The Myth of Normal 89

offering, granted to others precisely because we know and honor what we ourselves feel. We might well admire someone who puts another’s needs before their own in a crisis, or the leader of a struggle for the rights of many, but such sacrifices are undertaken in a conscious and time-bound manner, appropriate to the situation at hand and with full awareness of the risks. I have a rather unusual habit when it comes to reading the newspaper: I’ve long been taken with reading obituaries in which friends and relatives pay homage to deceased loved ones. I frequently note in these a certain poignant paradox. Composed with affection and sorrow, these moving tributes often reveal and unwittingly celebrate their dearly departed’s self-abnegating traits, without recognizing that these may have played a central role in the illness that ended the life being remembered. Consider, for instance, the case of an Ontario physician—we’ll call him Stanley—who died of cancer. Stanley’s closeness with his mother was approvingly lauded in his obituary in Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, in its daily “Lives Lived” section:[] “Stanley and his mother had an incredibly special relationship, a bond that was apparent in all aspects of their lives until her death. As a married man with young children, Stanley made a point to have dinner with his parents every day, as his wife Lisa and their four kids waited for him at home. He would walk in, greeted by yet another dinner to eat and to enjoy. Never wanting to disappoint either woman in his life, Stanley kept having two dinners a day for years, until gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions.”[] Another column memorializes a woman who, despite her metastatic cancer, “did not give up any of her roles,” including “several hockey practices, school board, orchestra and other extracurricular activities,” and even took on new ones—all directed toward helping others—as the disease spread throughout her body. I am all for enthusiastic engagement with one’s community. But there is such a thing as a lust for life, and then there is being driven to derive one’s sense of self from constant activity, even to the point of not being able to pause for self-care when disaster strikes. As a final example, we have a widower remembering his wife (dead of breast cancer at age fifty-five) in these terms: “In her entire life she never got