“So what’s it like having Stage 4 Cancer?”

Nobody has asked me this question. I’m going to answer it anyways, though. Maybe you’re all afraid the answer will just be depressing and you don’t want your day being pulled down into the gutter like that (if so, read on. It’s not nearly so depressing as you might think). Or maybe you don’t feel like the Earth stopped turning on its axis on August 5^th like I do, so your life goes on and you’re not quite interested enough to risk a long and possibly emotionally draining conversation like this. Either way, I don’t really blame you. But a few things have been on my mind as of late and I thought I’d share, for whatever that’s worth.

In a word, having Stage 4 Cancer is weird. Like so many things in life, nobody ever expects cancer to come visit them. For most, it’s a terrible but distant thing that provokes tears when the commercials come on TV begging you for money to help bald-headed kids in wheelchairs. Maybe you know somebody who had it and you watched them wither away, so you’re pretty convinced it’s bad mojo. When cancer is kept at a suitably safe distance like this, it seems sort of manageable in a way.

But let me tell you, when it’s YOU with the cancer, now that’s a weird experience. Suddenly you’re thrust into the spotlight and cancer doesn’t feel so manageable. In fact, in the space of just a few hours surrounding your diagnosis, life itself starts to feel a lot less manageable and weird things start occurring. Doctors become very responsive, even returning your calls long after business hours. I knew it was bad when the Doc began a phone call with, “So Levi… how are you feeling?” You see strange sights, like a man boarding an airplane wearing a live dog like a scarf (no, really this happened.) You start to see pity in other people’s eyes, and every interaction is soon colored by the question, “do they know about it?” And you slowly begin to realize that this is going to color everything and nothing remains certain. All of my financial plans I’d so carefully laid were now totally up for grabs. Since I’m hopelessly vain and care a little too much about things like staying in shape, I began to realize that controlling that would probably soon fly out the window too. Vacation plans: gone (too bad I’d just used up all those vacation days on a climbing expedition in the Alaska Range). But after all the confusion and swirling and shell-shock of the first few days, things settled down and I began to notice a few things.

The first thing I saw is that cancer shatters your identity. I think God had been preparing me for this for a long time already, though, as I’ve been stumbling on books that obliquely address this subject one after another for years. It’s been a theme and topic on my mind since, strangely, about the time the Docs say Timmy Tumor began growing. Anyways, what I’d begun to realize is that before you have cancer, it’s so easy to hold up all of your masks. You’re this person with one particular group of people, maybe that person with another group. These masks are personas that you’ve created and worn so long that you couldn’t put them away if you wanted to, which you don’t. You don’t even realize they’re there, so comfortable and familiar have they become.

And then cancer goes BOOM and drops the mic in your life and suddenly those masks are so, so woefully inadequate. For starters, you can’t hide your weakness, which has surely been an integral component of all of your masks. You can’t hide that your body is broken and you are NOT in control of jack shit and things are not all hunky-dory in your life. Everybody knows that things are unraveling in unexpected ways and that you probably aren’t handling it well. Any pretense of competency or capability is gone.

And when the masks are gone, what’s left? Just… you. All of a sudden I don’t care to define myself. I don’t care what people think in a way that I never could have before cancer. We hold on to our identities so tightly that we can’t let go of them until we’re forced to do so. It took cancer for me.

And speaking of things to which we cling to every-so-tightly: how about the idea that we’re never going to die? We avoid confronting this truth like it’s Ebola even though we all know it’s true, and this is a great tragedy because Death is a great teacher. Not only do we never talk about it with others, but we even try to hide it from ourselves! It’s a grown-up Santa Claus of lies - if everybody is in on it, then it must be true, right?

And then one day cancer brings you face to face with your own mortality, and Santa is no more. This might not seem like a surprising side effect of any disease, but in my case it was. You see, I have never, at any point, thought that this would kill me, so I don’t know why it should have me thinking about Nora walking down an aisle in a church somewhere with some other guy giving her away. Some people get cancer - the pack-your-bags and see-a-lawyer-about-that-will-you-never-got-around-to sort of cancer. But what I have has never felt like that. My cancer is localized in a big tumor and only one spot on my lung, and the Docs say it’s very treatable.

Then again, maybe they’re telling the cancer patients the same thing… now there’s some food for thought…

Anyways, whether it’s just naiveté or not, I’m not worried this is the end or anything. It feels more like a bump in the road - an inconvenience that we’ll make it through. And yet. there’s that thought. That thought that’s firmly planted in the back of my mind that I don’t listen to but never goes away that says, “but what if this is it?” What if this is how my story ends? It’s a shitty ending, really. Totally unoriginal. He died of cancer. Oh how sad - he was too young, yadda yadda yadda.

