I know I need there is so much work to do and stories to tell but tonight I need to write about cancer. It’s what is on my mind and heavy on my heart. A friend of mine died today. A friend who had been a mentor in my work and personal life. A friend who supported and prayed for my son with cancer, without even mentioning she was fighting her own battle. Cancer hits harder once it hits your home. Once you see it in the baby you raised. I’ve known cancer before when I was younger but I didn’t understand the wrath and how brutal it really was until it showed its ugly face in my son. Now I hate it more, the weight of it is so much more heavy. Cancer is a brutal ruthless beast that will take whatever it can. It does not discriminate, it will tear through children and some of the most amazing people I have ever known. Before my son was diagnosed with cancer, it was the unimaginable biggest fear for a parent and one of the furthest things from my mind on what could happen. I shrugged it off thinking it was something minor, not knowing what it actually was at the time. Now there’s a sense of trauma when it comes to cancer. Tonight I am in tears for my friend and her family, for those who have had to endure loss to this terrible disease. Watching it tear through my full of life little boy was by far the hardest thing I have ever experienced as a parent. It’s something you don’t really know how to cope with until you go through it. Most of the time in the middle of it you are just surviving, holding on to whatever you can to get through. Cancer stole my son’s innocence. One day he was a teenager full of life ready to start doing normal teenage boy things, the next he is wheelchair bound with a tumor in his leg. Life changed for us and fast. There was no time to prepare or process how we felt in those beginning days, we just had to toughen up and prepare for the fight of our lives. Now that we have made it through what we hope was the worst, the fear is still there. With so much cancer continuing to show up in people I love, it just reopens the wound and the fear. It’s everywhere, it doesn’t go away. You can’t wish or pray it out of the people you love. You can’t keep it from happening or destroying what it sets out to take. All you can do is show up to fight it however you can and love the people who are fighting their own battles that much harder. One day I pray there is a viable cure, one that works without harmful effects. One that will keep cancer from taking any more lives of people I love.
Cancer
