Carpe Diem

I’ve just picked up a book entitled Carpe Diem – Making the Most of Every Day with a Serious Illness by Ed Madden, published and copyrighted by Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. in 1993. Ed Madden was a newspaper columnist for ‘The Reporter’, ‘The Dorchester Reporter’ I think. I’ve only read the Preface, the Acknowledgements and the first of His 53 entries, each about one and a half pages long, but it has inspired me to share a portion of it with you as I read. Here are some highlights of his first entry entitled “The Journey Begins”.

“I have just entered upon a new adventure, the most exciting, challenging, spirited experience of all my 53 years. I’ve discovered I have cancer.
“Of course, had I been given the choice…the ailment would most definitely not have won out. But, as in so many of the other wonderful things that have happened to me – my birth, choice of parents and siblings, my rearing in Boston, my schooling, my magnificent body and looks, the choice was not mine.
“I can hate it, fume against it, pout and sulk, but that hurts only me. Or I can put it in its place and go on about my business, and that’s what I intend to do.
“But just as Ireland engaged Italy in the recent quarter-finals of the World Soccer cup, knowing the outcome in advance, I will enter my game with gusto and play with all my heart. I’ll use the best resources that medical science has to offer me, but I have something even better – my own will and desire and spirit….
“Of course, I will be the winner too. It will be through the agency of this cancer that I will pass over the River Jordan to the Elysian Fields, where the peace and happiness never end.
“I decided to go public with my illness…to assist others to whom the revelation of their cancers or other terminal illnesses has been devastating. It always helps to know that we have companions on a journey.
“Horatius Flaccus, the Roman poet whom we know familiarly as Horace, said it well: Carpe diem.”

Now, if you are reading this, you apparently have access to the www, so do a google search on Carpe diem and see what the wikipedia definition is. For those of you who cannot do that right now, lest you forget, I’ll do it for you. “Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace (Odes 1.11). It is popularly translated as seize the day, although a more literal translation of "carpe" would be "pluck" (pluck the day), as in the picking or plucking of fruit.”

Seize the day!