Reflections on gratitude

I have been following Dana Jennings’ reflections on his cancer journey in the New York Times and last month he wrote a piece on gratitude, which has given me pause for thought.

When you have cancer, when you’re being cut open and radiated and who knows what else, it can take a great effort to be thankful for the gift of the one life that we have been blessed with. Believe me, I know.

And sometimes, in the amnesia of sickness, we forget to be grateful. But if we let our cancers consume our spirits in addition to our bodies, then we risk forgetting who we truly are, of contracting a kind of Alzheimer’s of the soul.

Gratitude is an antidote to the dark voice of illness that whispers to us, that insists that all we have become is our disease. Living in the shadow of cancer has granted me a kind of high-definition gratitude. I’ve found that when you’re grateful, the world turns from funereal gray to incandescent Technicolor.

It is good to read Dana’s reflections, particularly so in light of Dan Barry’s recent NY Times piece which I featured a few days ago. The two sit very well alongside each other – Jennings reflecting on feeling gratitude in the midst of diagnosis and treatment; Barry pointing out how easily that state of “high-definition gratitude” can slip away the further down the road of post-treatment you travel.

You can read Dana Jennings article in full here