Over the last few days, I’ve been tweeting about one of Josiah’s “little friends” who — without much warning — entered the final days of his battle with brain cancer late last week.
This morning, this little 3-year-old boy passed away.
(To make it hit closer to home, this kid had the same thing our son has, and they ended up at St. Jude after reading about Josiah and his diagnosis.)
Over the last 39 months, we’ve seen a lot of families come and go from St. Jude. Some kids respond really well to treatment and live cancer-free after chemotherapy and radiation. Other kids, however, don’t share that fate, succumbing to the disease, despite receiving literally the best care in the world.
We’re in the middle ground. Josiah will never be cancer-free, but so far, he’s staying ahead of it. It’s brutal to know that the pendulum could swing at any time. Watching other families go through what we might go through one day is gut-wrenching.
As I tweeted, this sort of thing makes it “hard to give a shit about text editors.”
Yet, the cold hard truth is that I do still give a shit about things like TextMate going open source, the next iPhone and what people are reading and linking to to my blog.
In the light of kids dying from cancer, I always feel like a massive dick about all of my other interests and concerns.
The reality is that this shit is complicated. Getting hit with a load of bricks like cancer changes a lot of things about a person. I know it’s changed me.
But tragedy — and the rage and sorrow that come from it — shouldn’t have the power to change some one completely. (I’m not Walter White, for crying out loud.) I still have the same interests that I did before my kid got diagnosed. I still worry about the same things, and have the same goals I did three years ago.
The difference is, I suppose, that the value I put on things has changed, and when things like this kid’s death come along, I feel them get jerked around even harder than normal, making me feel like a bigger dick than I already do most days.