One Year After Cancer

Dear Friends,

The Uses of Sorrow | Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

I was so certain that this month I would be writing about how revolutionary female joy is. I’ll be saving it for May, because goodness knows we surely need to explore anything that’s both revolutionary and joyful for these times. And female joy IS the revolution. I come to this place of certainty about joy – the joy of a woman’s life, the transformative and sustaining power of it – because of my own experience down the dark and winding path of a breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and blessedly, to a full recovery with an excellent prognosis. 

As the one year anniversary of my diagnosis approached, vivid memories resurfaced. The new spring light, budding trees, and unpredictable weather—shifting from cold to warm and then back again—all worked together to return old thoughts and emotions to me. Our bodies know things that our minds don’t pick up on. It’s in the soma. We feel in our bones. My patients remember this time too. They tolerated my season of leave with such compassion, and I was held in mind by some of the strongest women I know. While it was the hardest time in my life, by every measurement, I am changed. There were poignant revelations that surfaced and just one year later, there are aspects of this journey that I find myself happy to know with an intimacy that only lived experience can bring. 

My whole career has been dedicated to giving a voice to the hidden pain in the lives of women. To work with women, and to specialize in the most vulnerable developmental time periods is to find yourself as an advocate for all of those places. One in three women will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. That’s a lot of us. If it were to come for you, I would want you to remember that there was a glancing memoir of instructive hope on this channel – and that it may serve as a talisman. A feather in a pocket. I think it’s also worth naming the thematic similarities overlapping with other losses women experience: the control we long for and do not have, griefs we can hardly bear, white-knuckle fears, and the beauties that life offers despite the former truths. 

Cancer. Once you’re in tune to it, it’s quite literally everywhere. It’s the ubiquitous villain, said in all kinds of ways, with rage, and despondency. It’s cancer: two words we live in unconscious dread of. A powerful, ambient, tiny thing. I fully understand, and acknowledge that the variety of outcomes is wide and varied. People lose loved ones to it, it ravages and changes lives forever. All things considered, I had a very lucky time. And yet, it sucked. Here are a few pearls that it left me with:

Your important people are suddenly so obvious. It was as clear as the dawn. I needed these folks like I needed to breathe. The beloveds were the foundation, and the house, the cathedral and the buttresses. I had been an indomitable force in my own life, and then I knew with so much awe that I was also surrounded in a grove of strong oaks, some of which I planted myself. Even through seasons of haphazard watering or neglect, to stay with the forest metaphor, there was a clearing for me in the forest, surrounded by love. I was saved by the power of enduring relationships. 

You have to ask for help. I quite literally say this all the time, and I do live it. I needed a deep bench of family, friends, my wonderful therapist, my therapist friends, and faux-therapist friends. Meals, walks, cozy curations, spontaneous sits to pass the impossible hours. Bringers of books, flowers, hugs, letters. Even snark and someone to sit with in a terrible mood is needed. We need our villages, and we survive because of them. It’s difficult for others to feel helpless too and I found people long for something tangible to do and a way to be together. 

It’s not your fault. Cancer shame is real. Sometimes there is no reason or explanation besides being a woman with breasts on this mortal coil. I found this so stunningly familiar to the shame that can accompany a PMAD, genetic anomalies, birth trauma, loss, fertility challenges, or TFMR decisions. It is so hard to be with the unknowns. To have no good, material answer to quell the nagging “why.” So we make ourselves the reason. “It must be me.” Something of omission or commission. “I have to be the problem, so I can be a part of the solution.” It’s terrible to feel powerless over something unseen. I was familiar with this landscape of bargaining and shame, and yet needed to traverse it on my own in this new land.  

You have to feel it all. Fear, hope, terror, dread. The whole gang is there. The illusion of invincibility is over, and it’s never coming back. I say to my patients “you’ve seen behind the curtain.” From my journal in March 2025: “I have rainy aches and a fearful heart today thinking about the different possibilities of the paths before me. Hoping for the best one, but not wanting to be blindsided by the worst. I hate being caught off guard. Clumsily, with the grace of a novice juggler, I'm trying to hold space for both. Today is giving “cancer is a real fucking bummer” vibes. Absolutely nothing in life is certain. Do we all keep learning this over and over again? I bet we do.”

