Meaning in the Rubble

Click Here to Read Rachel’s Article in our June 2025 Magazine

Just a few months before my diagnosis, at 29, I felt like I could do anything. That same year, I was featured in the Pittsburgh Business Times 30 Under 30 issue, served on multiple nonprofit boards, and managed a national network of nonprofits. On top of that, I spent the summer as a caregiver for my partner, also in his twenties, after a serious injury. That year, I also noticed a swollen lymph node in my neck that hadn’t gone away, along with persistent itchiness in my legs and midday naps. By fall, I was diagnosed with stage III Hodgkin’s lymphoma and quickly immersed in a grueling six-month chemo regimen.

There is a very rational tendency for people around me to fall back on the common platitude, “everything happens for a reason.” Kate Bowler’s book about this topic—and her own experience with cancer as a young adult—challenges that idea. She traces the origin of this belief to the Christian prosperity gospel, which suggests that either some type of God is in control—choosing to give people cancer for one reason or another (yikes)—or that we are personally responsible for what happens in our lives. Maybe cancer was just the wake-up call we needed (double yikes). In the thick of my treatments, that idea made me cringe. But when I step back and pull myself out of the fog, I understand why people cling to it—it helps them avoid the unsettling reality that so much in life is random and uncontrollable.

This reality settles more and more within me as my treatments begin.

As the months pass, I receive dozens of cards from friends and family. One of my favorites comes from my friend Juliet, who sends me a card from Emily McDowell’s company, Em & Friends (someone I later learned had the exact same diagnosis as me almost a decade prior).

These cards feel more truthful to me than any number of other platitudes: “everything happens for a reason,” “God won’t give you something you can’t handle,” and “good will come from this in time.”

Instead, the fronts of these cards read:

Please let me be the first to punch the next person who tells you everything happens for a reason. I’m sorry you’re going through this.

No card can make this better, but I’m giving you one anyway.

I promise never to refer to your illness as a “journey” unless someone takes you on a cruise.

If this is in God’s plan, God is a terrible planner. (No offense if you’re reading this, God—you did a really good job with other stuff, like waterfalls and pandas.)

There are so many layers to my experience with cancer and its effects. Questioning why this happened to me or what I’m supposed to learn from it is something I choose not to engage with. I find more truth—and even a kind of comfort—elsewhere.

A week or so after my final treatment, I’m in my kitchen cooking, listening to a podcast about a study that explored why older adults are more in tune with bittersweet emotions—and, therefore, more likely to experience deep joy and contentment in equal measure to the emotions that pull us down. The researchers found this wasn’t a function of wisdom gained with age but rather lived experience and a deep awareness of life’s precarity. They knew this because they observed the same traits in younger people who had near-death experiences, challenging diagnoses, or life moments that pushed them to the edge.

It makes me both smile and cry. How appropriate. It’s a precious gift I found in this rubble, despite everything. The study describes me—and, apparently, many others too.

I have moments where I feel connected to the bittersweet precarity of life and others when I live in fear—trying to control the uncontrollable, pretending—again—that I have agency. But it always has been, and always will be, the universe and nature that move in a constant and unpredictable flow.

It happens again this weekend as my now-husband, Patrick, and I drive to D.C.—our first little road trip post-treatment. In the car, I suddenly feel like I can’t breathe, my body collapsing in on itself. Instead of letting Patrick drive and take our fragile bodies where they need to go, I give directions, offer feedback, and attempt to control his driving from the passenger seat. Another reminder that I was never the right person to teach him to drive. I’m still struggling to let go.

We’re on our way south to Virginia, to a small Airbnb on the lower level of a beach house with a deck overlooking the dunes and the water of the Chesapeake Bay. We’ve been here once before—a reprieve during COVID—and assumed it might be warmer this weekend now that it’s April. It’s actually colder. But it doesn’t matter. I’m still pretty symptomatic from the end of chemo, and this small trip is about what I can handle—something that still marks the spring with travel.

The next afternoon, I’m reading Pema Chödrön on the beach. It’s cold by the water, so I’m wearing a long-sleeve shirt, bundled in a thick beach towel, my toes wedged under the sand to protect them from the wind. Despite the chill, the sun is warm on my skin—I feel it every time the breeze stops for a breath.

As Pema writes, we are in an unconditional relationship with this world and this life—much as we may try to imagine we are not, much as we try to create conditionality, make plans, or avoid pain. At our best, we settle into the truth of unconditional love. We love what’s in front of us—the pain, discomfort, ugliness, uncertainty. We take all of it in and don’t try to change it, rationalize it, or find a more comfortable position. We are wise and experienced in the precarity. We don’t expect it to be any other way—so it can truly be what it is.

Like today. I’m listening to the waves crash on the sand. I’m cold. My belly hurts, and I’m tired—like I often am these days. And I’m listening for something.

Yesterday, Patrick and I walked along the beach, collecting seashells and smooth stones—one of our favorite activities when we spend our days here. We talk about nothing and everything, about what it would be like to live by the ocean again, like we did when we first met in Haiti. We take weaving paths from the rough, hardened sandpaper of the flat beach closest to the water’s edge to the soft, white sand mounds near the dunes. At some point, I ask him to slow down, and we go stand by the edge of the water, looking out.

We stand there in silence for a bit, listening to seagulls, voices, and waves.

Then he asks me, “Do you ever hear the ocean calling you?”

“Like it’s calling you out?” I clarify.

“No,” he says, “Like it’s calling you in.”

He means like a siren or mermaid—how they lure people out and then pull them under the waves. He knows someone in Haiti who spent weeks, months, even years with a siren under the water, he says. Maybe it happens here too.

This afternoon, sitting on the beach chair, bundled in the towel, I put my book down and listen. I want to see if I can hear the voice he’s describing—if I can hear the ocean calling me. I see deep green, white caps, muddled blue in front of me. I unfocus my eyes so I can take in all of it against the pale blue sky. I hear the alternating stillness, the powerful rumbling of the waves. It’s louder when I close my eyes.

I hear the ocean.

But she’s not calling me out or in. She’s calling me to stand right on the edge, where I can feel the water lapping. She’s giving me an assignment: to stand right at the line where the water meets the shore and witness all of it—the beauty, the pain, the ever-changing nature of her very being. I hear her clearly now, and I do as she says.

Everything happens. Period.

One of our greatest traits as human beings, I think, is our ability to exist in the midst of both the good and the bad at once. And in the moments we are called to, we alchemize it—we make something new. My cancer did not happen for a reason, but my precarious human soul found meaning in it anyway.