I don't want to forget what cancer felt like.
I don't want to forget what cancer felt like.
Apparently, this is a slightly strange thing to say.
I know people who have finished treatment and wanted nothing more than to put the entire experience behind them. The hospital bracelets, the medications, the scans, the side effects, the strange vocabulary you somehow become fluent in against your will. They reach remission and want to close that chapter so firmly that eventually it begins to feel like something that happened to somebody else.
I understand that.
There are certainly things I would rather never experience again.
But I don't want to forget them.
Not because I think suffering is inherently beautiful. I don't think everything painful needs to be transformed into a lesson before we're allowed to admit that it was simply awful. Some things hurt. Some things frighten you. Some things you survive because there wasn't exactly another option.
Cancer was like that.
Still, now that I am on the other side of it, I find myself strangely protective of the person who knew what those days felt like.
Because she noticed things I am already beginning to overlook again.
Before chemotherapy, wind ruining my hair was an inconvenience.
You spend time styling it, step outside, and apparently the atmosphere has other plans.
Then I lost my hair.
And months later, when it had finally grown long enough to move again, I felt the wind catch it.
Such a stupidly ordinary thing.
Hair moving.
I had experienced it thousands of times without assigning any significance to it whatsoever. But that first time after being bald, I remember becoming almost embarrassingly emotional.
The wind wasn't ruining my hair anymore.
I had hair for the wind to ruin.
Warm showers were like that too.
Before cancer, a shower was just a shower. Something I did every day without much consideration beyond whether the water was hot enough.
Then I had a PICC line.
Suddenly showering involved covering it, protecting it, making sure it stayed dry. Something as mindless as standing beneath running water required preparation.
Eventually the line came out.
And the first time I stepped into a warm shower without having to protect part of my body from the water, it felt almost decadent.
Nothing about the shower had changed.
I had.
Breathing might be the strangest one.
The body does it so quietly that most of the time we don't even participate. You can spend an entire day without once being impressed that your lungs have continued filling and emptying on your behalf.
Until breathing becomes difficult.
Then suddenly there is nothing mundane about air.
I think that's what I'm afraid of forgetting.
Not the medical details necessarily. Not every appointment or every bad day or every moment I was frightened.
I don't want to forget how valuable ordinary life became when ordinary life was difficult to have.
Because comfort is remarkably good at making us amnesiac.
Give something back to us long enough and eventually we stop calling it a gift.
Hair becomes hair again.
A shower becomes a shower.
Breathing becomes breathing.
A boring Tuesday becomes something to complain about.
And maybe that is simply how human beings survive. We acclimate. We cannot walk around permanently astonished that our lungs work or burst into tears every time we wash our hair. Eventually life has to become normal again.
I just don't want normal to become synonymous with insignificant.
There are things I appreciate now precisely because there was a period when I couldn't have them. And I wonder whether that's one of the crueler paradoxes of being human: sometimes we have to lose the ordinary before we understand how extraordinary it was.
So no, I don't want to live in the worst period of my life forever.
I want to travel. I want to eat ridiculously good food. I want to make plans far enough into the future that I can complain about how expensive the flights are. I want cancer to become an increasingly small part of a very long life.
But I want to bring something from that life with me.
The girl who was bald knew something the girl with hair had forgotten.
The girl protecting her PICC line knew something the girl standing freely beneath hot water didn't.
The girl struggling to breathe knew something the girl breathing without thinking about it couldn't possibly understand.
I don't want their suffering back.
I just don't want to lose what they taught me about being alive.
Maybe moving forward doesn't always require leaving everything behind.