Epiphany in Breast Cancer

Epiphany in Breast Cancer

I’d like to say I had one. I’m tempted to say everything in my life changed and I have
become a better person. I’d like to say that I unleashed a newfound sense of purpose, a
motivation to do all those things I hadn’t had the guts to do before. I’d like to say that my
cancer has been the most profound thing in my life. Well, it has been, and it hasn’t. Don’t
be too upset if lots of things just stay the same.

Pretty soon after diagnosis you find that the world doesn’t stop for you to get off. Your
house still gets dirty, the bills still need paying, the roof doesn’t stop leaking, your children
still need parenting, your parents still need taking care of, and your life goes on in all those
quotidian ways it did before. It requires a particular kind of strength to hold your old life
together when you have the best excuse in the world to let it all go. I am an ordinary
woman, mother, and wife, diagnosed with breast cancer. I am not a Lifetime movie. The
lens looking at my life is not soft focus now; if anything it is in sharper relief. The picture is
crisp and clear, which is proof enough that life has kept going on.

There are small “realizations,” as I like to call them, rather than epiphanies. You will find
that your normally self-centered teenagers have an inner steeliness that shows itself at just
the right moment. You will discover that if your husband can’t muddle through quite as
well as you do, you have to let it go. You will find that the fierceness and loyalties of the
women around you are even stronger than you thought they could possibly be. You will
discover that even though you are pushing fifty you are still your dad’s little baby and his
inability to have stopped this disease from entering you crushes him and you love him even
more for that. You will find that a part of you is glad your mother is not alive to see you go
through this because, as much as you want her there, you know it would crush her too.

You will realize your good fortune to be living in the twenty-first century with a disease that
millions of people are familiar with and are working to understand more.

You will probably discover that you don’t want to pack up and go trek around the world,
or build an orphanage for poor girls in Nepal, even if you could. What you want most is
your pre-cancer life, which was pretty okay, all things considered, and you would do
anything to go back to it. That’s what makes you brave and strong and fearless, and it’s
what most of us have to deal with. I guess maybe that is the epiphany.