It’s a co-worker who retired almost a decade ago, but kept working on “his” project freelance.
He had moved to Ticino and we rarely saw him anymore.
I think June or so last year he came to the office and his voice was almost gone.
I asked him and he flat-out said: throat cancer, operation in four weeks.
He was ok-ish after a while, even kept working a bit. But apparently it all came back and when he hadn’t submitted his monthly report, the secretary sent him a mail, to which he sent her a mail which basically said that he was in hospice and would not send any more mails.
My team-lead informed me about it earlier today. Nobody else apart from the boss knows (and few have met him anyway).
That’s the thing if you stay long enough in a job where people tend to stay long: eventually, you’ll have to confront this topic, too.
If you switch jobs every two years and everybody else does, too, you’ll never be in that situation.
This is very true. Family, friends, experiences…appreciating the now so important. I always tell my wife that I am so happy with what we have, but also equally scared because it is all so fragile. A tumour, a drunk driver…anything can destroy this is an instant.
Not only staying in a job too long. I’ve reach the stage where I appear to be staying in life too long as friends and relations fall victim to fatal diseases.
No need to be old to experience this. I lost 6 people within the last 5 years, the last one (so far? One becomes uneasy) on my birthday this year.
Some had a wonderful age, some wanted and were expected to live a whole lot longer.
It feels like the entire environment is gone, the famous rug pulled from under ones feet. The only solution seems to be to reinvent oneself.
And to keep in mind this was their fate, not mine. Even if it’s me who has to deal with the consequences now.
Things are not as simple as some would like them to be: Only one was a smoker and she did not die of anything smoke-related.
It happens. Great that you had the courage to write.
It was long ago, but I clearly remember. I was traveling due to work and met a friend of a friend in a very unexpected place. He was traveling because the treatment for cancer was not working anymore, so travel until he couldn’t move anymore.
The post I wrote this morning deadlocked my day. All the energy had vanished and I did absolutely nothing apart from a little reading but I’ll have to read that stuff again tomorrow.
In the evening I thought I do something easy like prepare a carrot soup and then started to throw absolutely anything in it from carrots, onions and garlic to pineapple, coconutmilk, fishsauce, worcestershire sauce on to laurel and the hottest pepper type I had … etc. etc.
The soup ended up as diverse as the group of friends I have lost from Turkish, Indian, Swiss, English and Ethiopian and it tasted as wonderful as how this bunch had been spicing up decades of my life.
One thing I learnt today; I’m not as far as I thought in processing it all. But the tiny little things that warm your tummy can warm your heart for a short moment.
This is the most personal I ever got on internet and trying to get my humour back: Maybe they’re all gathered on that cloud where this forum is stored, getting the message.
It’s also important to remember it’s not the only thing to cause throat cancer though. My sister in law was diagnosed with something called Barrett’s Oesophagus about 10 years ago after having problems with her voice. It’s caused by acid reflux, she had to have nodules removed from her vocal cords and had to communicate with pen and paper for 2 weeks as she was not allowed to speak. She now has to take something every day to control the acid because Barrett’s causes throat cancer (but she doesn’t take a PPI as they know there’s a link between them and dementia).
Sorry, if this re-surrected some bad memories - the post was admittedly a bit selfish.
I don’t really have anybody to talk about it as I was told this news in confidence. It’s not supposed to be office gossip.
The first most devastating news in my life was to hear that my colleague from teenage times had passed away because of a cancer. She passed before 40, the commonly assumed just midlife age. I remember her spontaneously curling up with a groan about the pain in the belly, at the university times. Huh, it turned out she had a developing cancer which was attributed to digestive tract issues all the time and treated by remediating the symptoms while the cancer was growing and spreading around until it was too late to do anything about it.
On the other hand, if I knew I have a terminated disease, short term, I have no idea, but most likely I’d continue the life as usual without telling anybody and perhaps foolling myself that it doesn’t happen.
Slightly changing the topic, have you thought about your last years on the planet. I’ve been always looking forward to just enjoy my life when I’m rich enough, but every year the perceived target moves. Recently I indeed came to the conclusion that the target financial/age was reached long time ago, and hasn’t really changed, all the reasons why I’m not yet free are the attachment about having the best “rest of your life” obviously including artificial life support and what not. However reading all the time, I eventually realized that the thing that was pushing me to continue the thread mill was naive thinking of a healthy typical teenager hoping to continue that endlessly by keeping a healthy lifestyle. Nope, we have a limited time to enjoy. There’s no money that can buy us longevity, so what’s the deal, most likely a blind follow up of a propaganda.
I don’t think you need to apologize at all. Grief is hard and it comes in many forms, and can come in waves when a new loss reminds us of an old one. Maybe to some it sounds silly to grieve for a colleague. Yet if you add up all the hours you have spent with your colleague over the past 20 years, he was a big part of your life.
A colleague informed me yesterday that her mother is on end-of-life care. I actually cried when telling her how sorry I was to hear that, because my heart genuinely hurts for her to lose her mother. It also reminds me of how precious time is with my own mother, and how little of it I get because of where we each live.
Yes, with my own health issues and my best friends from school getting cancer, this was the wake up call for me.
As someone who is nautrally risk-averse and likes to take the belt-and-braces approach, there’s always the temptation to work more or earn more to build some kind of safety net ‘just in case’.
However, I think we need to re-frame it and the real risk is that you spend additional years working needlessly when you could have spent it doing other stuff that you might have enjoyed more.
True. And six within 5 years, all family and close, life long friends is very overwhelming. It’s one of these “if I get through this, I’ll get through anything” situations.
