Nervous energy coursed through my body as I stepped onto the elevator. I was heading to my first radiation treatment.
“Does your shirt say, ‘I Got This’?” a voice from the back corner inquired. She was small and thin, and her steel gray hair was chopped into a no-nonsense bob.
“Yes, it was a gift,” I replied.
“You’ve got this, even if it sucks…right?”
“And boy does it ever,” I chuckled, “But yep. I’ve got it.”
“Haha, me too, honey.”
Hours later, I stepped back onto that same elevator.
“I rode with you this morning. You’ve changed shirts,” the familiar voice said.
“Oh hi there!” I said, turning around to meet her gaze, “Yes, I went for a walk earlier and worked up a sweat. It’s so dang hot here.”
“Yes, it is. Well, this is the last time I’ll have to come here.”
Not picking up on any kind of pensive tone and being unable to fully read her face that was half-hidden by a mask, I replied, “Oh yay! Congratulations! Good for you!”
Silence.
“Well actually…not so good for me.”
It felt as if lava were being siphoned into my throat. The tears welled as I realized my egregious error.
I knew in that single, suffocating moment that I had just congratulated a dying woman.
This person had literally just returned from an appointment where a doctor (I hope) held her hand and apologized profusely because there was nothing else to be done. I rattled off my own apologies in an unending loop until we reached her floor. I asked her name and told her I would pray for her.
That beautiful, courageous woman is Ruth, and her reality is the same nightmare that often keeps me up at night. The monster on my back leans toward my ear and croons, “But what if the cancer wins?”
Yes, I have a monster. He isn’t just the cancer. He’s all of the hard things rolled into one mean son-of-a-gun. He is the fear of the unknown. He is the possibility of my children growing up without me. He is the anxiety of more scans and painful treatment. He is the poisonous, joy-thieving jerk who rides on my back everywhere I go.
Some days, he feels light and manageable, and I can drown out his whispers with worship music and positive thinking. Other days, it’s difficult to pick up my feet and trudge onward because I feel like I will buckle under his incredibly intrusive weight. He’s one rude dude, my monster.
There’s this thing I love about being here at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and it’s not just the peace of mind knowing I am receiving the best possible care. No, it’s something else. What I love is the brutal, unflinching transparency of people’s pain. It’s honest in ways that most places are Earth are not.
Every single person I pass in the hallway, meet in the elevator, and sit with in the waiting room has their monster on full display. It’s a sad kind of comradery that makes me feel seen and understood.
Ruth from the elevator has a monster too, and hers will remind her every few minutes that her story will soon come to an end. She will go home and struggle to find acceptance of this new, cruel truth.
But the thing is, Ruth’s not going to die tomorrow. She will have to resume normalcy in the days before the end arrives. Until she can’t anymore, she will cook dinner, and pay the bills, and clean the house, all the while knowing that Death will be turning the corner to meet her far sooner than she ever imagined.
And after returning home, Ruth may zbe driving to visit her daughter, lost in her thoughts. She’ll be whispering another desperate prayer for a last-ditch miracle. Aggressive honking will bring her back to the traffic light where she’s sitting. As she pulls forward, she will glance in her rear-view mirror to find an angry man throwing his arms around in the car behind her. He’s already fifteen minutes late for work.
Later, Ruth may stand in the checkout line of the grocery store where a man behind her will let out an exaggerated sigh because she’s taking far too long to thumb out the correct change. He will make muffled comments about her being a dinosaur and audibly wonder why she can’t just use a freakin’ credit card. He wants to hurry home as not to miss the football game he’s been anxiously awaiting all week.
Ruth may try to make small talk with the lady at the bank who will incessantly gripe about just how extraordinarily crappy her morning has been. You see, her cleaning woman can NEVER seem to manage to arrive on time, and she’s had just about enough.
And through all this, Ruth will feel with certainty that her luck is so much crappier than the driver who was late for work, the man who nearly missed the football game, and the woman whose cleaning lady had the audacity to get stuck in traffic.
None of these people know about the crushing weight of the monster on Ruth’s back, because if they did, they would probably operate very differently.
You see, Ruth doesn’t look sick yet. Unlike me and many other fellow cancer patients, she has her hair, and therefore, there’s no obvious sign screaming out into the world: BE NICE, Y’ALL… my monster is trying to kill me!
And people ARE kinder when the monster you’re toting is of the obvious sort. I’ve noticed kindness toward me greatly multiply when my outsides started matching what was happening on my insides.
And I’m thankful for it. I’m so very thankful for all the love and kindness shown to me by the world right now. But the truth is, I was hurting a hell of a lot worse after losing my mom than I am right at this very moment. Last October, I was at the store picking up some milk. My mom had just passed away two days before. I remember looking at the man who was next to me in line and thinking, “I am dying. I may in fact die from the way my heart feels in my chest right now. The most beautiful human alive, the one who gave me life, was just robbed from this world, and this man has absolutely no idea he is standing next to the saddest girl alive. ”
He had no way of knowing, of course. Just like Ruth will have no way of knowing that the man honking at her in traffic has a son who is a drug addict. He was up all night trying to locate his whereabouts. He knows deep down that his boy’s addiction is a slow-motion funeral.
Ruth doesn’t know that the man in the grocery store has absolutely no close relationships. His depression spews out as rage, and he’s pushed every single person in his life away. This football game is the only thing he has to look forward to each week. On the other nights, he fantasizes about all the ways he could just end it all.
And Ruth may silently judge the seemingly pretentious woman who is fed up with her maid, but she doesn’t know that this woman believes herself to be worthless and sees a complete fraud in her reflection each day. She is more aware of her inauthenticity than anyone else, and she degrades others in hopes that no one will notice her own shortcomings.
Those people have their own monsters. And it absolutely doesn’t excuse poor behavior, but it does help us view the world through a different lens if we know that EVERYONE is carrying their own invisible hardships around on their backs.
People see my bald head and my lashless face, and they adjust the way they move in the world around me because my pain is so obvious. But physical insecurity, financial worries, depression, anxiety, grief… those aren’t always so clear to outsiders.
I pray for Ruth. I pray that the world feels the weight of her monster and helps her to carry the load. I pray that in her final days, she is showered with love and goodness. But I also pray that if she encounters something other than that, she will be able to recognize those people are just feeling the weight of their own monsters, too.
Cancer has taught me so much, and one of those things is to try to see others the way God sees us. Our Creator sees every invisible monster, and He is happy to help you carry the load. I’ve had to lean into Him more than ever this past year because He WILL give you more than you can handle. That’s the point. He wants you to come to Him and ask him to help you with that monster on your back. If the load didn’t feel so overwhelmingly heavy, we would think we could manage alone. I’ve found that the more I talk to Him about my monster, the quieter and lighter the thing becomes.
I’m learning to tread more lightly as I navigate life. My hope is that we can all be a little more gentle with one another. I pray that the solidarity of the human spirit that exists within the walls of this cancer center can spill out into the real world, too.
But even when it doesn’t, I’m working on kicking my judgment to the curb. Because that ugliness we see, it’s really just the invisible monsters who’ve become far to heavy to bear.
