So what does it all mean, my encounter with cancer? For me, what is the inner significance of having had cancer? Broadly speaking, none, nothing, zero. I achieved no karmic insights. I failed to be enlightened as to my relationship with the universe. Rather, the whole thing was like being in a train wreck. The smash of the derailing of my life was an unmotivated disaster which came upon me from the invisible corners of nowhere, devoid of any significance save the threat to my life.
        Okay, admittedly, I learnt that I was mortal. I learnt that the future doesn't exist, unless it's a future starting right here, now, today. Other futures, such as the imagined leisures of old age and retirement? They're imaginary. But that was a lesson I'd already absorbed long before I fell ill. Being ill merely foregrounded this basic truth of human existence: we are mortal and we none of us live very long.
        And beyond that?
        There was only one thing that surprised me, only one thing which came upon me with the force of revelation.
        So what did I learn?
        I learnt that I am my daughter's father. At one point the phrase "she is my immortality" went through my mind. All going well, she will continue after I am gone. To say so seems risky, as if the mere thinking of the desired outcome could place it in hazard.
        My consciousness of hazard and risk teaches me how glad I am that I am my daughter's father, that she is alive, that she has the capacity to live beyond me. And this is the new thing, the unexpected thing which has emerged from my siege of medical experience. To feel in my heart's core the preciousness of a life which is not my own.