Changes are inevitable. I had to change my life and the scale of how I work to bring back the 99% of what I love. Yes it was stress reduction, and joy amplification – but to the wellness gurus it wasn’t a simple lifestyle hack. (I think there is more to say here about how women should run the world, but our bodies give stress signals that we have to listen to so we can live the bulk of our years in good health.) Platitude alert: Now I postpone nothing. Nada. Seize the day. The time to be food for worms cometh. Your life is happening right now - live in it as fully as you can.

You’ll learn to live with fear and hope to trust your body again. Was I sick? Or am I a healthy person with a cancer problem? The confusion over my state of being was an endless tangle for me. Who am I now, and can I get back to where I was, before it began? I have heard these stories forever in my work, the wrestling with “how did my body malfunction?” The fact of the matter is – shit happens. The script can glitch and code can become errant. The body fails, but it’s not of any moral order. Again I say, shit happens. I come back to believing each day at a time, that I am safe in this body and can listen to what it is telling me. We don’t cause or prevent everything, we can’t keep the forces of death at bay indefinitely. We are both so miraculously strong and devastatingly vulnerable, and we have to live holding onto these two truths. 

You have to advocate for your own health. It never stops. Many of you know this from your own lives, all too well. There are angels in healthcare and they work in impossible systems. We know women’s experiences and pain is dismissed, especially if you are a woman of color. The waiting is so difficult, the process is what it is: schedule challenges, short visits, shelved specimens, postponed surgeries, missed calls, endless portals to the beyond – even in a state-of-the-art hospital and with providers who should be sainted. There are also toilsome, time-consuming, and confusing aspects that need more time and answers. I will tell you this: be a pain if you have to. You deserve to know everything about what is happening to you. 

You can be lucky, and still acknowledge it was hell. There are silver linings, traumatic growth, inexplicable strengths, miracles of women persevering. There is depth that emerges through impossible hours. It is nothing short of holy. 

Journal entry from April 2025:  “That's the clarifying thing about this time. When you take away the bulk of the day-to-day "normal" schedule and its scaffolding, what's left is micro delights that there is space to be more present for. My dear friend gave me Audre Lorde's book, The Cancer Journals. It's a quick and meaty read. Audre did ultimately die from cancer, but she lived differently after her diagnosis and mastectomy. It's very poignant even though it took some courage to pick it up. 

She [Audre] says, "If I said all this didn't matter I would be lying. I see this as a serious break in my work/living, but also as a serious chance to learn something that I can share. And I mourn the women who limit their loss to the physical loss alone, who do not move into the whole terrible meaning of mortality as both weapon and power. After all, what could we possibly be afraid of after having admitted to ourselves that we had dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? For once we acknowledge the actual existence of our dying, who can ever have power over us again? 

Now I am anxious for more living – to sample and partake with the sweetness of each moment and each wonder who walks with me through my days. And now I feel again the large sweetness of the women who stayed open to me when I needed that openness, like rain, who made themselves available." 

It's women with us at the beginning and the end, and for me – blessedly – all the in-between in my work and play. I pinch myself over this village that I have, both near and far. I hope this goes out with some usefulness in the world, like Audre herself wanted, but if not it was a helpful retrospective for me. I’m going to close with this poem that was a bit of a lifeline for me. A poem that leant some words to the wordless form of a difficult season. I think it could likely serve you in whatever is on your heart, heavy on your shoulders, or wriggling in your arms. Take this good medicine my friend. 

For When People Ask

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I want a word that means

okay and not okay,

more than that: a word that means

devastated and stunned with joy.

I want the word that says

I feel it all all at once.

The heart is not like a songbird

singing only one note at a time,

more like a Tuvan throat singer

able to sing both a drone

and simultaneously

two or three harmonics high above it—

a sound, the Tuvans say,

that gives the impression

of wind swirling among rocks.

The heart understands swirl,

how the churning of opposite feelings

weaves through us like an insistent breeze

leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,

blesses us with paradox

so we might walk more openly

into this world so rife with devastation,

this world so ripe with joy.