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True inspiration.

Seventeen years ago, Jane was diagnosed, at the age of 26, with breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy and had her lymph nodes removed.

Three years later, the cancer returned. She now underwent radio- and chemotherapy.

Four years on, her son Steven was born.

Ten years after she was first diagnosed with cancer, her doctors told her she had cancer in her lungs and bones. And that she had six months to live.

It is a question we often ask ourselves. What would I do if I had six months to live?

Do animals know when their number is up? They certainly know when disaster is imminent. Before the Asian tsunami, most animals headed for the hills, leaving very few casualties.

How about an orgy of consumption? Travelling around the world? Doing something for the human race or planet? Giving up completely?

Many years ago I read about a doctor in the USA called Lawrence Le Shan. His job was to counsel patients diagnosed with [terminal] cancer. The [obviously] very high death rates made his job depressing at times.

As a psychotherapist myself, I often ask clients, as a way of illustrating several techniques and principles, how long they expect to live. When I first started, 12 years ago, most people saw mid-70’s as a realistic goal.

Who knows what has changed? Social attitudes, demographic trends, maybe even the kind of client the universe was sending me, but the figure amazingly crept up, so much so that the question inevitably returns answers at least 10 years more.

Think about it like this. You are like me, in your mid-50’s. Suppose you think you will shake of this mortal coil at 75. So you have 20 years to live. Given the number of people who say the best philosophy is to live each day as if were your last, maybe this might seem a good thing.

But is it? Let us say you go for 85, or even 95. You have 30 years to pursue your life’s purpose, not 20. It starts to add credibility to the notion of our being infinite beings, able to step outside the prison of time.

If you sign up to the ‘everything starts falling off’ mind-set, then it will, half as fast again…

However, Le Shan decided to do investigate what factors contributed to cancer survival. What he found was very significant. The majority of patients, having been given the diagnosis, accepted it, and asked for ways to relieve the pain. The next largest group statistically, did all they could to return to the life they had before the diagnosis. Almost all members of these two groups died.

The one group that did create survivors, was the one in which the response to cancer was: “This is my wake-up call, I have to [and will] change my life.”

I, and I suspect many of my readers know people who have survived cancer, and are cancer-free.

Over the years, a number of my relatives have died ‘before their time.’ Many of the poor sods lived unhealthy stressful lives, because that’s all they knew, and regarded senior members of the medical profession as God’s boss. Like the car going in for a service, doctors knew exactly how to fix people, and if they didn’t, order the coffin.

One of our cats was diagnosed with cancer, and given a few weeks to live, with [a chance] or without [no chance] an expensive operation. My wife and I did some healing on her. She lived for a further 18 months, with no signs of pain. It was obvious when she was slipping away. She died, quietly on the chair.

Animals do know, but they also absorb our wishes to stay or go to the Great Cat [or other species equivalents!] in the sky. When my mum died at 88 a few years ago, I faced the realisation it was me who wanted to her hang on [she had had enough and knew it], not her.

Does part of you know when you’re due to go? I suspect it does.

By 2005, she had raised over £1.5 million for charity.

In 2006, she cycled across America, 4200 miles.

In June this year, she witnessed an event she organised in Leeds [UK] in which 8000 runners took part.

On September 3^rd, Jane Tomlinson died at 9 p.m. at St. Gemma's Hospice, Leeds.

We live in an incredible world, full of joy, abundance and love. I often through my fables, point out the dark side of life, before emerging into the light.

No matter how skilled I aspire to be, every so often, ‘real life’ conjures up people who inspire us more than any fiction, and we can’t hear enough about them.

Their stories usually end up in books like ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ a few years later. Because ‘Chicken Soup’ is written by and mostly for Americans, stories like Jane’s can slip through the net.

For part of this month only, I couldn’t create a story more inspirational than that of Jane Tomlinson.

There is life before death, and we don’t need the dreaded ‘C’ word to motivate us to make our lives a masterpiece. That Jane did, makes her life even more remarkable, because it enabled her to imagine a life previously undreamed of.

So, in our own way, how about translating her achievements into something a little closer to home, something we would like to leave as our legacy.

Could you…Would you…When?

JS, September 07.