The question I get asked most these days is 'how are you?' I understand, it is what I wonder about people too. I wonder what are you thinking about, what makes your soul sing, have you read anything good? Do you feel like you are living an authentic life, what is really hard right now, how is the weather affecting you and what makes you feel alive? You know, how are you? I'm not sure that is exactly what people mean when they ask me; they may mean something more like how are you physically feeling, or are you going to survive?
So here is my answer: even when you have cancer not much changes. Life goes on in all the regular, beautiful, everyday ways. My kids still wake up needing to eat and learn and be parented. Sometimes I can cherish every second and sometimes I'm just hanging in there until I get an hour with no one talking to me. Aaron and I are still married, we still need to connect with each other and pay our bills and do our jobs, we still love each other very much.
Normal things happen: we went to the symphony and my girls got the flu and we fold laundry and do math and watch soccer games and clean out the chicken coop. My sister had a baby on Valentine's Day, I can't wait to hold her, a miraculous reminder of things carrying on just as they should.
I still like to write and post things on instagram and be in nature and talk to my best friends and laugh and find beauty everyday. I'm tired because I'm often not sleeping and also, oh yeah, maybe the cancer, but otherwise, it is life pretty much as normal and I'm doing okay.
And here is also my answer: when you have cancer everything changes. It starts out with your heart being broken. It most likely will be re-broken many times along the way and you have to decide, after you mourn, to pick up from there and move on. It challenges every thought you have ever had about how things are, about how if you do enough, you will succeed, certainly at something as simple and straightforward as keeping yourself healthy.
It makes you look at your very own life and examine every part. Is this really what I want to be doing? Is this how I want to spend my days? Is this how I want to treat people? Is this really important? Important enough to trade my time for?
It makes you wonder, what is this here to teach me? What goodness will come from this?
Cancer makes you say everyday 'I am healing' and at first you only believe it metaphorically. But then with the gift of a magical unicorn lightbeam of a healer and the power of the holy spirit, you realized as you said it two days ago, for the first time, yes, you believe it. You believe it fully, deep in your soul. You are not just going to survive, this is actually healing you.
Cancer makes you wrestle with deciding which of those broken pieces of yourself are worth picking up and salvaging and which needed to be shed off and let go of a long time ago.
And this too is okay.
