Surviving cancer

The agony & the ecstasy

In homage to Lewis Carroll and with a twist on the Disney earworm that is now burrowing into your brain, today is a very un-merry anniversary to me (to you?).

Two years ago today, I was diagnosed with cancer. The news ruined my 1) day, 2) Holy Week, 3) life plans, not necessarily in that order. But with the holiest days once again brimming on the horizon, and with the widening light of April stretching across the springing sky, and with the good ol’ body keeping the score,¹ the memory of what happened two long-short years ago is creeping around the corner like an alley cat.

Insert requisite cliched perspective: sometimes it feels like two months! sometimes it feels like two decades!

Mostly it feels like two years because I am still in my toddler tantrum phase of processing, and like any toddler I refuse to be rationalized with.

Insert analogous anecdote, more relatable than oncological ontologies:

Last week one of my kids was in his first play, “The Aristocats.” The night before his performance, he started to feel sick and upset but swore it was NOT NERVES.

“You know,” I began, in that pedantic tone of voice that parents are prone to take, “our bodies are really smart. Sometimes they know things that our minds don’t know. Like right now it’s almost the anniversary of when I found out I had cancer. And my mind knows it doesn’t have cancer anymore, but my body remembers how much it hated everything about that time. So it’s been reminding me lately. Maybe your body is reminding you that it’s a little anxious about tomorrow, even if your mind doesn’t feel nervous?”

One-in-a-million moonshot, my son did not immediately shut down upon hearing the blaring sirens of MATERNAL WISDOM AHEAD. He still insisted I was wrong, of course. But later that night, after a warm bath had worked its magic and laughter had been rediscovered, he came over to me with the quiet voice of return and repentance.²

“I think you were right. I think it was nerves. I don’t think I’m really sick.”

I hugged him. “Your body is really smart. It tells you what it needs you to know.”

So does mine. (So does yours.) And right now, my body is mostly telling me a long litany of unprintable expletives about how royally pissed it remains that 1) I got cancer, 2) I could get it again, 3) even if I don’t get it again, it took a lifelong toll on my health.

Lately I’ve been trying to treat my traumatized body like the innate toddler we remain despite our best adult efforts. I give it extra rest, yummy snacks, plenty of water, time and space to run around like crazy to work out its big feelings. I know only a pinky’s worth of what it means to survive cancer,³ but rather than wait till my life runs its full course to decide that I did in fact survive it, I think it’s worth saying: here’s what I know now. It will certainly change, but now is all I’ve got.

Insert necessary disclaimer: People have very different experiences of surviving.⁴ Mine may not resemble yours, but they each have value.⁵ Yours is warmly welcome here,⁶ and I’d love to hear whatever you’d like to share from your own experiences.⁷

Surviving Cancer: The Agony & The Ecstasy

Insert apparent aside that will come full circle: My mother’s side of the family can be summed up by the story that during one of our holiday gathering games of charades, someone submitted “The Agony & The Ecstasy.”⁸ When my Uncle Dennis drew that piece of paper, he first threw himself down on the living room floor in a dramatic stage-death and then jumped up to start writhing like a Shaker caught in religious euphoria.⁹ None of us kids had any clue what he was trying to get us to guess, so our eyes went saucer-wide while my father erupted in tears and laughter in the corner, clearly the erudite source of the title.¹⁰

I have never read the biographical novel of Michelangelo, but that first memory of agony and ecstasy is burned in my brain as the sharpest of contrasts. So I’ll borrow a page from the title, and let’s roll:

The Ecstasy

1. Being alive beats being dead. Sometimes it feels like you could make a compelling case to the contrary. But though I await the prospect of the beatific vision with bated breath, I still have a strong affinity for this present place and its people. So I am really, deeply glad to still be here. I think about this approx 6-75 times a day, often around my spouse, my children, my friends, my family, books, trees, churches, clouds, stars, music, art, sunsets, laughter, rivers, lakes, birds, babies, any-and-everything that makes it fantastic to keep living.

2. I hate to admit it, but cancer did change my perspective on nearly everything. While I still dagger-glare at every cheery cliché of forced gratitude, I must tell you that cancer let fall a thousand scales from my eyes that I didn’t know I needed to shed. The list of things I actively work to no longer care about is as lengthy and delightful to me as the aforementioned list of goodnesses worth celebrating. Success, looks, wealth, popularity, certainty, comfort—shrug! Seeing the world, striking it rich, sucking the marrow from the bones of life—also shrug! I find wild happiness with the simplest moments now in a way I didn’t do before. Hand to heaven, at least once a day, I stop and think if this ends up being my last day, I loved this part of it.¹¹ Learning to let go of nearly everything and embrace the life you actually have feels like winning a secret lottery. I don’t quite know how to explain this if you haven’t almost died, but I have a strong hunch that many of you know what I mean. This life shines.

3. You can say and do whatever you want. Hoo boy, have my filters evaporated. When you aren’t sure how much time you have left, you don’t pussyfoot around the truth. Notice how older adults feel free to speak their mind? Yours truly is rocking that liberty at forty-four-years-young. So I’ve lost a not-small amount of social media followers post-election (but gained even more, surprisingly!). And when I want to do something I’ve never done before, I just do it. Getting close as I can to truth and beauty and freedom and goodness is astonishingly beautiful.

Took this photo the day after I was diagnosed. Still an accurate depiction of hope.

