Cancer – It Takes Over Your Mind Too

I have never had cancer so I have no notion of the first had experience of the disease. This post isn’t about the first hand living and dying of cancer, it’s about the second hand experience of cancer – being alive with someone you love who has it.

The thing with cancer is that it never goes away, even when it is gone, it isn’t ever not there – it just isn’t there right now. A piece of your peace dies with the knowledge of this diagnosis. It is a flash-bulb moment marking the end of that life and the beginning of this new one.

It is the start of a new mental process that runs unstopped until your loved one dies. It’s a process that is mostly in the background, out of the consciousness, yet very taxing on the finite mental resources that exist within each of us. It’s a process that has it’s biggest impact exactly when you forget that it’s there – it reminds you that someone you love is sick and that the blissful moments you knew before are gone forever.

It’s like having a monkey on your back – sometimes the monkey is sleeping allowing your to live a cancer-free existence, like everything is fine and life is good. The rest of the time that monkey is drunk, playing a trumpet and spilling drinks all over your happiness.

And all the while, life goes on. There are bills to pay, dreams to have and life to live. It was coming all along, maybe not the cancer, but the death. The clock of life has been ticking down. Just because some doctor tells you with more clarity that it’ll be arriving sometime soon doesn’t change the fact that it has always been rolling towards us.

This is the piece that I have the least enjoyment with. You put on your game face and try to pay complete attention to the one you love, marked for death, yet not at all different from how they were a few weeks ago. And it is always close by, the though that says “they have cancer and they are going to be dead soon,” spoken with your own voice. Words you couldn’t have imaginable last year when you were all eating at Christmas and they said “hey, who invited this turkey to dinner?”