When Cancer Moved In (Part Two)

The Life We Live Now

There is a phrase people love to say after treatment ends:

“You’re cancer-free.”

And to be clear, that is good news. Wonderful news. News worth being grateful for.

But it is not the same thing as going back.

People tend to imagine illness as a chapter with a clean ending. Diagnosis. Treatment. Recovery. Fade out. Roll credits.

Real life is less tidy than that.

Even when cancer is gone physically, it often remains mentally. It lingers in the background of your thinking. Quiet some days, louder on others. A strange ache. A test result. A routine appointment. The passing thought that begins, What if…?

You learn that survival and peace are not always identical twins.

There are physical reminders too. Scars, of course. Bodies changed by surgery, treatment, fatigue, and time. I can’t physically do what I could before all of this. Not even close. Some of that is age. Some of that is treatment. Some of that is simply the cost of having gone through it.

I’m not thrilled about the extra belly that arrived with reduced capacity and decided to stay, but apparently it pays no rent and ignores eviction notices.

Some changes, however, are better.

I go to bed at a reasonable hour now instead of waiting until I’m falling asleep upright in a chair. That may not sound profound, but it reflects something larger: we think differently about how we live.

Cancer has a way of clarifying what matters and what absolutely does not.

Our tolerance for nonsense—which was never sky-high to begin with—has dropped dramatically. We have far less patience for performative friendships, vague promises, and people who say, “We should get together sometime,” then vanish the moment you ask when.

Life feels more finite after cancer. Not in a gloomy way. In an honest way.

And honesty can be useful.

It has shaped practical decisions too, including the way we eat. We’ve embraced a whole food, plant-based lifestyle because we’d like the years ahead to be healthy ones, not merely numerous ones. Both my parents and Tracy’s mother are turning ninety this year. That means it is entirely possible we could each have thirty more years.

Thirty years is a long time.

Long enough for more books. More gardens. More ordinary Tuesdays. More dinners together. More walks. More laughter. More things a lot of people assume they’ll “get to later.”

That phrase—later—doesn’t feel as trustworthy as it once did.

If cancer gave us anything worth keeping, it was perspective. Not magical gratitude for every sunrise and bird song. I’m still perfectly capable of being annoyed by stupid things. Let’s be serious.

But we do understand more clearly now that time is precious, health is not guaranteed, and love is best measured in the thousand unglamorous ways people show up for each other when life gets hard.

That knowledge was expensive.

We’d still rather have it than not.