Celebrations, Community and Cancer

This is being written earlier than usual, because I will have left Berea right after Easter to officiate at the wedding, near Washington, DC, of my nephew. Nick has always been a symbol, for me, of the continuity of our generations: he was born hours after my mother’s death and his names echo those of my father and a favorite great-uncle.

Weddings are an example of the power of our need for community, and it will be a privilege to have a part in the formation of a new cell of community in the tissue of human life. It is a conceit of most couples to assume, early on, that their wedding is about them, but most quickly discover that a whole host of others are connected to "their" wedding.

Beyond the obvious connections—relatives who have, and claim, a stake in the proceedings; attendants imported from the four corners of the globe to "stand up" for the couple; friends who gather in support, curiosity, or both—there is a whole industry geared up to make sure each couple thinks their wedding is unique, while looking very much like most other weddings that year. "It takes a small city," it seems, to get a couple married.

But we put up with the expense, and the loss of individual freedom inherent in the promises of marriage, because something very deep in us tells us that we need one another, that we are meant to be connected to the lives of others.

Biologists are discovering that this is true at the cellular level. All human cells start out pretty much the same; what seems to lead them to "decide" to differentiate into part of a pancreas or a left shoulder or a right thumbnail is the influence of the cells around them.

However, cells sometimes arise which simply ignore these messages from their community. They have no apparent connection with the rest of the organism and are unable to process information from the other elements of the body. If the left shoulder, or the right thumbnail, or the pancreas, need help, they won’t get it from these cells, which are interested only in their own growth, in replicating themselves without regard to the needs of the whole. We have a name for such groups of cells. We call them "cancer."

The cancer cells proliferating in a tumor think they have their world by the tail. They can go on using up resources forever (they think) without regard to the needs of the rest of the community they share life with—the body they inhabit.

Of course, they are dead wrong. And, eventually, they are just plain dead. Just like the pancreas, left shoulder and right thumbnail. The body their selfishness killed took them with it.

This entry originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the Berea, Ohio News-Sun on April 15, 1999.