At the end of 6 years, I have given up on the idea of arriving someplace. There will never be a time when I understand everything and can live without fear. I expected to get to that place. I thought that after 6 years, I would have it figured out. I have not. Maybe that is the first thing I want you to know.
I was a surgeon for over 30 years. I knew cancer from the clinical side: the scans, the staging, and the treatment options. I could tell my patients about their cancer with complete confidence. I had answers, or at least I had information that felt like answers.
When cancer came to me, I found out how little I truly understood.
What I know now lives in a different place inside me. It sits in my bones, in the late-night hours when I cannot sleep, and in random moments of unexpected kindness that still catch me off guard. This kind of knowing cannot be drawn on a graph or listed on a chart.
Here is what I want you to understand: I feel everything, all at once.
I feel fearful. Not only the sharp fear that comes with a new diagnosis, although that fear can still creep back in on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. I mean the quiet, steady fear. The fear of recurrence. The fear of what comes next. The fear of leaving Joyce, my wife, my rock, who carries so much of this burden with me.
At the same time, I feel grateful. Deeply, honestly grateful. Grateful for another morning. Grateful for coffee that tastes right. Grateful for the way the light enters our window at Atlantic Heights. For 6 years, I was not a guarantee. These feelings do not cancel each other. They sit side by side, and I have stopped trying to separate them.
I also want you to understand the loneliness.
Many people believe that cancer creates a community, and sometimes it does. Joyce and I have found parts of our relationship that I did not know existed. Friends have shown up in ways that still surprise me.
Still, there is a very specific kind of loneliness that cancer creates. It is the loneliness that lives inside you while you sit among people who care about you. It is the loneliness that comes when your body becomes an unknown place. It is watching friends plan for the future (next year, 5 years from now) with the same calm certainty you once had. It is carrying experiences that you cannot fully express, no matter how hard you try to put them into words.
I am not saying this to be sad. I am saying it because it is true. If you feel this kind of loneliness too, I want you to know you are not imagining it.
The treatments were often brutal. Chemo. Surgery. Radiation. A stem cell transplant. CAR-T therapy. Many of these treatments drained me of energy, yet some of them also returned pieces of me.
I learned that my body can endure far more than I once believed. I learned that I can face things I never thought I could face. I learned that survival is not a single moment of triumph. It is thousands of small choices to keep going, to take the next medication, to show up for the next doctor’s visit, and to keep fighting even when it feels impossible. It is also the choice to rest when rest is what I need.
I also learned that strength looks different than I thought it did. Strength is not always about pushing forward. Many times, strength is crying in the shower. Often, strength is saying out loud that you are scared. Strength is asking for help when every part of you wants to go it alone.
I want you to know that hope is complex now.
I still have it. Hope still surprises me with its presence and its quiet, persistent, illogical nature. It does not feel like the hope I had before this journey, the calm belief that everything would work itself out. These days, my hope is not tied to certainty. My hope is tied to uncertainty. It lives inside questions, not answers.
Maybe that is a more honest kind of hope. Maybe that is a more truthful kind of hope. I am not sure. I am unsure about many things now.
More than anything, I have learned that life with cancer asks you to accept contradictions.
I am afraid, and I am peaceful.
I am overwhelmed, and I am managing.
I am lost, and I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
I am dying (we all are), and I am alive. Alive in a way that feels profound and sometimes too much to hold.
I have learned that good days do not erase bad days, and bad days do not ruin good days. I have learned that meaning does not arrive all at once. It grows over time through small, almost overlooked moments.
I have learned that I do not have to be courageous. I only have to be present.
If you are reading this because you love someone with cancer or another life-threatening disease, please know this: you do not have to fix it. You cannot. The greatest comfort often comes from presence. From showing up. From being with us in our uncertainty without trying to offer a solution. From allowing us to feel whatever we feel, without trying to reason it away.
If you are reading this because you are on this path yourself, I want you to know something my surgeon self could never have told you:
You are working harder than most people see. Every day you wake up and carry on, that matters. Your fear is real. The hope you hold, even when it flickers, is real too. You do not have to have it figured out. None of us do.
To those on this path: you are not alone, even when loneliness sits beside you like a constant companion. There are others of us on the same road, moving through the same darkness, trying to find our way. Some days, knowing that is enough. Some days, it has to be.
