When 'I Would' Becomes 'You Should'

First Elizabeth Edwards, and now Tony Snow.

Both are public figures -- she is married to a presidential candidate, he is press secretary for President Bush -- and so their recurring cancers are generating stories full of doctors who are unfamiliar with their cases rattling off their odds for survival as if they were lab rats. In most of these stories, worst-case scenarios loom large.

Imagine what it's like for Edwards and Snow, and the people who love them, as they attempt to block out all the dire predictions for their early demise. Think about all those people who are in similar situations, with similar versions of their diseases, fighting hard not to personalize all the awful prognoses being hashed out over the airwaves, in newsprint and on countless blogs.

Anyone who has endured a medical scare, for themselves or someone they love, knows the potential power of such speculation. Medical treatment is so often two parts science, one part head game. We want to believe in the possible, but that can be a fragile faith when fear and uncertainty are stalking. On a bad day, or in just a weak moment, our hope can be harpooned by the unthinking comment, the blurted statistic. And we all know someone with that gift for blab.

The recent coverage of Edwards and Snow is forcing conversations in homes across the country. They begin and end with: What would we do?

Among the what-ifs, it wouldn't hurt if we started thinking about how we would conduct ourselves if someone we knew got the frightening news. To help us figure that out, we might imagine that we are the ones on the receiving end of bad news and a chatty doom-and-gloomer.

Most of our worst moments of behavior are driven by our fears, and that is probably never more evident than when we blurt opinions regarding what we think is good for someone else.

Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a series titled "Losing Lisa," which chronicled the life and death of 41-year-old Lisa Hearey and a year in the life of her family after she died.

There are so many reasons I will never forget Lisa, but what most struck me in the four months I knew her was her resolve to live as normal a life as possible -- and the equally strong resolve of a few who felt her priorities were screwed up.

There were a lot of "shoulds" flying at Lisa.

She should be videotaping herself for her three young children, they said. She should keep journals for each of them, full of all the things she would never be able to tell them. She should stop chemo, too, because didn't the doctor already say all hope was lost?

Not coincidentally, most of this advice came from mothers around her age with equally young children. They were not selfish or mean. They were scared, for Lisa, and for themselves. I, too, was the mother of a young child at that time, and it was impossible to look at Lisa and not imagine what I would do in her situation. It was easy to see how some of those mothers felt the need to visit their own fears on their friend.

Lisa, though, had her own ideas of what she needed to do. To her, the most important thing was to live as normal a life as possible for as long as she could. So, she shopped for shoes. She bought a dog for her boys. She ordered new furniture for the living room and decided in July where the Christmas tree would go. Days before she died, her hairdresser gave her one last trim.

Some insisted that she was in denial that she was dying, but what she was really denying was any notion that real life must stop. I am certain her attitude prolonged her life.

All these years later, Lisa continues to remind me to hold my tongue whenever someone I know has to navigate the murky waters of illness. They are steering the ship, and my job is to ask how I can help.

They already have plenty of bad news from their doctors, and likely as not, they also already have someone in their lives insisting they must prepare for the worst.

As Lisa always said, prepare, yes.

But never surrender.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and author of two books from Random House, "Life Happens" and " … And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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