Martin Howard lost his battle with PC on Dec. 21. I thought I'd include this
for all of you to read. Sorry it is so long. BTW, I believe that paracetamol
is just plain Tylenol.
***************
Angela, his wife, wrote this:

Martin - a pioneering spirit

Martin died on Sunday, 21st December (the Solstice) at 7.30 am. He was in
his own bed and I was beside him taking him through a guided meditation on
"going to the light". I think he made a sensible decision at some level to
go quickly, as he might have had to go to hospital later that day.

At the time Martin was feeling a sense of failure. His last words to me were
"I'm sorry. I was trying to prove .." He was trying to prove, of course,
that cancer can be overcome by boosting the body's own immune system through
the use of alternative therapies. Martin was an all or nothing sort of
person and he always believed he would be successful and live for many years
to come. I find myself more in the middle on the optimism/pessimism scale
though I supported him every inch of the way. I hope that now he is in his
new, vibrant body, he is seeing things from a different perspective and
being a little less hard on himself. He was courageous, cheerful and
positive throughout his illness and his bravery has touched many lives.

I think he had a very significant partial success. He was diagnosed with an
aggressive form of cancer in October 2002. It had already spread from the
prostate to the pelvis and upper femur on the left side, and the first
lumbar vertebra. The only conventional treatment he was offered were hormone
tablets. He took those for six weeks but they produced unpleasant side
effects. He was offered radiotherapy to deal with the side effects but not
to lengthen his life. He was already well into his alternative forms of
treatment by this time and he took himself off the hormone tablets. During
his illness his GP prescribed paracetamol, an anti-inflammatory drug and
sleeping pills, and these helped him, as did her supportive attitude.

As well as feeling that alternative therapies were gentler on the body,
Martin wanted, as far as possible, to avoid medication and treatment based
on animal testing. He was against animal experiments not only from a moral
point of view (the ends/means argument) but also because our reading had led
us to the conclusion held also (and much more significantly) by many senior
members of the medical profession that animal experiments do not assist
medical progress and may in fact be detrimental to it.

Why do I feel that Martin achieved partial success? I will give several
reasons. For someone with a terminal illness he had a good quality of life.
He lived for 14 months after the diagnosis and he was able to pass on in
good order the jobs he was doing in connection with Esperanto and a Quaker
membership database and other voluntary work.

Martin didn't spend a single day in hospital. Until the last two days of his
life when it suddenly became clear the cancer had spread to his brain, he
didn't spend a day when he couldn't chat to friends in person and by e mail,
play a musical instrument, watch TV, and more importantly read, read, read.
He remained clear headed. He could always go out, even if only in the car
with me driving.

He said Christmas 2002 (two months after diagnosis) was "the best ever". I
wrote that in my diary.

He lived to see the birth of his third grandson, Nathan Martin, and, on a
day filled with sunshine and happiness we attended the christening. He also
had time to re-build and strengthen other relationships within his family.

During the illness we met many wonderful people, therapists and healers, we
would not otherwise have met, and gained great help and inspiration from our
visits to the Bristol Cancer Help Centre and the Liongate Clinic in
Tunbridge Wells. The network of support and prayer around us just kept
growing.

Martin's quest for knowledge, always strong, intensified. He was a great
customer at our local bookshop. He devoured books. Books on the treatment of
cancer, on spiritual subjects, and humorous books - P.G. Wodehouse, for
example. He grew spiritually and particularly he grew in compassion. He
believed that what he called "the upstairs team" were teaching him to
understand suffering from the inside. It was no use just reading about it.
He had to experience it. When he watched scenes of devastation in different
parts of the world on the TV news he would cry for the people involved. He
cried very easily in the last few months, as if his own body was taking on
the suffering of the whole planet.

The last book he found, "The New Revelations" by Neale Donald Walsch, (ISBN
0 340 82590 1) really felt as if it was the last book he needed. I couldn't
see where he could go after that. It just seemed to have completed his
course of study. (As a carer I was staggering a bit by this time and I still
haven't read it myself!) The effect on him was intense, and many of his
closest family received that book from him for Christmas together with a
letter wishing them well. That letter struck me as a goodbye letter but we
never actually spoke of the ending of his physical life. He managed to sign
some of those letters on the Wednesday before he died but he said his
signature was "funny".

To end on a lighter note, because there was plenty of laughter during this
illness, he always had a good appetite. I used to put a bottle of horse
radish sauce beside his plate because my cooking was never spicy enough for
him..

Martin thought that we should all have choice and control when it comes to
the treatment we receive when we're ill. It's all too easy to be forced into
quick decisions in the face of an alarming diagnosis. He found a book called
"Options" which he presented to his G.P. Most people are not given the facts
on which to base their decision, or sufficient time. Some do not want it. We
all have to follow our own pathway and some prefer to let the doctors make
the decisions. However, we came to see for ourselves and through our reading
that the full facts are not always presented to the patient. There are
several reasons for this. It is better to explore the situation when one is
well rather than in a state of shock. Michael Gearin-Tosh's "Living Proof"
is a great and enlightening read. He's an Oxford professor of literature and
he studied, among much else, the psychological processes of the medical
people he encountered, and the pressures under which they work. He became
very wary as a result.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Cancer is
increasing amongst us. We need to understand how to deal with it; how to
live with it; what it can teach us. I see Martin as one of those would-be
early aviators who skilfully made little structures of plywood and launched
themselves into the air with hope and great courage. Often they crashed back
to Earth after only a few airborne yards. However, others were able to build
on their pioneering efforts. Pollution-wise we're not altogether happy with
the results of all this, Martin bids me add, but in terms of human
inventiveness, flying was certainly a notable achievement.

Because of all he learnt, and experienced and the wonderful people he met,
Martin said he would not have missed this illness. My sister said the same
thing when she went through cancer in 1978.

Extraordinary. But then life is.

Of the many lovely things I have been reading I would like to pass on this:

"Life and death should not be considered as opposites.
It is closer to the truth to speak of dying as an entrance rather than an
exit.

What the doorway of death offers is a resurgence of tremendous vitality, for
you are entering from what could be described as a watered down version of
life into the thing itself, the vitality of the primary reality.

If death could be seen as a beautiful clear lake, refreshing and bouyant,
then when a consciousness moves towards its exit from a body, there would be
that delightful plunge and it would simply swim away."  From "Emmanuel's
Book" compiled by Pat Rodegast and Judith Stanton.