The Agony

1. Every single day I fear my cancer might be back. Maybe it’s just starting, microscopic but malevolent. Maybe I’m in the midst of a full-blown recurrence that both my oncologist and I have somehow missed. Maybe a secondary cancer is starting somewhere else in my body—that twitch? that pain? that stomachache?—and some new terror is lurking right around the corner. Bless my therapist who tried to tell me gently in more than one session, “What if what comes next is good?” Intellectually I understand that this is an entirely plausible, even probable reality. But on that darn body level, I have been through hell too many times to trust in heaven-on-earth. Every single day I have to talk myself back into the 95% chance that I might be ok.¹² This is exhausting work.

2. My body will never be what it was before. Not only did I lose a bunch of body parts and gain a bunch of giant scars, but the toll of cancer treatment is lifelong. It wrecks your gut flora. It does a doozy on your heart. It increases your risk for all kinds of conditions no one wants in their medical charts. Chemotherapy, immunotherapy, surgeries—all of it saved my life, no doubt. But cancer also changed my health irreparably. Two years out, I’m still weaker, more limited, and more tired than I ever thought I’d be. I try to care for my body as best I can—which takes much more time and effort than I realized, too!—but no amount of sleep, exercise, healthy foods, or supplements can restore the body that was. Or the life/span I might have had otherwise. Another bitter pill to swallow.

3. When you know too much, it makes it hard to be a normal person. Sometimes I catch myself viewing the world through cancered glasses. Anyone I love could have it right now—or another awful malady I now know exists. The world and its inhabitants feel frighteningly fragile, and I can’t unsee it. After miscarriage and infant loss, I remember feeling astonished and awed that any of us makes it to birth. Now I feel the same about any part of life: that any of us are healthy enough to move through our everyday lives feels almost impossible to believe. Like I said, kind of a downer at parties.¹³

If you asked me to metaphorize life-after-cancer, two years out, first of all, we’d be best friends for eternity because writers ADORE an invitation to analogize, and second, here’s what I’d serve up. The most delicious cake of daily delight: rich, soft, sweet, warm, every mouthful a melting dream. But the frosting that glazes the whole cake is baked with existential dread, for you and others. You gotta bite through that bitterness and crack the shell of fear and fragility again and again, to get to the goodness inside.

Which brings us back to today. A very un-merry anniversary to me. But also: a very merry un-birthday! An utterly average, alive day to inhabit. The celebration that lasts 364 days.¹⁴ Today might be a banner day, good or bad, stretched across your corner of the globe. But it might also be exquisitely ordinary. The sacred worth savoring. If you have something red-letter to celebrate—or a tough grief to mourn today—I would love to stand in the space-between with you.

Because remember: we are here for each other, made in the image of God-with-us. As I hope to do every month with our plucky Compassion Brigade, I’ve rounded up some ways for you to give, pray, support, or share ways to help a few folks who deeply need it. Share your own in comments, and let’s grow the empathy that makes us human.

So gut-deep grateful to still be here, with you, for others.

Took this photo two days after I was diagnosed. The stubborn still-buds of spring.

Compassion Brigade Rally Cry

The husband of Steph Ebert, one of our Mothering Spirit writers, died suddenly, leaving behind his pregnant wife and two young sons. Here are ways to help their family in South Africa.

From my friend Jena: “Please consider supporting the family of one of my students. Her father was killed last weekend in this fatal shooting [in Milwaukee]. Their family is struggling to make ends meet while also planning a funeral. May he rest in peace.”

And one huge update: together we have raised over $40,000 for Catholic Relief Services this Lent (including several donations that aren’t shown in the online fundraiser total). Can we take a moment to stop and celebrate that?! The world is brutally hard and disheartening right now. But people of good faith are refusing to go gentle into that good night.¹⁵ I tell you truly: you are part of why I get out of bed in the morning.¹⁶

1. Has anyone actually finished Bessel’s best-seller? I have checked it out of the library fully four times and never read it. That sucker looks DENSE.

2. This is the same voice I take when I come shuffling back to God, approx twenty times a day, so I know it well. Ok, fine. You were right. Thanks, I guess.

3. First and foremost, it means I still hesitate every time I go to speak or write the words “I survived cancer.” A cacaphony of alarms go off in my head, screaming YOU MIGHT HAVE IT AGAIN, FOOL!!! DON’T TEMPT FATE WITH THE PAST TENSE!! Which makes it super easy to function in normal society, thanks for asking.

4. We might call this diversity.

5. Equity.

6. Inclusion.

7. See how it’s not that hard to make space for people? But it does start with liking and respecting people, and that’s a high bar these days, so…just know the IMAGO DEI will always be celebrated here.

8. In case you want to read it.

9. The fact that this happened in Shaker Heights, Ohio, makes it even better.

10. I still love charades, but that evening scarred some cousins for life. The body keeps the score, have you heard?

11. Yesterday tested this theory because a kid puked in my hands not once but twice, but then the night exploded with sky-shaking lightning and made me fall in love with the whole fraught enterprise of living again. (I do hate puke though.)

12. Is it the end or the eye? Reflections on trying to live with a 5% chance of recurrence.

13. Me, daily.

14. Admit it, you want to hear the song now. Scratch the itch.

15. Might be a good time to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

16. Also my five children needing breakfast and rides. And a stubborn, unshakable faith that love wins (to quote my Christology professor) and grace bats last (to quote Anne Lamott).