I beg your pardon if not your deep forgiveness in advance for the personal nature of my year-end review (if that is all you want to read, skip the following seven paragraphs). You may look elsewhere for the real news and informed opinions related to the Greatest Hits and Misses of 2011: natural disasters, political guffaws, wars and revolutions, the occupation of everywhere, the worst sex scenes in novels, the best music mash-ups you’ll soon forget, and etc.

And of course there are the year-end reviews that are really year-end laments. The might-have-beens (i.e;, if Obama kept his campaign promises) and the wish-there-weres (i.e., a decent Republican presidential candidate). Sigh.

There are also the end-of-the-year complaints about the state of American culture. From the right, we are headed into a Godless liberal hell on a socialist Obamawagon laden with taxes, regulations, and class warfare. From the left, the right is simply and bone-headedly wrong and their dumbass leaders are truly dangerous. For the rest of us stuck somewhere in the progressive middle, the politicians on all sides are all hopeless corporate toadies and feckless paid liars. Their inability to do much of anything or even to compromise is further evidence of the problem for which there is only one solution, and it is a solution that those who are elected to solve our problems – the Congressional toadies and liars – will never enact: Campaign finance reform.

But that’s not all there is to review or complain about at the end of 2011.

America worries us, and we are the Americans.

The genuine oppression suffered by the vast majority of us (due to the immodest daily parade of ignorant political asshats running the country or wanting to) isn’t the only assault on our sensibilities. It is matched by the empty and meaningless lives of their popular culture counterparts, who are, with few exceptions mostly untalented but always scantily clothed, usually drugged and/or drunken photogenic if anorexic celebrities. Collectively they are a daily distraction of eye candy for an already junk-food fattened screen-dependent nation, whose silicone-enhanced butts and breasts (to say nothing of their weeks-long marriages or reported “gender trouble”) pass as news which isn’t news and for reality when nothing about them is real. 

The news media watchdog isn’t the news media anymore, not when the best news show on television is hosted by John Stewart on The Comedy Channel. All of the rest – from Faux Fox Noise to CNN to MSNBC – is a loud competitive talk show sponsored by the mall. When we tire of watching it, we are supposed to suck it up and go shopping. Is this any way to represent the greatest country on earth? Or even in the Top Ten? The Founders weep.

But I shall do none of that lamenting or complaining here.  

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Instead, what I will offer is neither a list of bests or worsts but instead a few words of thanks. Yes, thanks. For 2011 has been a year that for me has been about learning to be thankful for a lot of good things in this citizen’s life, including the one really bad thing that caused me to understand what being thankful is all about, which is the power to transform lives. Including my own. 

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I begin by being thankful for each and every day that led me to this one, which is to say I am thankful for my life. I get up every morning, look up at the skies, and smile. I thank God I’m alive. I say a quiet prayer for others less fortunate and for those who are suffering. I also say a prayer for my family, our friends, and our community, without whom I would not be here today.

So I begin with a few words of thanks because the story of 2011, for me and for my family, now closes with that singularly happy ending. It was a year that back in early June we thought was going to be defined by my diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer, but instead has been miraculously redefined not only by its remission, but by the love, science, prayers, laughter, and support that made being “cancer-free” possible. 

That story, my story, could well have gone the other way. That it didn’t do that, and that the trajectory of my narrative – of our narrative – for 2011 brought us here instead of there, well, for that happy ending I am truly thankful. I say that aloud every morning. I say that prayer even with the understanding that my life will end. But not yet!

To say, as I do every morning, that I am thankful for my life – for each and every moment of it – is to also say that I am thankful that my life is one that is not lived alone.

I am blessed with the love of a wonderful wife and fine son who sacrificed their own goals, who willingly and without being asked gave up important parts of their own busy lives and who without question interrupted the trajectories of their own ongoing narratives to ensure that I always had everything I needed to make it through treatments and recoveries, and who – regardless of my physical or mental condition – worked tirelessly and creatively to see that the high quality of my life continued to have high quality in it. I am thankful for them and for their love. Without them, as I say, this story could have gone another way.

