Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

My mom died a year and a half ago from cancer. In the last two years of her life, she lived with me and I took care of her. This provided me with more knowledge about her disease than I ever wished to have.

The memories of those two years keep flashing back in my mind after the bloody terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya killed dozens of people and injured even more last weekend. Not only because the attack is another reminder of how vulnerable and fragile life can be, but also how close modern terrorism is to cancer.

Like cancer cells, terrorists prepare their attacks for a long time without giving notice to the intended victims. Then they attack at a time when the victims are least expecting and leave them in numbing shock.

The most frustrating part is once the attack happens, we often have few choices other than fighting back with toxic chemotherapy, which kills both the rogue cells and the healthy ones.

We have been going through this chemotherapy since the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

When terrorists used aircraft in the attacks, we have to say goodbye to anything with a blade in our hand luggage at the airport. When they tried to detonate a shoe bomb on a flight, we are forced to remove our shoes at security.

When they tried to bomb our planes with liquid explosives, we had to give up on any idea of bringing liquids into an airport, from a regular size shampoo to a can of Coca-Cola. And when they used pressurized cookers carried in backpacks to turn into lethal bombs at the Boston Marathon, we had to be careful about ordering both items together on the Internet or at a local store.

Now after the latest attack in Kenya, there are already discussions on tightening security in shopping malls.

Imagine in the upcoming Black Friday sales, after a cold night camping outside the shops and before they can rush to the bargains they covet, bargain hunters have to go through metal detectors first. Even the most fervent shoppers might be deterred.

Under the new security state, we have been killing the fun in our own life little by little.

But chemotherapy often only leads to two possible results. One, you survive, but your health, and therefore, your quality of life, is damaged. And two, you died from the toxins, together with your cancer. Neither sounds appealing.

But if cancer can provide any useful reference, it might be the idea that prevention is always more effective than treatment.

Methods of cancer prevention can include regular physical checks, an equivalent of the random stop and pat-downs in the airports. But more and more medical experts cast doubt on the role cancer screening plays in reducing death rates, suggesting that it can also lead to treatments that aren't necessary, like the unnecessary searching of grannies at the airport.

A better way of preventing cancer is self-examination, not of one's body but of one's life habits and behavior. It means getting rid of high-risk behavior, such as smoking and sunbathing without sunscreen. That way, cancer may not be able to latch onto your body.

In the war against terrorism, the equivalent is finding the roots of the hatred that triggered an abomination like the Nairobi attack, and dissolving it by addressing any legitimate grievances.

This might be the smartest way to win the battle, because it involves no doctor or bullet. But self-correcting is always the toughest thing to do.

However, the best lesson cancer offers happens after a prevention attempt fails. When the diagnosis makes it clear that we'll have to live with the disease, there is still one thing as important as physical treatment if not more important; psychological adjustment.

We all know many cancer patients die not from the disease but from their fear of the disease. That's also how terrorists hope to win the battle.

Spreading fear rather than murdering people is the real power of terrorism, and fighting that fear is our final weapon against it.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com