About a month before A’s last chemo infusion, I suddenly realized that all the things we’d been struggling with before cancer—improving our communication, sorting our work situations, figuring out our priorities—all of those problems were waiting for us when treatment ended. They’d be there, whether or not we were ready to handle them, and we’d have to deal with them. And with all the mail that had arrived in the intervening months that we had ignored. With all the trivial and significant things we’d put on the back-burner. At that point, it felt like a lot of things.
I dreaded the end of the treatment. I wasn’t ready to deal with our problems, those lingering, patient yet insistent annoyances and struggles and obstacles and insecurities and inconveniences and irresponsibilities and well-the-math-doesn’t-quite-add-up-there-does-its. I didn’t even have time to process the preceding months—I’m still not quite sure I’ve done that—and I was totally unprepared to deal with real life.
How strange that this happens. That cancer is so horrible, and cancer treatment potentially even worse—so much physical, emotional, psychological suffering; such a risk of unknown yet incredibly serious side effects; potential death due to any infection, even borne within your own body, during low immunity—and yet, we dread the end of it.
Cancer puts everything else on hold. Nothing is as important as doing everything we need to, everything we—and family and friends—can do to get ourselves through it. Therapy. Reading. Conversations. With luck, a lot of support. And neglecting normal responsibilities just as much as we can, which often means completely.
Cancer gives us purpose. There’s a problem, and (if we’re lucky) there’s a plan for how to solve it. We always have the option to go off the beaten path, but as long as the patient is well enough and the doctor has solutions for problems that come up, there’s a prescribed route. Appointments, biopsies, scans, blood tests ad nauseum, chemotherapy, rinse and repeat.
Someone else sets the agenda for us.
And then it ends.
The social worker A spoke with when he got a second opinion said that the couple of months following treatment might be when we’d need the most support (because we would have to actually adjust back to whatever normal life would now look like) and have the least (because we wouldn’t have any unless we made plans for it since people assume you’re done when the treatment’s over).
In the months after chemo ended, I had occasional overwhelming feelings. Resentment about my small life. I didn’t leave the county for a solid year. Me. Who other people see as a world-traveler, a language-learner, an always-up-for-an-adventurer. The COUNTY. I was only semi-on top of things at home, always dropping some balls (often to do with paperwork and keeping the house fully, actually clean and not just haphazardly vacuumed/swept). A, even with cancer, traveled much more than I did in the year after he was diagnosed: he had work trip after the lymph node biopsy but before the results came in, and three more brief work and personal trips in the months before I also ventured out of town.
And there I was. Home. Running errands. Buying food, making food, cleaning up after food. Doing the bare minimum. Nervous about actually getting a grasp on our finances. Nervous about writing, and about not writing. Nervous about making a career for myself—about succeeding and about failing. About letting other people down. About keeping myself small. About how our relationship would be. About what the new normal would look like and how we would even get there.
The worries I had before, plus the worries triggered by cancer and months of chemo, multiplied by the months they lay dormant.
I don’t think I should have to write that of course we were incredibly relieved, joyous even, when A finished treatment; when his immune system came back; when his follow-up PET scan was clear.
But, as always, real life is a bit more complex. The good—the end of treatment, the clear scans—requires incredible emotional work to enjoy.
And then, of course, there’s all the paperwork.
This Glass Has Water 
The end is hard because you are cast out from the known, the Club of everyone working in their own battle to survive. Out into the open water. The now uncharted territory, with the added knowledge that it can all be upset on any given day by our own bodies. Is this new state forever, or temporary? Will it return or is it gone? Can we truly be happy down to our toes or would we be better served to be reserved?
We can’t know what tomorrow holds whether we are sick, in treatment or perfectly healthy. Once you’ve been punched in the gut, you don’t forget it very soon. Cancer is like that, as are many other diseases and life setbacks, I’m sure. We are left with getting up each day to appreciate what that day has to offer as best we can. Some choose to see light and opportunity, others see darkness and sadness. For most that’s a choice. Sometimes a really, really difficult choice to discern.
Thank you for this, Tom. You capture the feeling so well. We try to focus on the light and opportunity, and the irony is that looming threat of the end of health both enables and interrupts this appreciation of health, life, opportunity, well-being.