I am thankful for dear friends and family members who also contributed so much to that quality of life and to my healing. I am blessed – we are blessed – to have all of you in our lives. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the gift of your friendship, your love, and your compassion. When I was down in the depths of my disease you visited us and kept in touch, you made meals and cookies and laughter and songs for us, and just being in your good company restored our spirits and strengthened our resolve. You wrote to me on email and gave me new things to think about, to look at, and to read. You prayed for me, and for us. And for those of you who participated in “The Buddy System” tribute, you showed me that my teaching and writing mattered. So when I say that the love and support of friends and family truly contributed to my ability to fight this disease and our family’s ability to survive it, I want you to hear in those words the deep gratitude I have in my heart for all of you. You, too, are part of my prayers. 

I am thankful for Dr. Rohit Sud, the amazing oncology team and support staff, our fellow patients and former patients at Four Winds Cancer Clinic in Chandler, Arizona. You brought to the practice of medicine the art of human kindness and defined for us what “living with cancer” could mean. We came into your community in fear and you welcomed us with care, compassion, and, as the fear vanished, a friendship that grew into love. You listened to our stories and shared yours. We danced a wild and merry “Happy Dance” to celebrate not just the end of my chemotherapy treatment but also the miracle of this community. Without you my remission would not have been possible. Without you, well, my family knows this story would have turned out differently.

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Being thankful to real people for real things reminds me of what is important in this life. Oh, I will still go on (and on and on) about what needs to be done in the land that I love – whose freedoms, strength, people, and beauty I am also thankful for – and to write about its politics and culture. You and I can still argue about all of that. That’s fine. That’s what citizens are supposed to do. But that’s all a sideshow when the real show is what you and I choose to do each and every day.

So here, at the end of this life-altering and tumultuous year, I want to honor the lessons I’ve learned that have little to do with world affairs and everything to do with what all of you have enabled within me. I am thankful for the love I’ve received and for the peace I have accepted in my heart, as well as for the gratitude I have now for the second chance I’ve been given. 

As a result of those important lessons learned this year, I look ahead to the New Year as I think Lord Chesterton would have me do: not as a mere change in a number or as a list of resolutions I’ll soon break, but as an opportunity for that newly found peace – that love and gratitude that is in my heart – to lead to a true revolution in my soul. 

Of course it’s not just me. We have arrived here together. So at the end of this year let us look forward to 2012 with an uncommon but shared revolutionary spirit. There is much that needs to change and to change it requires changing ourselves. Which is to say that what is required of us is a new way of thinking and being not just as actors in this world, but as actors in much larger narrative that encompasses our place and purpose in the evolution of the universe.

Who are we? Why are we here? What must we do? These are enduring questions for any thinking person but they are also the essential questions we need to bring anew into a true revolution. For that true revolution must first be about finding new ways to think about how we should understand those questions not as mere philosophical exercises but as practical matters of the soul out here among the stars, if our soul and our lives are to be understood as meaningful parts of that larger evolving narrative.

I know this sort of talk sounds a little crazy. But maybe we need a little crazy to make an already crazy world find right. Maybe one of the lessons I learned about cancer is that how we talk about it matters, and if that doesn’t sound crazy to you then nothing will. How we talk about ourselves matters, too. And those three questions, crazy as answering them may be, are part of the narrative medicine we need to administer to ourselves if we are to find a cure for what ails us, our relationships, our politics, our cultures, and our planet.

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So that’s it. That’s my year in review. It’s been a year of lessons about what’s important in this life and maybe our shared journey through Cancerland is what it took to get me to understand it. Writing about it in this blog is also part of how I moved through that rough terrain, as is how we talked and prayed our way into this miracle of remission. But with remission comes second chance and with that newly found peace made of gratitude and love comes the challenge of a New Year. For me, that challenge is to revolutionize my own understanding of three questions in light of what I’ve learned this year and what I have yet to learn in the year ahead.

Thank you for being part of my journey. Please feel free to join the revolution!

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