Rich Brooks

Embrace mortality, then live and grow

May is ALS Awareness Month.

Did you know that?

Well, I did. But only because I received an e-mail notice about it.

I'm aware of it, all right. I'm more aware of it than I'd like to be. Disease is like that, I guess.

Most people never give their health a second thought until something goes wrong.

Then comes an eruption of awareness, which usually lasts a couple of months. Eventually, this is replaced by what I call the "Now what?" stage.

At this critical juncture, there are four possible outcomes: the patient becomes worse, gets better, stays the same or croaks -- a euphemism for kicking the bucket, buying the ranch and lots of phrases that mean the same thing. Life, defined by the act of respiration, has ceased.

I know I was like that.

Shortly after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, roughly 12 years ago, I became an encyclopedia of knowledge about it. Nothing about what I learned was hopeful.

This is what I found out: ALS is a relatively rare disease. At any one time 30,000 people have it, with about 5,000 new cases each year. Roughly 80 percent of those people die within five years of being diagnosed.

There is no cure and no effective treatment; neither is there a known cause.

I wish I had never heard of ALS, just as many of you wish that you remained ignorant of Alzheimer's, heart disease, cerebral palsy, diabetes, Crohn's disease or any of the dozens of types of cancer.

Where would we be without war, disease, pestilence and famine?

Without the apocalyptic drumbeat of those horsemen urging us forward, humankind may never have birthed great ideas.

DaVinci would never have painted the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven would not have composed his Fifth Symphony, we wouldn't have heard of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica or Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

I'm not the first to recognize our own mortality as a motivational tool.

In fact, that is one of the philosophical lynchpins espoused by Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and an ardent supporter of the president's policy limiting embryonic stem cell research.

What are we to do?

Embrace our mortality. It's part of what makes us great and reaching for the stars.

At the same time, we should keep extending ourselves -- personally and as a nation. We don't seem to be in danger of living too long.

After all, ignorance is bliss.



Rich Brooks can be reached at rich.brooks@heraldtribune.com.