Everywhere and Always

Dear Cancer,

As far as I know I’m not supposed to be stopped in the grocery store in front of all the bread, frozen in my body by a sudden wave of dread and images of sickness. I’m not supposed to be listing chemo drugs in my head as I drive or zoning out of a conversation with my neighbor wondering whether they are scared of death too. As far as I know I shouldn’t be thinking about you 24 hours a day, but that’s what I find myself doing. I didn’t know how lucky I was for those short years when I was too little to understand what you were or how much you would be a part of my life. Now I see you as a deeper and more integral part of my family than anyone else. You are in our DNA the way they say our quirky personalities or our irrational anxieties are part of our make up. There are periods of time where you actually take up more space than any of our personality traits or silly habits because there are times when you are the center of attention and you sure do demand a lot of it.

Before I met you face to face I knew of you in the distance. You were bothering lots of people, but not me, yet. You were always quite the celebrity, I saw you on TV shows, movies and documentaries, on social media. When I saw you there, I saw that you were evil and hard to fight with, but the fight with you always ended one of two ways: Either you won or you lost. Either way the person who was fighting against you was an inspiration. Strong and resilient and full of wisdom and ways to live their best life. In the movies when they beat you, it seemed like they’re lives became full of color and glitter and kayaking and skiing and all that all at once. It seemed not so bad to have a little fight with you and then get to be even stronger and better than before. I didn’t realize that you are a good actor and on TV you are different than in real life. Your media appearances gave me a false picture of what it would mean when I met you for real.

As I got older I understood that you would probably come into my life at some point or another. I began to understand that it was almost impossible to outrun you. As I learned that you had actually been a part of my family for longer than I knew, I wondered why everyone had always kept you so quiet. You had been with us all that time, but our lives had never looked like those movies you were in. I thought from all those movies, social media and inspirational news features that whenever I came face to face with you, I too would become strong and resilient and live every day to the fullest and have a community full of people hugging me and cooking me dinner. I didn’t know that you could also take all of that away, I didn’t think that you could keep people away the way you did or that you could envelope us in shame rather than community or show me my greatest weaknesses rather than my greatest strengths. Turns out you have a lot of sides.

People I meet who have not come face to face with you (there seem to be fewer and fewer– you sure get around) confuse me now. I’m not really able to be with them because I find their lives too different. Sometimes I think of you so much that I can’t even imagine how someone may have lived a life without you. In this way you have separated me from many of my peers. You always want to be the center of the conversation but young people don’t want to talk about you, unless it’s one of your celebrity appearances. They don’t know you or understand you the way I do and they don’t understand how toxic you are or how much you have changed my life. Unless they met you, how could they really know? When there is someone who has met you or is dealing with you the same way I am, I feel close to them, as if you have brought us together. We have many mutual friends, you and I. Sometimes I don’t know whether to be heartbroken over this or grateful.

As much as I want to see myself as a person with forgiveness in my heart, I don’t think I will be able to forgive you for pushing your way into my life and into my family. I can’t forgive you because you never compromise and you never give us a break. To be attached to you for the rest of my life is a difficult thing to come to terms with because with other people I am able to say goodbye to them or move away from their influence. With you, it’s different. You are in me and in us and as much as we have tried we haven’t been able to remove you from our lives completely.

Although you have shown me strength and powerful parts of myself I didn’t know were there, those parts do not balance out the pain and fear that I also did not know I had in me. Not only did you reveal emotional and physical pain within me, but you also showed me suffering in other people unlike anything I knew existed. You caused people I love to hurt so much. To sit and watch you fighting with the people I hold dear is something I wish I could unsee. You have caused me pain so deep that even if one day you decided to leave me alone, that pain will stay in me forever. I hope that one day we might be able to live side by side more easily, more peacefully, maybe I will come to accept you as part of my life as I get older and more mature. I know other people have done so, even though you don’t make it easy. I hope to get there sometime because you will be with me always.