Rising Above Cancer

There is a temptation, when telling the story of cancer, to arrange everything neatly around the diagnosis: life before, life after, and the frightening dividing line between them.

But that is not how my year unfolded.

There were weddings and airplanes. Beautiful dresses and hospital gowns. Paris before I knew, Tuscany after I did, and a son’s wedding held in the narrow space between diagnosis and surgery. Cancer entered my life, but life did not politely step aside for it.

The events were already planned, but continuing with them was a decision.

I needed those beautiful days-not as an escape from reality, but as a way of remembering that cancer was not the whole of my reality. I needed something larger to look toward than appointments, test results, and the multiple surgeries waiting for me.

So I went.

I boarded the airplanes, I packed the dresses, I celebrated marriages and stood behind people I loved. The diagnosis traveled with me, of course. It was there in the quiet moments and in the knowledge of what awaited me when I returned home. But I refused to let it occupy every room I entered.

I did not put my life on hold while waiting for cancer to be finished with me. I chose to keep participating in it.

Looking back, I do not think continuing with those plans meant denial. Denial would have meant pretending I was not afraid. I was afraid. I simply understood that fear and beauty could exist at the same time-and I wanted to make room for both.

In Switzerland, I asked Doug to take a photograph of me facing the mountains. I turned my back to the camera and stretched a pink scarf wide behind me.

I called it my “kick cancer’s ass” photograph.

The words sound fierce-and I felt fierce-but that was not the only thing I felt.

At the time, I was also in a painful place in my marriage.

I was not physically alone. Doug was standing behind the camera. Yet I had been feeling deeply alone in ways that were difficult to explain-and a cancer diagnosis has a way of making every absence of comfort feel even sharper.

I wanted to feel that someone was standing beside me in what was coming instead much of the fear felt like mine to carry alone.

Then I turned toward the mountains and stretched the pink scarf between my hands.

Something shifted.

I felt myself rising above the diagnosis. Not escaping or denying it. Rising above its power to become the whole horizon.

I felt connected to God-not as an abstract idea or a comforting phrase, but truly connected and in His presence.

I felt seen.

I felt held.

I felt accompanied.

God did not give me certainty about what would happen, The diagnosis was still real. Surgery was still waiting for me. My marriage was still hurting.

But, I was not alone.

The mountains were immense. The sky seemed endless. Against all of it, cancer felt smaller-not insignificant, but no longer large enough to contain my entire life.

Peace and defiance rose together in me.

I was held by God.

I was at peace.

And I was going to kick cancer’s ass.

When I look at that photograph now, I do not see a woman pretending not to be frightened. I see a woman refusing to let fear determine the altitude of her spirit.

A week later, before sunrise in Tuscany, I climbed into a hot-air balloon and checked something off my bucket list.

As the balloon lifted, the countryside opened beneath us in soft shards of gold and rose.

The timing felt almost too perfect. Days after standing before the mountains and declaring that I would rise above cancer, I was quite literally rising into the morning sky.

There was something almost audacious about it: receiving a diagnosis that made the future feel uncertain and then floating above Tuscany simply because I had always wanted to.

I had no certainty about what waited for me on the ground. But above Tuscany, held in the first light of a new autumn day, I knew this much:

Cancer was a part of my life.

It was not the whole of it.

“Kick cancer’s ass” pose

Has there been a season in your life that threatened to become your whole story? I would love to hear what helped you rise above it and keep living.

Faith, beauty, and the decision to keep living.

Rising with the sun above Tuscany