Grief Is No Stranger to the MBC Community

To those of us in the cancer community, grief isn't a stranger. It's not an unknown emotion. And if you know anything about grief, you know that it tends to pop up at the oddest times, triggered by the simplest things.

The many faces of loss

We lose friends, spouses, mothers, brothers, and sometimes even children. For some of you, it might even mean losing your own life.

As a caregiver and a parent, I know this means one day losing my spouse, but also my daughter losing her other parent. While my partner is still here with us, that doesn't mean the grief is waiting for the day they no longer are. It feels ever-present, some days as thick as smoke reaching up to choke me.

Bringing grief into focus

A recent loss in the metastatic breast cancer community brought this into even more perspective as the news echoed through our house, the grief of losing another friend but also the grief for her husband left without the love of his life. Grief I may someday face.

I've fought the grief, even resented it. Sometimes, it feels like it's here to steal what happy moments I do have. But fighting it made it worse, and resenting it did nothing but make me miserable. Both of those things only kept me from really feeling everything my grief was trying to show me. That grief means that you have something worth missing. Whatever or whoever's now gone was once so important to you that it left a hole. You need to snatch every moment you have because it's worth having those moments.

Grieving the life I expected

It's okay that I grieve what I thought life would be. My hopes of homeschooling our daughter, having more children, or even the expectation that we would get to grow old together. It's okay to grieve the way cancer has changed my relationship with my spouse, my daughter, and even myself. I grieve that I am now a bit more cautious than I once was, slow to have hope or get excited, worried that it'll all get taken away somehow.

I grieve what it was like to live a life ignorant of the way this country treats people with disabilities and terminal illnesses, and I grieve that so many people have to fight so hard for basic human rights.

I grieve for my partner, who loved their career very much and now struggles to find work, as "cancer" has become a taboo word with employers.

Making space for grief

Just like any other emotion, grief cannot move through and out of you until you allow it the space it needs. Fighting it and pushing it aside only leaves it the room to grow until it's so big you have to deal with it, and it's way more overwhelming than it originally was.

I make room in my home, in my mind, for grief. I leave out small electric candles for those I've lost both to cancer and other causes. Their lights flickering, reminding me that, in some small way, they are still with me. It helps me remember that although grief can feel really dark, there's always a little light in the darkness.