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It’s a funny thing, coming home. Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different; the contrast between who you were when you left and who you are now is heightened against the backdrop of old haunts.
matter how brilliant and compassionate my doctors might be, I would have to be proactive and learn to advocate for myself.
Worse were the disaster tourists:
I grew resigned to the idea that, for the time being, I had one central preoccupation: ongoingness.
Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you
“Write,” instructs Annie Dillard, “as if you were dying.” We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not “if” but “when” death appears in the plotline.
For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.
But in fact, the hardest part of my cancer treatment began once it was over.
“EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
But instead, it feels like the beginning of a new kind of reckoning. I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.
My medical team is focused on cancer, not its aftermath. Painfully aware that the struggles of recovery are a privilege many don’t get to experience, I’m afraid of sounding ungrateful—or worse yet, insensitive to those dealing with far scarier unknowns.
“The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence,” Annie Dillard once wrote. “We let our bodies go the way of our fears.”
There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.
The haunting feeling that something terrible could happen again at any moment.
Recognition of my post-traumatic stress was a revelation, but so was the possibility of what psychologists describe as “post-traumatic growth.”
But that old Hemingway saw—“the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is only true if you live the possibilities of your newly acquired knowledge.
We call those who have lost their spouses “widows” and children who have lost their parents “orphans,” but there is no word in the English language to describe a parent who loses a child. Your children are supposed to outlive you by many decades, to confront the burden of mortality only by way of your dying. To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.
The worst part is that other parents treat us like we have some kind of curse, a contagious one. Grief makes people uncomfortable, I guess. They want you to be positive, they want you to quit talking about your dead daughter, they want you to stop being sad. But we will never not be sad. So what do we do?”
Trauma has a way of dividing your view of the world into two camps: those who get it and those who don’t.
Each time, it becomes harder to recover your sense of safety. After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you—whether through illness or some other catastrophe—you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines.
Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.
When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.”
“You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
sometimes all you can do is show up. And when things are hard, to keep on showing up.
But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose.
May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.
I remember when all I wanted is what I have in this moment.
It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.
Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
LIFE IS NOT a controlled experiment. You can’t time-stamp when one thing turns into another,
