On the day of the total solar eclipse, Eric Seidlitz will not only experience the celestial event of a lifetime, but also a birthday he thought he’d never live to see.
A former cancer researcher-turned-teaching professor at Hamilton’s McMaster University, Seidlitz, who turns 60 on Monday, said he received a grim diagnosis in the fall of 2019.
A tumour was growing in his neck and spreading quickly, doctors told him and his wife Wendy. Rare and lethal, the Stage 4B anaplastic thyroid cancer was expected to kill Seidlitz within months, even after he underwent surgery and a round of treatment.
“If you get this kind of diagnosis, you’re dangling and you don’t know what to do,” Seidlitz said, sitting across from Wendy, a registered nurse, in their Hamilton living room last month.
Seidlitz — self-described as practical, calm and “a little weird” — began planning his own death.
He selected the hospice where he’d spend his final days, made a playlist for his funeral and found meaningful ways to say goodbye to family, including his two sons, friends, students and colleagues.
He and Wendy cried together and celebrated life together. They travelled to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon in February 2020 — weeks before the pandemic triggered global lockdowns.
They began the process of setting up a scholarship at McMaster in Seidlitz’s name. His elderly parents flew in from Manitoba for a final goodbye.
‘I call him my unicorn’
Then, they waited for the end. And waited.
But by April 2020, to his doctors’ amazement, the single round of chemotherapy and radiation he received had destroyed the cancer, Seidlitz said. He was inexplicably in remission.
“I call him my unicorn,” said Wendy fondly.
They’re throwing a party to mark his milestone 60th birthday on Monday — the same day as the total solar eclipse.
“All birthdays are good because I wasn’t supposed to see 56, nevermind 60,” he said. “The fact it coincides with the eclipse? I cannot pass that up.”
As the moon passes between the sun and the Earth, they’ll watch from their front lawn, alongside many of the same friends and family who Seidlitz said goodbye to in 2020.
To this day, Seidltiz said his doctors can’t explain how he survived anaplastic thyroid cancer, which was confirmed through DNA testing of his removed tumour.
The vast majority of patients don’t survive a year, reported the American Thyroid Association in 2021. Only about seven per cent of patients are alive after five years, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
Seidlitz has a simple explanation: “It’s because I’m unique and different that I didn’t end up dying from this.”
Not his 1st total solar eclipse
Dr. Arden Corter, a Toronto-based psychologist at Sunnybrook Hospital’s Odette Cancer Centre, called Seidlitz’s celebration “pretty special” and said it demonstrates how some survivors “attempt to live wholeheartedly in the present moment.”
“If I’m connecting with the things that are most important to me on a day-to-day basis, then I am leading a meaningful life,” she said.
“That’s one of the things that helps to protect against fear.”
Seidltiz described his cancer diagnosis as a cloud that follows him, but gets further away as the years go by.
He said it’s made him more philosophical and able to focus on things that bring him joy — stained glass art, photography, teaching and, of course, the total solar eclipse.
Hamilton is one of a handful of Canadian cities that will be in the path of totality on Monday.
It won’t be the first time Seidlitz has witnessed one where he lives.
He said he also experienced the rare sighting as a teenager living in Portage la Prairie, Man., on a freezing cold February day in 1979, gazing through a strip of exposed film in an attempt to protect his eyes.
“Everybody watched it on the frozen lake,” Seidlitz said. “It was getting progressively darker. Then all of the sudden I saw this flash and it was dark. The experience was amazing.”