Membership Has It's Privileges...And So Does Dying

How best to put this? 

By most normal standards of the word, I'm rich. Sure, by the standards of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and all their little mini-mes, I barely move the needle, but that's hardly a reasonable point of reference. I prefer to be reasonable. 

And reasonably, I have no doubt that it probably frustrates the shit out of a lot of the people reading this when I write about the options and opportunities that are available to me as a result of the resources that are available to me that aren't available to the vast majority of Americans (nevermind the rest of the world).

I get that. Completely. 

I have great health insurance that pays almost the entire cost of $30,000 worth of chemo infusions, and nearly $1,000 a month in diabetes care, and doesn't blink at the bills for my conversations with my palliative nurse or other mental health consults. And, honestly, I don't know what to do when I talk with my cancer colleagues who are struggling with their care, fighting with their insurer over every scan and every consult. I can't change their coverage, and I can't personally cover the gaps. 

It seems all I can do is acknowledge my privilege, and fight where I can for change. And I'd be the first to agree that this is the very definition of the word "inadequate."

Similarly. I think I've told the story here before of the roofer I heard about who was going through the same chemo I did after my diagnosis. The only difference is that while I had a job that provided me with paid leave in a variety of flavors, his job didn't. So he'd get his oxaliplatin infusion, get connected to the forty-eight hour 5FU pump, and then go back to work, climbing out onto rooftops to lay shingles. And he's far from alone. One of my cancer buds runs a housecleaning business. So while I got to spend my infusion days in bed, she got to spend hers cleaning her clients' houses. How is that remotely fair?

And then, of course, there's the money. Again, I'm no Bill or Jeff, but I make what any normal person would recognize as some serious coin. More importantly, during the four or five years preceding the cancer diagnosis, I had exactly nothing to spend it on. As the XS was extracting herself from our marriage, it's not like she wanted to spend time with me, so a whole set of expenses just disappeared. And while she took half of what we had with her, I am genetically predisposed to be cheap, and so I wound up in a small condo, with nothing to spend my money on, making the above-referenced serious coin. As the oft-quoted equation goes, "Kids, time or money -- pick two." I didn't even bother with two. I just went with the money. 

And I will be the first to admit that that has made everything I've dealt with vis-a-vis the cancer monumentally easier. In fact, even the divorce made it easier. Talk with people dealing with cancer, read about people dealing with cancer, go see movies about people with cancer, and there's one theme that comes up time and time again. Unlike me, the thing that the vast majority of cancer patients are most concerned about isn't the cancer, and it isn't dying. The thing they're most concerned about is the people they're afraid they may be leaving behind. And as a result, they work their asses off trying to accumulate whatever they can with the time they have remaining so their families will be able to keep their world afloat if/when they're gone. 

And that is not a problem I had to deal with. I could piss my money away on the GCW Tour because I didn't have a spouse worried about how she'd eventually make the house payment, kids worried about how they'd afford college, or anyone else relying on my income to keep up with the Joneses. I only had to worry about me. And while in some ways that was a bad thing -- if there's anything that makes you wish you had someone to hold onto, it's chemotherapy -- in other ways it was a luxury. A luxury I had that the vast majority of people don't.

And again, I am very aware of that fact.

So why am I posting a rumination on money and privilege in violation of all the social constraints that say we're not supposed to talk about this stuff? There are a few reasons, but mostly it's because y'all are smart people, and it doesn't take a genius to see in my posts that I've had resources available to me that most people don't. I'm also a firm believer that people should acknowledge their advantages, even -- or maybe especially -- when it's not possible to effect change that would make the world more just. (Don't get me started on the subject of luck.)

Moreover, it's become clear to me that the visibility of my advantages is about to become orders of magnitude worse. Simply put, I'm about to start spending money like there's no tomorrow -- because for me, there isn't -- and as I write about what's going on in my life as I rush toward the exits, that's going to be a really hard fact to hide. 

In short, what I have now is money, not time. If I could wait until next summer to go, I could get a ticket to Europe for about $600. But since I can't wait, that same ticket's going to cost me in the neighborhood of $2,100. If I was worried about my job, sick parents, retirement, how my family was going to survive without me, or any of the millions of other things that proscribe most people's options, there's absolutely no way I'd pay that premium. 

But I'm not, and so I do.

And I do it knowing what a luxury that is, and how privileged it makes me. 

(But on the flip side, I am doing to die before I reach fifty. That part kinda sucks.)