I have a close friend whose deployment date for Iraq was recently moved forward. Another close friend of mine was diagnosed with lymphoma. Neither of them is “likely to die” in any real sense — Intrade puts the odds of Ron Paul winning the 2008 election higher than the fatality rate of both serving in Iraq and having the type of cancer my friend has — but each has to deal with the possibility of death. I thought I would pass on some of the more interesting thoughts they had shared with me.

1) Someone has to go

Whenever my friend talks about his military service, his friends tell him they hope he doesn’t get deployed to Iraq. While they mean this comfortingly, like “get well soon” or “safe travels,” he thinks the sentiment doesn’t really make sense. He enlisted in order to help shoulder the burden the other members of the US military are carrying on our nation’s behalf. He did not enlist despite the possibility of deployment, but because of it.

It surprised me to hear my cancer-patient friend echo the same thoughts. “People are going to get cancer,” she told me. “I don’t necessarily think it should have been somebody else rather than me.”

2) Facts are inherent; meanings are not

When she first learned she had lymphoma, my friend spent a day with her boyfriend deciding how she wanted to communicate her diagnosis to her other friends. The fact that she had cancer was immutable, but her word choice when delivering the news could have big implications. Was the cancer a disability like blindness, a life influence like a parent’s mental illness, an identity like homosexuality, an incidence of a collective ill like racism, a lifestyle like keeping kosher, or a personal challenge like growing up in the inner city? We struggle with these questions for a number of conditions, especially when it comes to classifying what might be called disabilities. What do we want to cure, and what do we want to preserve? Or is there a way to both value these life-altering conditions and seek to eliminate them?

3) Everything is a gift

In the end, my friend decided that one of her favorite things about herself was the creative way she responded to the world, and that her cancer diagnosis would be no different. She was positive and humorous, casting herself and her cancer as characters in a story, with neither one just the villain or the hero.

“Not every part of me is going to make it through this,” she told me. She was confident that the parts she left behind, however, would be replaced by even more interesting and beautiful facets to her personality.

4) It’s more like a color than a shade

Marines don’t, as a rule, talk about their feelings. But one thing my friend does articulate is that death is ever-present. It’s almost a macabre joke — “Get out of bed, dude! If you’re late for work marines DIE!” It doesn’t change all other aspects of your life, but rather inserts a new aspect into it. Like adding color to a black and white photo, it doesn’t change what’s already there, it just adds a new dimension. My cancer-patient friend said that her corporeality is with her more now than it was before, but she hasn’t really changed how she spends her time. There was no “I’m going to focus on what really matters now” moment for her — she still primarily hangs out with friends and fights global warming.

5) For whom the bell tolls

Gandhi’s great insight into imperialism was that it didn’t just hurt the Indians — it made barbarians of the British as well. Martin Luther King Jr. applied the same lesson to American racism — it was black people who were denied their political, social and economic rights, but white people lived in a world filled with hate, tension and division as a result.

Our language is not very good at explaining conditions that impinge upon the one and affect the many — “I am still dealing with my cancer” might be easier in something like Latin where you can readily assign possession and object to a noun (such as “the racism on him to me”). But the bottom line is that it’s a fairly silly, 18th century view of the world to suggest that in any real sense some of us go to war, some of us get cancer and some of us are affected by racism.

We all go to war; it is just some of us who get shot at. Whether the survivor’s trauma, the bystander’s guilt, the family’s bereavement, the deceased’s nonexistence or the politician’s hypocrisy is the greater burden I leave to the Bureau of Weighing and Classifying Pain. But we all carry some of it.

Kai Stinchcombe is curious to hear more thoughts on how people think about the possibility of death, and might do a follow-up column if people send him interesting stuff. Email him at kstinch@stanford.edu.