getting lit

as in literary. we're talking books not weed, sorry to disappoint.

Everything Happens for a Reason by Kate Bowler

At first I’m a little scared to read Kate Bowler’s New York Times bestseller Everything Happens for a Reason.

She was 35 with a new baby when she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. So a child down, a year older, and a stage up, but basically the situation I find myself in.

The book has been recommended to me by two people whose thoughtfulness and intelligence I admire, so I will read it.

But will Bowler’s thoughts be so potent that they crowd out my own? I’m feeling protective of my own authenticity here. I don’t know if I want to be informed by other people’s ideas before I understand my own.

Maybe part of my new willingness to share my words comes from my reluctance to read what other people have to say on this subject.

When it comes to cancer, I’ve been nervous to read about other people’s experiences. I want to protect the purity of my own thoughts—I want to know that my choices about my treatment are my own, and that my feelings are really mine.

I don’t want to be influenced by what other people think I ought to feel or think.

I’ve been operating in ‘transmit only’ mode for some time now.

But I read the book. The tone is engaging and conversational, and I devour it in two sittings. I quickly encounter some quotes that ring true to my own experience:

“Friends keep sending me recipes for green drinks and quinoa salads, and others ship herbal supplements straight to my house. Just try…you can eat your way out of this.... Don’t I know that sugar causes cancer?…all this talk of nutrition has infected [my husband] with a poisonous hope. Maybe I can be the cure” (Bowler, 84).

I too have experienced this optimization pressure. This idea that every moment now, every morsel of food that crosses my lips, ought to be in service of The Fight Against Cancer.

I’m struck by Bowler’s early unexplained illness Before Cancer. She had arm numbness the doctors couldn’t understand or believe, and it echoes my experience with back pain.

She also briefly refers to an appendectomy in one sentence that stands out to me as if written in neon font. I’m growing conspiracy-minded about appendices.

Hands up if you have colon cancer and also had appendicitis as an adult.

I’ve asked ChatGPT about this and there is apparently no connection. But I still don’t believe it, which I guess is what it means to be conspiracy-minded. I’m sure there must be something to this theory. ThE apPeNdIx iS a VeStiGaL OrGaN, they tell me. iT DoeSn’T dO aNyThInG.

What if the same thing that caused my appendicitis also caused my cancer?

What if my appendix was filtering out cancer somehow, and I removed my last layer of protection?

Conspiracies and commonalities aside, Bowler’s cancer journey is profoundly different from my own. Her writing is very engaged with her relationship to death. With an advanced stage 4 diagnosis, the doctors are sure she will die soon. (Spoiler alert: She is still alive!)¹

She struggles with her relationship to God and with her fervent desire to live to see her child grow up. She does not get into the nitty-gritty of treatment or symptoms or her daily existence.

I’m relieved that all my medical forms still say “curative” rather than “palliative”—the possibility of imminent death remains as vague as ever. My odds of getting hit by a bus tomorrow have not been altered by this unlikely cancer diagnosis—they are statistically independent events. I don’t feel like my current illness has meaningfully altered my proximity to death; it is as close and as far as ever.

For me, death is a loose acquaintance. An old family friend who used to visit a lot but now lives abroad and sends only occasional holiday cards. When she comes to town she doesn’t stay long, and not in our house.

There’s a book series I love, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. In it, Lyra and Will explore the multiverse and encounter a world in which everyone knows their Death. A person’s Death is a familiar presence by their side throughout their lifetime, and when it’s time to die it is greeted as a friend. I’ve been thinking about my relationship to my death, how to treat it with less anxiety and more inevitability.

I’m not ready for it to come any time soon, of course. But I hope that when it does my overwhelming reaction is one of peace rather than fear or resistance.

Death will come eventually, and I can die literally any time for any reason. A tree could fall on me right now. Lightning could strike me. I could have an aneurysm. A car could hit me tomorrow.

But I just don’t believe it will happen. Like how teenagers all allegedly think themselves immortal. Me too, teens. I’m with you.

Am I alone in this? What is your relationship to your death?

I’m not sure how I could meaningfully get through the day² if I genuinely thought I might die at any second.

And given that that’s the case, I might as well be happy. Because being miserable won’t help me avoid death. Better to take advantage of the time I know I have, which is right now.

There’s a quote on the wall of the waiting room of the cancer center:

"There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow, so today is the right day to love, believe, do and mostly live” —Dalai Lama

I’m going to eat the delicious food because I might lose my asshole or my appetite at any time. Burn the pretty matches, drink the fancy wine. You can’t take it with you.

I am not immediately confronting death from cancer in the way Bowler is; I am much more concerned about life with cancer than death from cancer. And life in general. How to live a good one, what will add texture and richness and meaning to my days.

Bowler grew up in a high-control religious environment, and spent considerable time studying and engaging with the prosperity gospel. Notably, the idea that the proof of goodness is in the pudding. If you’re rich and beautiful, then God clearly loves you and has chosen you for salvation.

This evidence of worthiness is something of which John Calvin would approve. But it doesn’t work so well for those of us with chronic illnesses. If luck and success are evidence of virtue, then what is illness but evidence of the opposite? If everything happens for a reason, then I deserve to have cancer. This is my karma, my fate, God’s will for me.

I guess I do believe that on some level. It’s hard to accept full randomness and an absence of meaning as an answer for life. Maybe that is the answer, but I don’t want it to be and it’s far less interesting to me if it is. My meaning-making faculties demand more than a shrug.

The part of the prosperity gospel that I reject is the part where this fate means I’m bad, or that God is punishing me or doesn’t love me. Theologians have long struggled with the problem of evil, and the problem of bad things happening to good people. But we can’t see the end of the story. We can’t see the answers, or draw firm conclusions. This one brief data point—today I am sick—is not sufficient information from which to interpret God’s intentions.

We’re all only temporarily able-bodied or successful.

Cancer is not punishment; it’s opportunity. It’s a gift. A chance to grow, to show my strength, to learn the depths of my resilience and my resolve, to see the goodness and compassion and love in all the people around me who continue to show up so relentlessly even when I don’t feel I deserve it.

I’m surprising myself, but I guess I come to a different conclusion than Bowler. She rejects the premise that everything happens for a reason. I embrace it.

Would love to know what you think. Does everything happen for a reason?

1. For a very good cancer memoir in which the author grapples with death and actually dies at the end, check out When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

2. “meaningfully” is a generous description of how I currently get through my days, but whatever