Dilbert’s Dad Lives

Earlier this spring, Dilbert creator Scott Adams announced that he has advanced prostate cancer.

In May he said:

“I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it — well longer than he’s admitted having it. . . . I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”

Sunday, on his podcast, he said that it was going to be the day he would make use of his doctor-prescribed death. But after months of intense suffering, he’s gotten a treatment (hormone blockers that keep the cancer from getting the testosterone it thrives on) that has provided him relief.

He’s previously said about life with cancer: “Every day is a nightmare, and evening is even worse.”

Yesterday Adams talked about how even when he was in pain, he would wake up “in a good mood.”

It’s almost as if he has something like hope?

For now, Adams plans to stick around longer — even talking about the possibility of a year or two.

He’s long been an ardent — graphic — proponent of legal assisted suicide. In an interview with Reason in 2013, while watching his father die, he declared:

I’m okay with any citizen who opposes doctor-assisted suicide on moral or practical grounds. But if you have acted on that thought, such as basing a vote on it, I would like you to die a slow, horrible death too. You and the government are accomplices in the torturing of my father, and there’s a good chance you’ll someday be accomplices in torturing me to death too.

He may see me as a torturer and probably doesn’t see it this way, but he’s accompanying people in their final journeys, by sharing the challenges and surprising joys. And we want to listen to his podcast because he’s still the same talented Scott Adams. Cancer doesn’t make you less worthy of listening to or caring about. Even when he doesn’t feel up to the podcast — he actually had to cut one short last week — and ultimately, permanently, people are invested in him prayerfully, humanly, knowing they are not alone.

I’ll always love Dilbert. I’ll always love Scott Adams.

It’s jarring both how casual his announcement that yesterday was supposed to be doctor-okayed suicide day and how little it seemed to get noticed. Is this really how we live and die now? Ho-hum, wildly successful artist and social commentator was going to kill himself today with a doctor’s prescription. Ho-hum. What did Lauren Sanchez’s next dress look like at her wedding to Mr. Amazon? 

At the same time, if you listen, Adams most definitely gets the import of what he’s saying — he could be dead. It was/is in his hands. “Borrowed time,” he referenced more than once. He’s obviously got a support system and means. Though, when you can’t walk, you can’t walk. He spent weeks with a walker because of back pain caused by a tumor on his spine. But he presumably has some level of creature comfort in the midst of the torture of cancer. What about those who don’t? Who don’t have loved ones supporting them or adequate medical care? Who are coerced into death and don’t have a shot at the treatment that is making life more livable for Adams right now?

I look forward to what Adams creates while he is still able. Maybe Dilbert makes a comeback and reflects on life from a new perspective. Whatever happens, I pray for Adams, that his pain continues to ease, and that he lives until his natural death. He will never know on this side how many people he is helping. Accompanying. Inspiring. Not to kill themselves, but to do what he’s doing: Living one day at a time. Grateful for the time — which is a gift. Always has been, always will be.

It’s a gift we’re not meant to end, but to live until the end.