Last summer, my husband and I experienced what it would be like to be “done.” Tommy had no evidence of disease, and despite a few preventative treatments here and there, he was finished with active treatment. The relief was unbelievable. We had made it through the hardest year of our lives. We were on the other side—cancer checklist completed!  

We could move on, and get back to our “regularly scheduled programming.” We spent a summer with an exciting new sense of freedom which gave us the time to process and realize what the heck we had just experienced the past year. When you are moving from appointment to appointment and treatment to treatment, you don’t have a lot of time to process the fear, anger, and uncertainty that come along with it, and it hit me like a brick.

Truthfully, I genuinely expected us to drop back into the “newlywed” storyline we had embarked upon before Tommy’s diagnosis, but that storyline no longer “fit.” We had our lives back in our own hands, but trying to have the relationship we had before cancer didn’t feel authentic. This came as somewhat of a shock to me.

Why doesn’t this fit? I thought. We were the same people we were before cancer. We had all of this time back. We were ecstatic. The checked boxes were all there, but I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting the satisfaction I usually get from finishing a task.

I’ve noticed, through the highs and the lows, that joy and grief often go hand in hand—cancer makes joy confusing. Joy is there, gratitude is bountiful, but there’s something else in the mix. Some experience this “something else” as survivor’s guilt. Personally, I was feeling a massive amount of guilt about the guilt itself—a guilt rollercoaster!

We stretch and grow whether we want to or not. Change is inevitable, but the direction is up to us. We are changed, but we are stronger.

Despite the incredible results and news, we had experienced trauma—mentally, emotionally, and in Tommy’s case, physically. You can’t just flip a switch and make trauma disappear. It takes time and a different sort of healing to move through this.

I knew cancer had changed so much of our lives, but I think I was clinging to the hope that it hadn’t changed me as a person. A few months earlier, I told my therapist I didn’t want cancer to change me. I am a generally happy person, but I was becoming worried that the weight of this ongoing fight would close off my heart, and make me inherently darker and less happy. I expected her to respond with reassurances like, “You will always be who you are” and “Nothing can change that,” but instead, she said, “It’s going to change you.”

I was shocked. It was completely unfair.

“It’s going to change you, and it already has changed you. It doesn’t mean it has to change you in ways that don’t serve you,” she said.

We stretch and grow whether we want to or not. Change is inevitable, but the direction is up to us. We are changed, but we are stronger.

I do not have to “complete cancer.” I do not need a check mark to prove I am a good caregiver and wife. I do not need a clean bill of health to live a fulfilling and happy life. Life has its chapters, and this one is stretching and molding me in ways I never could have imagined. I am still “me,” but I am living in a more honest place. There is room for cancer, there is room for laughter, there is room for love and acceptance and doubt. As Walt Whitman once said, “I am large—I contain multitudes.” Becoming grateful for the struggle is no easy task, but I hope it’s one box I can eventually check off.