PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME
Please don’t make me write about cancer.
____________________________
In the beginning I would study it with fascination. Not so much the disease in general. But the disease in me. Despite my initial resistance, what was ‘in’ me became a permeating topic of conversation. If not aloud, a haunting and persistent melody stuck in my head.
And then people I knew and those who became #cancerthriver kindred spirits began asking, even demanding that I share every excruciating survival detail. Even my enema habits became topics of conversation in not so intimate circles occupied by those desperate to conquer their own disease.
Somewhere along the way I decided I did not want to give ‘it’ that much power.
I felt this visceral resistance to becoming an expert in ‘not dying’—
Not in the diets,
Not in the treatments and the supplements,
Not in the injections and IV’s.
The realization surprised me. I wasn't resisting medicine. I was resisting the slow migration of my attention. Day after day, conversation after conversation, I could feel my world shrinking until everything revolved around one question: How do I stay alive? It was an important question. It simply wasn't the only one.
I determined that if I was to be an expert on anything it would be the condition of the heart.
Not because the body doesn't matter. It does. I have fought hard for this body. I have pursued treatments across borders, read studies, changed habits, and made difficult decisions. But somewhere along the way I realized that while everyone was asking me how I was treating my body, almost no one was asking what was happening to my soul.
This is where I have dropped my anchor. Not in the shallow end of obsession over the temple.
But in the depths of the God who dwells within.
What of the soul neglected when the fascination is more with how to stay alive than the living itself?
There is a difference between preserving a life and discovering what it is for.
Do I choose to be an expert in fighting cancer or someone who lived until she died?
I decided I would rather become an expert in living than an expert in dying.
The focus is intentional:
To redefine the hard moment not as other but omniscient.
To notice the quiet beauty over the loud ugliness that seeks to permeate our lives.
People often ask about the environments I create. The homes. The gardens. The light. A dear friend recently said to me, "The beautiful environments you create are just a flex of the world you see." I've thought about that ever since. Perhaps beauty isn't something I create at all. Perhaps it is simply what remains visible when fear is no longer allowed to occupy the center of the room.
If you ask me to tell you how I live with cancer, instead, I will drop the last two words.
Not to hide behind the truth of my experience,
But to place emphasis where emphasis is due.
Cancer is part of my story. It simply refuses to become the title of the book.
What week have you entered that was without the hard?
What hard moment was experienced without insight?
What insight has cost you nothing?
The cost forces conversation with the soul.
That conversation requires introspection.
The pain of life without purpose is far greater than any physical pain endured.
Everything we go through is connected to another's journey—
my life is intended to edify and uplift you.
Do you believe it?
The suffering becomes more bearable, even more beautiful when you do.
Perhaps this is why I resist writing "a cancer book."
I don't want to become fluent in the language of disease if it costs me fluency in the language of life.
Please don't make me...
each one of us has an intimate and sometimes unbearable end to that sentence—
PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME
start over.
forgive.
move.
grieve.
let go.
change.
become vulnerable.
face this.
We all finish that sentence differently.
Mine happened to end with...
write about cancer.
Instead, let me join you in celebrating life.
NOTES
A Soul Map
Every hard moment deserves our attention.
It deserves to be acknowledged.
Grieved.
Learned from.
Even honored.
But not every hard moment deserves to become the place from which we live.
The temptation is subtle.
What begins as an event slowly becomes an identity.
A diagnosis becomes the introduction.
A disappointment becomes the lens.
A betrayal becomes the address.
We don't heal by refusing to look at the hard moment.
We heal by refusing to mistake it for home.
The invitation is not to look away.
It is to keep walking.
Toward beauty.
Toward truth.
Toward the God who has been calling us beyond the hard moment all along.
REFLECTION
What has quietly become your address?
Where have you unintentionally taken up residence?
What circumstance still deserves your attention—
but no longer deserves your identity?
There is beauty in the hard moment.
What if its greatest beauty is that it points beyond itself?
You Are Here.
Not in the diagnosis.
Not in the disappointment.
Not in the fear.
Here.
Still becoming.
Still walking.
Still loved.
You are not alone.
IMAGE: Most mornings begin with the writing, trying to listen to the Voice within before the world has much to say. This week I am back in my beloved San Diego, staying with precious friends. Friday morning we drive to Mexico for another round of therapy, the Healer guiding every decision along the way.
There is beauty in the hard moment. There is danger in mistaking it for home—Janene Kraft