Anyways, the fact that my non-cancer cancer has me thinking occasionally about whatever happens when you decide never to take another breath isn’t the only surprising side effect. It’s funny how being told you have a disease that kills lots of other people, even if it isn’t likely to do so to you, pulls your focus into the now. It’s just like Tim McGraw singing about going skydiving and rocky mountain climbing when a diagnosis comes along (Although, full disclosure, my reaction to the diagnosis was less noble and involved Insomnia Cookies and Netflix with the Mrs. Already done the skydiving and climbing, I suppose…). In its own way, cancer is a real blessing because it makes you realize there’s no guarantee that another breath will follow this current one, or that the complex electrical circuitry in your heart will ever fire again. This has always been and always will be the case for each one of us, but somehow I could never get that fact through my thick skull until it forced its way in.

And in this state, where life is more clearly defined by its antithesis, everything becomes much clearer. I think maybe this is the great gift that cancer gives. It’s harder to get worked up about dumb stuff. It’s easier to enjoy the little things. It’s easier to love. Your awareness backs up from the zoomed in field of exposure with which you’ve always limited yourself and suddenly you see the bigger picture, full of radiance and beauty. The old people with their big ears getting together at Starbucks just to talk - that’s beautiful. Light itself and the way it plays underneath the whispering leaves of an oak while you’re walking the kids home from school - that’s beautiful. Even the crap stuff is beautiful and radiant just because it IS. It’s like the part about creation in the Jesus Storybook Bible that I read to Nora and Wyatt all the time that says God loved His creation and it was lovely precisely because He loved it.

But lest you think this has all been a pleasure cruise for me the last five weeks, let me just acknowledge that I know suffering is coming. I don’t even have a treatment plan yet, so there’s no telling just how terrible I’m going to be feeling in the very near future. Do pregnant women feel this way as they approach the due date? I know that the suffering coming my way is probably, at least physically, going to bring me to my knees. I’m probably going to feel worse, and for a longer time, than I ever have before. Everybody knows that cancer sucks, and that is not lost on me. It’s likely that I’ll feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and inadequate to even survive this at points. Cancer is scary as hell, and the treatments are even more frightening.

But what is a guy to do? I can’t live in a state of perpetual fear of this unknown. That would suck even more than the cancer. So for now, I’m getting up each day and doing the next best thing, again and again, until it’s time to sleep again. And life pretty much rolls along just like it always has, for everybody, ever since we homo sapiens started doing our Thing. And that’s what it’s like having Stage 4 Cancer right now. 

P.S. - As an added bonus, here are a few pro tips about having cancer from a guy who is so early in the journey that he has no business dispensing such advice:

- Most importantly, be sure you have a satisfactory answer for the question, “now how are you feeling?”. You will receive this very heartfelt question many, many times per day, and on each occasion it will be delivered very sincerely. Remember that, even though you may have answered this question as genuinely as you can so, so many times that day, your interlocutor wasn’t there for any of these dress rehearsals and deserves an honest response.

- Don’t miss the opportunity to enjoy telling people you have cancer. Nobody knows how they’re supposed to react when somebody close to them drops such a truth bomb, so things are going to get messy and awkward when you do so. Savor their awkwardness and don’t be afraid to toy with their attempts to find the right words. After all, the situation is so shitty that, you have to admit, it’s a little funny…

- Enjoy getting the chance to talk to all of the people you haven’t heard from in decades. Every person you haven’t even thought about since high school will be getting in touch. Take advantage of it.

- Take up something new. You’re going to spend a lot of time waiting in doctor’s offices, labs, and the like, so you might as well find something kooky to do with that time. My brother basically dared me to take up whittling. I think this was just to see if he could turn me into some version of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, and it’s working. I have a fine collection of carved trolls and wizards now. Don’t whittle in a doctor’s office, though. That’s crossing the line, bro.

- Use cancer for the Ultimate Trump Card that it is only sparingly. For example, when your wife asks you to say, take out the trash, you should do it if you really are feeling all right. Don’t be a cancer jerk.

- Since you’re probably going to be on one hell of a weight loss program soon, take this opportunity to fatten up. Add heavy whipping cream to everything. If at any point that little voice inside your head cautions you against letting gluttony rule the day, put in your earplugs and count this as a #cancerwin.

- Brace yourself for the biggest piece of humble pie you’ve ever eaten. I didn’t know how deeply all of the people I know were capable of reaching into their kindness pockets. I also didn’t know just how much they care for and love me until cancer came calling. I have been humiliated by kindness (and I mean that in the old-fashioned Jonathan Edwards positive sense of the word) more often and by more people than I ever thought possible - so much so that I am completely incapable of ever repaying them. And within that impossibility lays more proof of both my inadequacy and the conquering power of love. There is no economy of love. It has been freely given to me with no expectation of a return, and that is what makes it beautiful. This is the radiance that shines brightly in all of this mess.

- And lastly, don’t forget the advice of my very favorite poem ever by Dylan Thomas, which says,

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.