09/29/2025
CANCER! WTF! Has been my silent response the last few months. Wanting to be there, wanting to show up, and wanting to not center sorrow. I can’t imagine standing in those shoes as I struggle to stand alongside those impacted.
In May of this year, I learned that someone very close to me is living with cancer. Hearing the agony and fear in his voice over the phone was almost too much to bear. There were moments when, seemingly, my heart dropped. When someone you love enters a space you can’t protect them from, and all you can do is listen, it sucks! As a mental health practitioner, I should know how to… At the very least, as a human being, I should know how to… Yet! I dont.
By late August, the pain had returned. The pain that has no words. The pain that robs a person of their joy, their appetite for life, and their will to keep going. The pain was the cancer returning and spreading. My words, so often a place of refuge for others, were suddenly frozen. I could understand why he struggled to speak it aloud. I couldnt understand my struggled to find words.
CANCER isnt just the medical charts, the unaffordable treatments for many, the odds, the feelings of being disposable. AND!!!! the emotional and psychological toll that can hollow someone out. The mental health impact that runs parallel to the physical disease!! Is NOT! Spoke of enough. Somehow, mental healtg is a silent and devastating shadow. It is the quiet erosion of hope when pain becomes a constant companion. It’s the questioning of whether continuing to live means enduring more suffering than one can stand. When the body betrays you, when the pain strips you of dignity, and the only thing that feels human is the sound of your own sobbing in silence. CANCER! WTF!
This is the part of cancer that we as a society still don’t know how to hold. We tell people to “be strong” as if survival depends on stoicism. We rally around them with slogans, but rarely ask: What does this do to your spirit? How do you keep going when living hurts so much? We expect endurance, but endurance is not infinite.
I don’t have answers. I only know that witnessing this up close has changed me. It has made me confront how little space we give people — especially men — to grieve, to break down, to express the kind of pain that can’t be cured. And yet, these moments of vulnerability are not failures. They are not a loss of masculinity. They are the most human moments of all.
Cancer is a disease of the body, sure. It is also a test of the mind, THE WILL TO LIVE. And for those of us who stand beside someone enduring it, it is a test of our own capacity to show up without answers, to sit in silence, to let the tears fall without shame, and to stop pretending that strength always looks like holding it together.
Because sometimes, the truest strength is found in the breaking.
