Why I Celebrate Cancer
With illness often comes distress, but if you're lucky, you can end up with some hard-won wisdom and enlightenment, too. That's why I make every December 8 my Cancerversary.
In many ways, each year the date feels like a lifetime ago, yet when December 8th comes around, the memories feel raw and recent.
December, 1988 I am 34 years old. My two children are both under three years old. I am ill-equipped to deal with a diagnosis like cancer. My husband, too. But we all know we are not given the choice, so we deal with it and persevere.
Have you ever heard someone call cancer a “gift,” and scoff at the very notion of this? Calling it that is a way to make lemonade out of lemons, perhaps. A way to justify an injustice.
But it’s also true that if you turn it inside out and examine it closely enough, and for long enough, it might eventually appear differently and teach you something.
I’m sharing my version of this gift, and hoping that in hardship (which we all inevitably deal with at some point in time), you might reflect back on this and find the strength you need to move through the mud.
Ask any cancer survivor the date they were diagnosed, or the day they had surgery, and I can bet that almost every one of them will have no trouble recalling it. They might even remember the exact time and place where they heard “you have cancer;” down to dream-like details, like the scratchy feel of the fabric of the chair underneath them, the dull grey of the shirt or dress the doctor wore that day or the stale odor that seeped through the dim hallways into the room where they sat too frozen to move or speak.
For me, each and every year takes me further from that date that changed the course of my life. Each turn of the calendar helps me exhale just a bit more. And thus my case – and so many others’ - for celebrating my “cancerversary.”
But not every survivor – nor every onlooker – understands, or believes in, cancerversaries.
Perhaps it’s their wish to move on; to dodge the reminder of an unpleasant time.
A good friend – and fellow cancer survivor - told me that while she loves celebrating milestones, there are two she ignores: the death of a loved one, and the death of her cancer cells. “I don’t need a particular day to remember what I’ve lost, because I think about that throughout the year. I’m grateful for my health each and every day.”
And although my two sons and husband and a few close friends ‘get it,’ and fervently acknowledge and rejoice with me each year, some others refuse to acknowledge the day.
But I cannot store it away. Let me explain why.
Imagine being handed a gift. It’s not for your birthday, nor any other special occasion. You’re stumped as to why you’re getting it, and you wonder where it came from. You don’t want it, but it’s thrust your way, pressed into your arms.
Once you take it in your hands, you feel its enormous and amorphous heft. It’s challenging to hold it up, but you do. You want to throw it back, but you can’t. The gift-giver has vanished.
Like a gruesome automobile accident, you can’t look away, even though you try. And it’s hard to ignore the voices who insist this gift is not refundable, but is one that you will, one day, be grateful for. Given no choice, you hold onto it with a tenuous grip.
You want to hurl it against the wall, smash it to pieces with a hammer, but instead, you put it out of the way, atop a high shelf. But although it’s out of reach, it’s capable of bringing out the worst in you. Resentment, cursing, wild anxiety, bitterness, anger, depression, hopelessness. So much so, that you lose sight of your essence. You’ve become not just physically changed, but emotionally and spiritually altered, too.
But as time passes – first, so slowly you swear the earth is caught up in some sort of anti-gravitational pull – and then, a bit more in sync with its natural rhythm – every so often you glimpse the gift, as it slowly begins to take on a more distinctive shape. Its edges are less blurry, its surface not as rough. You begin to soften, too: You cry when you notice buds appear on the trees, wondering why they never looked as perfectly promising. You hug your children and husband with a firmer grip than you thought capable. You stroke the new hair sprouting on your head, marveling at its downy softness and perseverance, thanking it for returning.
When you’re finally ready to reach the gift, you’re surprised: Despite its heft, it’s not as heavy as you first thought. It feels quite nice; comforting, stable and newly resplendent. You caress its smooth, luminous surface and marvel at its comforting rounded corners as you clutch it tightly to your chest, realizing it won’t crack – and neither will you.