One afternoon, as I drove to my radiation treatment, I had the classical music station
going, National Public Radio, which is pretty much what I listened to, and the piece started
playing, which I recognized immediately. I've known it for as long as I can remember. It's
the second piano concerto by Sergey Rachmaninov. When I was a young boy, my older brother, who
was a pretty serious student of piano, had worked on the piece, and then years later, I was actually
in a couple of different orchestras, which performed the piece with different soloists. So,
it's something I knew quite well. I've always felt it was quite beautiful. Of the piano and
orchestra literature, which is a very rich literature, I personally find the Rachmaninov
second to be one of the most beautiful. So, this music I was so fond of was, was it spilling
the cars I was driving to the cancer center, and it occurred to me then that if what the
oncologists had said to me might be true, this could just be the last time I'd ever hear it,
and that made me sad. I was alone in the car and in the middle of nowhere, and I think I
did my eyes a couple of times, and then I began to feel the nostalgia of musical pieces I had
known throughout my life, listened to and played in, and recalled how some of them had been a source
of joy, and some of them had actually comforted me when I needed it, and the thought of no
longer being able to hear these beautiful pieces of music kind of consumed my mind for a little
bit. And then I recalled books that I've read. I was always an avid reader, and even as a young
boy, I was aware from time to time, as I set a book aside, that this is a book I will intend to
read again someday, because it's worthy of that. 25 years later, it probably will be like revisiting
an old friend, but in the meantime, will have gained significance because of my own life
experiences. I'm talking about books like David Copperfield, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Of Human
Bondage, books which deserve to be read again. I guess I had always just assumed there was time
in the future to get back to these old friends, but in that car that day, I became almost panicky
at the thought of losing them and not getting back to them. It's difficult for me to explain the
quality of those moments. It was a very lonely melancholy. You know, some people have a very
sudden and unexpected death experience. They don't have a chance to even think end of life
thoughts. Maybe that is one of the good things about getting a cancer diagnosis. The end of life
thoughts become a real event in one's life, and hence, there might be a chance to make everything
count and to make the best of each moment.
