What Cancer Feels Like

I have tried to explain what it feels like, going through cancer. Honestly, the answer to that question is too long for anyone to answer. I had never thought to try and explain it until someone asked me. It feels like a lot of things--like betrayal, abandonment. It feels like I am in the world, but not quite a part of it. It feels like depression, like an endless hazy drizzle. It feels like carrying concrete blocks up a muddy hill. It feels like unfairness, guilt, confusion.

I have had a lot of time in these last months to contemplate pain and how to describe it. Pain mostly feels like confusion to me, and for many other people as well. Isn’t “why?” the question we always come back to during times like these?

When I was diagnosed with cancer, I and everyone around me started throbbing with questions. How did this happen so young? Why me, and not someone else? Is this a punishment? Is this God giving me an excuse to give up because he knows I won’t succeed at my dreams? Is God letting me die because my husband deserves to be with someone better?

For a long time, I felt that cancer was God’s way of communicating how disappointed he was with me. I remember articulating that to a kind friend who shook his head and said, “don’t you have any idea how much God approves of you? I can feel it.”

The theme of my story is this: unconditional love. The truth is that for years now, that has been at the top of my list for life goals: to understand and believe in unconditional love. I didn’t realize until recently that truly, at the very bottom of me, I believed that I was unlovable. I thought that if I let anyone truly know me, they wouldn’t love me anymore. So I did everything I could to prove to myself and to the world that I was worthy. I climbed social ladders, I practiced my craft, I obsessed over looking beautiful at every angle. I became the best at everything I could.

For years, even before cancer, I had felt very alone. I messed up a lot of relationships in my college town because I was so laser-focused on succeeding in music. I left that town in shambles, pieces of me scattered among people I loved dearly, but didn’t feel that I deserved to reconcile with.

I played for arenas of people, everyone knew me, everyone liked me. I was popular, I was talented, I was pretty. I had all the positive attention that a girl could ask for, but the truth is, I was deeply lonely. Although everyone knew who I was, no one really knew me. I kept people at a distance--only allowing them to see the parts that I wanted them to. I believed, deeply believed, that if anyone got close enough to really see me, they would see the truth: that I am ugly, selfish, and unloveable. I had pushed so many friends away, burned so many bridges.

The breaking point came for me when I realized how many good people I had hurt. I felt unforgivable, and undeserving of the success I had there. I packed up my car and drove to my parents house. Isn’t that where we all go when we need comfort? I arrived there in shambles and tears--hoping to find some answers in my highschool bedroom and by the lake I grew up looking at. It didn’t quite go that way.

The wrench in my story came when I met Jeremy, a blazing rocketship of a person. Meeting him was like walking right into the middle of the story where I already was irreversibly in love. Something in me recognized something in him, and we both knew the details would work themselves out.

My family did not fall in love with him quite as quickly. I had planned for a quick stay in Ohio before my solo move to Nashville, but Jeremy changed everything. My parents told me they never wanted to see him again. They said a lot of things that deflated my sense of safety there, and further confirmed what I always knew. I was a disappointment. I was a joke. I was a failure. I was unlovable.

I spent the next nine months living out of my car, house-sitting, and staying with friends. There was no money from my family, no father-daughter dance, my mother was not there when I chose my wedding dress. During that year my new car unexpectedly kicked the can, I was fired from my job, I didn’t sing a single song. I was on autopilot.

We married 8 months after we met, and moved to Nashville together a month later. Jeremy quickly thrived in his field. I did not. I was so disillusioned, depressed, anxious, afraid, and regretful, that I was barely functioning. I had witnessed such marital dysfunction growing up, that the moment I was in my own marriage, I panicked. I became extremely insecure and guarded. The trauma of the last years was too much. My purest self was locked away, and years went by where I couldn’t even sing a few notes without getting frustrated.

I had made an agreement with God--that for three years, I would just grow, and get healthy internally. And after my three years was complete, I would try again at music.

It was a long trek up the mountain, forgiving myself, learning courage, breaking the promises I made to myself when I said I would never let anyone close enough to hurt me. I had conquered so much and felt a bright and nervous readiness.

It was September of 2017, the month and the year I had been dreaming about, and just when I expected that I would be moving on from a tough season, a frantic doctor rushed in to ask me a series of rapidfire questions, then scheduled a biopsy. My aunt who is a nurse called me in tears later that night and said, “It doesn’t look good.” Jeremy and I canceled all our plans for the week and drove seven hours to the ocean. Moments after we arrived, the doctor called.

It’s cancer. A new low.

We digested that news in our own ways that week. I rose early and disappeared into the foggy blue and pink of the morning. We sat on the balcony and were surprised by dolphins in the distance. We cooked together. Sat in silence. Cried. Whispered things to God.

I had already lost so much in the last years. I lost my name when I got married, I lost my ability to write music, I lost my relationships with my family, I lost my identity as an artist. I was about to lose everything that I had left. The last of what I had stocked up to prove to myself and the world that I was lovable.

I lost 25 pounds of my body, I lost my hair, I lost lung capacity to sing, I lost my energy, my personality. Being sick with cancer is every bit as bad as you imagine. For the first weeks, my body rejected food so quickly that I just stopped trying to eat at all. Marriage was strained. The trauma was effecting us both--we were distant.

So there I was, at the ultimate low--stripped of everything I had every used to earn love and attention and meaning. And that was the moment when I was met with a tidal wave of friendship and affection.

My friends scheduled themselves to clean my house every week, a meal train was organized, and three days a week for four months, the doorbell rang with hot food. I never went alone to an appointment--my husband and friends would drop everything and show up for me. Thousands of dollars came in online and through the mail. Packages came in the mail, every day for weeks. My dining room table filled up with flowers, candles, blankets, chapsticks, letters, books. I was not forgotten.

My family drove seven hours to Nashville for Thanksgiving, and took off their hats to show that they all had shaved their heads. My mom couldn’t stay away--a broken relationship mended with soups and old movies and shared cups of tea. My brother called me “Janie” again. We forgave eachother for old wounds.

My husband, whose head was spinning, did everything he could. He picked me up out of bed to slow dance with me. He turned on Tyler Perry movies when I was crying--knowing exactly what would make me laugh. He wrote songs for me, and read to me when I couldn’t sleep. He didn’t have a lot of words, but he always would reach for my purse as if to show me that he would carry anything for me that he knew how to.

All at once, it all made sense. I was expecting a resurrection in September 2017, and was crushed that it didn’t come. But after making it to the other side, I finally understand. Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a single seed. The last pieces of my pride had to die. The last drop of my belief in the lie that I was unworthy of love. My paradigm had to crumble in order for me to find wholeness. I didn’t get the story that I wanted, but the story that I ended up with is pretty incredible.

I got to see with my own eyes the white stag of unconditional love. The thing that we all stubbornly want to believe in, but most people don’t get to see. When I had lost everything, when it was impossible to pretend to be anything else, I was met with the most extravagant movement of love that I have ever seen.

Cancer came to steal and to kill, but turns out that it actually has given me an irreplaceable gift: an immovable belief in unconditional love, and an understanding of what an honor it is to be here--alive and a part of the moving, golden world.

Essay By: Jane Marczewski aka Nightbirde