly take up metaphorical arms if I had breast cancer, since I tend to think of medicine as treatment to improve my life, not a battle. However, YMMV.
If anyone uses “loses battle with yaws (or whatever kills me)” at my funeral, I will haunt them. You know how hard that’ll be for an atheist?