A Year in “Rear View”

Random ramblings on a day of new significance. It’s funny how a date on a calendar changes its meaning within a year. May 23rd, 2024. The day I logged into MyChart and read and re-read the pathology reports, and knew this was going to upend all our plans and hopes for 2024. See, 2023 was our deployment year and the year for putting things on pause, or so I thought. In many ways, looking back it was a great practice year for 2024. Cancerversary… as some survivors call it. Some never want to remember the day, forget it ever happened, some choose to remember it. For my first Cancerversary, I choose to honor it and the season that it ushered in. From surgery, fertility preservation decisions, chemotherapy, radiation, managing side effects to ongoing current treatments and income and insurance instability…it’s been a year! Definitely not cancer lite.

And yet, it hasn’t been a year of despair. I’m still mentally processing some of the events of the past year, but know it has been transformative. It’s been a year of deep love, deep faith, deep care and clarity. Clarity…it’s crazy how a cancer diagnosis brings clarity into your life. You learn to reprioritize real fast…things you thought were goals and personal dreams you have to re-assess, pause, abandon? Speaking of abandon…I never felt abandoned by God. It still feels surreal that I got to experience divine presence in darkness, and a calm on chemo days that I am yet to have a rational explanation for. I have experienced a deeper understanding of Faith, a faith not conditional on things happening according to my limited understanding of life’s progression.

Cake…I’ve possibly eaten cake more often this past year than I have as an adult. Guess what…no regrets! Cake, both the baking and eating of, as a coping mechanism, must be explored. I ushered in my diagnosis with chocolate cake and by blowing out the candles on our birthday cakes. And I choose to remember one year with cake and candles.

Going into this I was all about the “fight” and “warrior” language surrounding cancer. There is a certain amount of grit, courage, hope and badassery needed for this journey. Having been through it now, I’m not sure I want to use these war terms always. People don’t lose to this disease because they didn’t “fight” hard enough. In many ways our bodies feel like a war zone in which skilled oncology teams launch attacks against a traitorous faction of me. As I run my hand along the healed surgery scar and touch my new hairs on my head, it feels like signs of spring are slowly arriving on this battlefield. May 2024 me, assumed that this would be a blip in my life and I’d get to put it behind me. May 2025 me, now knows that this will be a significant part of me even though it is not the whole story. Fighting cancer feels tempered with the humility and awareness that the future can look different than what I hope.

Relatability points: hahaha (that’s what trauma-laced laughter sounds like in my head) Life has me collecting relatability points like a 90s video game! Hey, at least I feel like I’m winning in this aspect. I’ve noticed I’ve gone from saying ” I can’t imagine” to “I can imagine” to a lot of life experiences. Nothing fazes me much anymore. Most things are figure-outable. At many points in our lives, we get opportunities to expand or contract our lives and viewpoints based on our experiences…I am trying to expand.

Humor as a form of resilience. The humor may be sillier, wry, and dark…but it’s been sustaining. Along with a sense of awe. When the big things are bad, the flowers, the breeze, the birds provide a sense of wonder. “You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days” says author Alain de Botton and I concur.

We often forget that stories worth telling often have chapters that feel disastrous in the moment, but somehow weave together a more beautiful masterpiece than we could have ever imagined. Here’s to pivotal plots in our lives…let us never lose sight of hope! To perfect the art of living….the beautiful and the terrible!