Marching Forward: Finding Meaning to Life in the Face of Death

A philosopher with brain cancer and a scientist who studies brain parasites walk into a coffee shop and try to figure out the meaning of it all.

By Adam Hayden and Bill Sullivan

The alarm goes off, and Adam Hayden rises.

With his wife Whitney, they dress their three boys, stir their oatmeal, and plan how to get one to soccer and another to art class. They are working to create a childhood for the kids that resembles normalcy.

But it isn’t.

It isn’t normal.

Whitney must drive Adam to the hospital for a brain scan, which he must do every two months to monitor an insidious brain cancer that he had removed three years ago. Adam’s cancer is near certain to return, and so Adam must submit to these frequent scans. The scan is complete.

They wait.

They wonder.

It isn’t normal.

Each year in the U.S., more than 1.7 million people will hear the word “cancer” drop from a doctor’s lips. The diagnosis is a stark reminder of our mortality, prompting Death to emerge from the shadows for a face-to-face meeting. Adam has had this meeting far sooner than he anticipated. He stares at the wrinkles on Death’s face and wonders, “Is there wisdom to be read between those lines?”

To learn more about his cancer and the threat it poses on mental health, Adam, a philosophy student, reached out to numerous physicians and…