ABSTRACT
Before describing the palliative care and end-of-life experiences for my friend
Craig Fiedler, I need to say a little about the kind of person Craig was. To begin
by talking about his life after his cancer diagnosis (or, as he called it, AD) would
be to give cancer a victory that Craig resisted until the day he died, which was
not to allow cancer to become the primary factor in his identity. This was the
point of the subtitle for his book, Robbery and Redemption: Cancer as Identity
Theft (2012). In the book, he listed the specific ways that cancer had been
already been successful in stealing and transforming his identity immediately
following his lung cancer diagnosis:
Despite cancer’s early success, Craig refused to fly the flag of defeat but
persisted in the struggle to maintain his identity in interactions with family,
friends, medical caregivers, and others. His book records such efforts in
descriptions of his palliative care and his end-of-life choices, but that’s the
story to come. For the moment, it is necessary to begin with a description of the
unique identity he had created during the more than five decades of life in what
he would come to call his BC (Before Cancer) period.
