Life as a journey
A metaphor used over and over again by many wise people is that life is a journey:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson said it’s one without a destination.
- Michelle Obama says it’s one that doesn’t end.
- Street artist Banksy says not everyone will understand your journey and that’s ok.
- According to Proust, wisdom is discovered after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
- According to Buddha, we are far from the end of it.
- According to the Bible, Isaiah 43:1-2, when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned.
I’ll end with a quote from Star Trek, the journey where no man has gone before:
Cancer as part of a life journey
While each cancer journey is as unique as the person making it, they all begin at the same starting point: when the doctor says you have cancer. These are words they don’t like to speak and words that nobody likes to hear.
I recently watched the movie Living, starring Bill Nighy. Living is about a British man in 1950s London who discovers he has terminal cancer, with only months to live. The doctor breaks the news to him by saying, “It’s never easy, this,” to which Nighy’s character Mr. WIlliams responds, “Quite,” all spoken with the utmost in British propriety and politeness.
My doctor told me the news that I had breast cancer over the phone. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but I do remember collapsing into the nearest chair, where I sat for many minutes to process the information. It was the spring of 2000, and I remember thinking that this was one hell of a way for a new century–millennium even!–to begin. Not only that, it was illness on top of injury as I was about to turn 40 a few months later.
I would have the same dialogue two more times, in 2007 and again in 2016. It was in 2016 when I learned that cancer cells had broken free from my right breast and traveled into my right lung and beyond, reaching my spine, where, fortunately, they were detected before getting a chance to go up the superhighway of my spine.
Stage 4 cancer journeys
Some cancer journeys are brief and straightforward, with a welcome destination of NED–No Evidence of Disease. Some cancer patients reach that same destination, but a little more tired and tattered, after traversing many twists, turns, bumps and potholes along the way.
Metastatic breast cancer, a stage 4 disease, is a marathon, as my current oncologist tells me. Rather than annual checkups that may become even less frequent with time, our checkups will be a routine entry on our calendars. We become as familiar with the winding corridors and labs and rad rooms in the facility where we are treated as the medical staff that work there. We linger in the cafe or stakeout a quiet corner in a waiting area where we can spend the time between blood draws and injections of contrast dye or radioactive tracer and scans and doctor visits.
We come to understand why we are called patient.
For those of us with cancer diagnoses like metastatic breast cancer, our journey has no end. The destination is simply the one where we all will arrive, at some point. When you’re living with MBC, you just realize that you will get there a bit sooner than you had expected or hoped.
Finding goodness in the journey’s challenges
Cancer is part of many life journeys, and for some of us, it can seem like IT IS our journey. And like lost luggage or a missed connection, it’s an unwanted and unwelcome occurrence of a journey.
Yet I’m going to suggest turning that view around, even when it involves something like lost luggage or missing a train. I had an experience involving both, on a trip to Alaska with my niece. We got off the train in Talkeetna, but our luggage continued on to Denali. It didn’t keep us from enjoying a river boat ride (in a drizzly rain I might add) that included eagle-spotting and an easy (though muddy) hike that I did in my Birkenstock Boston clogs (love them shoes) rather than my packed, train-riding hiking shoes.
I’m not saying that missing luggage and cancer are equivalent, but having experienced both, I am suggesting that whatever challenge you’re facing, especially if it’s something like cancer or another life-altering / life-threatening condition, find a way to honor it.
In doing so, you honor yourself for handling it with courage, grace, humor, will–whatever it takes. You can bring meaning to the burden you bear.
Honoring the journey of cancer and other challenges can lessen their power and strengthen your own.