Gaining a healthy sense of your own mortality
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On the evening of Dec. 30, I settled in to watch ESPN SportsCenter. I thought I would get ready for the college football playoff on New Year’s Eve, along with the Fiesta, Rose and Sugar Bowls on Jan. 1.
SportsCenter featured the top 10 sports highlights of 2021. One was Jalen Suggs’ buzzer-beating shot of UCLA during the semifinal game of March Madness. That vaulted Gonzaga to face Baylor University in the championship game, which they lost.
The other highlight was Tom Brady winning his seventh Super Bowl in his first year as the new quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That’s right, seven Super Bowl wins. Whether you’re a fan of Brady or not, you have to admit that he is the best quarterback to ever play professional football. I admit it, and I’m a Giants fan.
The highlights also got me thinking about famous athletes we lost in 2021, including Hank Aaron. Aaron had a 21-season major league baseball career, mostly with the Atlanta Braves (formerly the Milwaukee Braves). He hit his 715th career home run in 1974, breaking the record Babe Ruth held for close to 33 years. Aaron would end his career with 755 home runs. That was a record that would hold until Barry Bonds surpassed it in 2007.
The other famous individual who died in 2021 was John Madden, a Hall of Fame NFL coach of the (formerly Oakland) Raiders and broadcasting icon. Madden changed the sports we watch and how we watch them, and how our kids and their kids will learn football. He was a colorful commentator and made watching football an educational and fun experience.
Then there is Tommy Lasorda, the Hall of Fame major league baseball manager best known for leading the Los Angeles Dodgers to two World Series championships. Lasorda did it with a tremendous love of the game and a very colorful personality that led to him showing up in several movies and TV shows. Lasorda was 94 years young.
Unfortunately, on a personal note, I lost a colleague whose time was premature. Michael J. Guarino, MD, was one of the brightest and most talented medical oncologists I’ve had the pleasure of working with in my professional career. Michael was an excellent diagnostician. If he were to evaluate the case histories in The New England Journal of Medicine, I bet he would get the correct diagnosis every time. Dr. Guarino will be missed but not forgotten at our cancer center.
This brought to mind the death in 2019 of Thomas Weber, MD, a former surgical oncology fellow of mine when I was at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Tom was an excellent physician, teacher and researcher. He also was a prolific writer, and I don’t remember a time when one of his students did not have a poster or oral presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology.
When your colleagues die prematurely, as Drs. Guarino and Weber did, a feeling comes over you concerning your own mortality. It leads you to realize that many of the events in your professional and private life that once ticked you off were insignificant and not worth getting upset about. Thinking of one’s own mortality can cause one to become more tolerant and compassionate, realizing the one thing that we all can’t escape is death. Perhaps this sense of mortality also surfaces after the death of patients with cancer with whom you have become very close during their treatment.
Some may think that this commentary is not a good way to move forward into 2022. On the contrary. If we can become more compassionate and tolerant after thinking about our own mortality, it will be a better year for everyone we meet. In these trying times with this deadly virus still hanging over our shoulders, it’s something to think about. Try it before you get “ticked off.” I bet it will work for you.
Stay safe.
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Nicholas J. Petrelli, MD, FACS, is Bank of America endowed medical director of ChristianaCare’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute and associate director of translational research at Wistar Cancer Institute. He also serves as Associate Editor of Surgical Oncology for HemOnc Today. He can be reached at npetrelli@christianacare.org.
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