The people I know who have or have had cancer are extremely nice people. (Not to be conceited, but I do have my heart in the right place and classify myself among these as mostly good.) For a while I thought maybe it was a result of learning patience or seeing the support they have in their families or being grateful. Maybe they’re fighters and that’s why they’re still here. Maybe the world needs their goodness.

I’m sure cancer is an equal opportunity offender, but why doesn’t it practice a little discrimination? Why not choose the really nasty-hearted people? Wouldn’t it make more sense to affect people who are rotten to begin with, those for whom cancer is a natural extension? Why not force them to think about their lives and how they could have lived differently? Why not give them and their families difficult choices to make, risks to weigh, pain to manage? Why choose a sweet-hearted person whose body has been through enough already?

The agony of that decision: to make him as comfortable as possible until the end. How best to help him spend the time he has left. What kind of choices are these?

We can spin it up anyway we want: it’s a blessing in disguise, facing your own and/or someone else’s mortality, having the opportunity to love with abandon; or, here’s one example of hell on Earth; or, if no one ever had cancer, we wouldn’t be inspired to cure it and make medical and technological advances.

I’m not sure where I am on these things. I try to limit my asking of the question why because no answer would really satisfy me. The best thing I can tell myself, and this is just to get by in the world, is that some things (most things, really) are bigger than we are, and try as we may, we will never understand them entirely. It isn’t about making sense or logic or what’s fair as we understand it. There is good and there is evil. We control what we can, and the rest, well, it isn’t up to us.

Speaking of good and evil, we will see Episode III at 12:01 AM, the first showing. We didn’t really plan to be such huge nerds, but we spent the past week seeing the other five, so naturally we’re anxious to see this one. Yoda is so my fictional hero.