HE WAS PLANNING HIS FUNERAL WHILE STILL ALIVE
By SBT Reporter
Baba Moyo sat on the plastic chair outside the clinic holding the paper the nurse had given him as if it were already a death certificate, because in his mind the word that had been spoken inside that small room had ended everything and although the nurse had tried to explain what would happen next, he had stopped listening the moment he heard the word cancer.
To him it had always meant one thing only, that a person was finished.
When he got home that evening, he did not eat and he did not ask about work or about the children, because he had already decided that there was no point in pretending that life would continue as before.
As the house grew quiet, he pulled out a torn exercise book and a pen and began to write what he believed were his final instructions, not because he had been told that he was going to die tomorrow, but because the myth he had carried for years had convinced him that there was nothing left to fight for.
His wife, Mai Moyo, stood in the doorway watching him and when he finally looked up, his voice was low and tired, like that of a man who had already accepted his fate, as he said,
"Gadzirisai policy yangu kuNyaradzo, kana ndafa uzosara uchengete vana,"
In that moment it became clear that he was not preparing for treatment, he was preparing for burial and the fear was not only killing his hope, it was making him give up the very time he still had.
Mai Moyo walked slowly to the table and took the pen from his hand, not with anger but with the quiet firmness of a woman who had spent many years holding the family together and she told him that the children still needed their father and not his funeral policy.
She told him that if the doctor said there was no hope, then they could talk about Nyaradzo, but not now, not while there was still a chance to fight, because she understood what he did not yet understand, that a diagnosis is not the same as a death sentence.
What Baba Moyo did not know, and what many people still do not know, is that cancer is not always the end, because some cancers can be cured, especially when they are found early, while others can be controlled for many years with treatment, in the same way that other chronic illnesses are managed.
Even when a cancer cannot be completely cured, treatment can slow it down, reduce pain and give a person more time and a better quality of life, which is why doctors keep saying that early detection changes everything, because the earlier it is found, the more options there are.
The reason so many people still die is not always because cancer is unbeatable, but because it is often found too late, or because people delay going to hospital out of fear, or because of the cost and the distance, or because they stop treatment too early, or because the myth itself pushes them towards unproven cures instead of medical care.
Baba Moyo was almost becoming one of those stories, a man who would have died not from the disease alone, but from the belief that had already buried him before his time.
His daughter Rudo, who had been listening from the other room, came and sat beside him and told him that everyone he knew who had died from cancer had not died simply because they had cancer, but because they had found it late or had given up too soon.
She reminded him of the man in their street who had been told the same thing five years ago and was still alive, still working, still laughing with his grandchildren, because he had chosen to start treatment even when he was afraid.
Baba Moyo stared at the page in front of him, at the words he had written about his policy and his children, and for the first time since he had left the clinic, he did not have an answer, because a small part of him began to wonder if he had been preparing for the wrong thing and if instead of writing his epitaph, he should have been writing the first page of his fight.
Cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence
Comments