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Legacy Fall 2020
My journey through cancer.
by Noah Stanzione
Faculty Member, World Language and Religion Departments
There is a famous scene in Homer’s Iliad wherein Achilles’ mother Thetis offers him a choice of two fates: to die young but be remembered or to have a long life and be forgotten. Achilles chooses the former, which in the afterlife he famously comes to regret. In Vergil’s correction of the story, his hero Aeneas thinks he wants Achilles’ fate—on the night Troy is sacked, he keeps trying to run into battle to die with glory—but the gods will not let him. Instead, Aeneas learns that his mission is to survive so that he can serve and guide the Trojan refugees to a new home. Six years on and seemingly no closer to the new home promised him, he still longs to have stayed at Troy with his fallen friends, but his mother appears to him in disguise and gives him the seemingly simple advice to perge modo: just keep going. It has been six years since I left a place I thought was home. This is the story of me “just keeping going” to get here.
