This is what it looks like when your life falls apart in chapters. 

First, your mother hangs herself from the ceiling fan in your apartment. Then your father forgets your name and everything else, one neuron at a time. The spring your father dies, your apartment floods. Your rapacious landlord raised the rent like clockwork but wouldn’t fix the leaky roof. You find out your renters insurance will not cover any of your damages, lost wages, or irreplaceable family heirlooms—some fine print loophole. Mold takes what grief hasn’t already.

Then comes the cancer diagnosis. 

You fall in love. Move states. You believe in something again. But when oncologists tell you your cancer is advanced and that it has progressed, the man you thought would hold you through this, your supposed rock, tells you he doesn’t love you. Just like that. 

You say goodbye to your dog—the closest thing you had to family—and leave him with the man who couldn’t say I love you back. You abandon what little furniture survived the flood in a barn in a dead-end town in southeast Idaho. You carefully tetris what remains—some clothes, your laptop, your parents’ ashes—into the back of a car you can no longer afford and are one, maybe two months behind on. And then you leave Idaho. No plan. No net. All this—and treatment has just begun. 

You watch your business fold. The connections you spent seven years building begin to ghost you—leaving the call with "Let me know." You eat when friends Venmo you. You sleep in borrowed beds. You pray your hair doesn’t fall out. 

You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. A spirit of restlessness washes over you. And on the nights when you lie awake thinking about what will happen to you, you think about your younger brother fourteen hundred miles away and wonder what will become of him if you die? You let the tears come. Because you can’t imagine being the last one left, the only survivor of your immediate family, after they’ve been erased in a matter of years.

​​You fast for forty days on pure water alone—in the desert, like Jesus—believing God is angry with you, hoping for redemption. But instead of salvation, you find cancer. The same one doctors ignored and misdiagnosed for four years. 

You lament the fact that you might die without ever having a man who is not your father tell you he loves you. You mourn children you will never bear, never name, never rock to sleep. You picture thirty-nine: no hair, no parents, no partner, no children and a colostomy bag clinging to your hip where life should have been growing. A body riddled by chemo. A mind riddled by grief. 

You call this a gift. Not because you believe it yet, but because you want to. 

And maybe it is. 

But it’s the kind you open with trembling hands, knowing it might kill you before it saves you. 

There are times when I wonder what I ever did to deserve such a story as this. I search for meaning in the meaningless. I feel like Job. I ask why God has chosen to humble me–no, more like obliterate me–while my friends who believe in divine retribution sit watching like Eliphaz and Bildad. 

I try to look on the brightside–try to hold onto a more nuanced view of suffering: maybe it’s for spiritual growth and not punishment. I question whether it was mercy when God struck me down with cancer, or just boredom. If this is the refiner’s fire, then why am I burning alive? 

Sometimes I fear that when I stand before God, He will name me ungrateful. That I bruised His heart. That I squandered the lessons. That I stayed stubborn when I should have bent. That I asked for too much and gave too little. Maybe He’ll be disappointed in me. 

There’s one thing I’ll never question—God knew me. Whether He answered or not, whether He stayed silent or stormed in, He knew the sound of me.

I have cried out for Him on borrowed beds and stranger’s couches. I have cursed him from the toilet bowl. I have whispered His name on yoga mats and sitting in church pews. I have prayed beneath streetlamps when I had nowhere else to kneel and shouted at Him from truck stops outside Amarillo.

I have spit accusations into the dark—called Him cruel, heartless, absent. I have called Him a liar and I meant it. I have prayed for release and I have begged for death. 

You will find me on a Monday, questioning whether cancer is in fact a gift or a slow undoing. Wondering if a person can die from a heart broken by grief. I remind myself that I am praying to the same God who answered Job in the Bible with a whirlwind. The God who let him lose everything—seven sons, three daughters, his sheep, camels, donkeys and oxen. 

The same God who left Job scraping boils from his skin with shards of pottery, sitting in the ash heap of his own life while friends called him cursed. This is the same God I cry out to now, wondering if He has forgotten my name, or worse—forgotten I was ever His.

Some nights the only prayers I know are tears. Some nights not even that. Maybe I will never understand why this was written as my story. Maybe He does not owe me an answer.

The questions wore me down. The prayers emptied out. For eight months I let the mountains hold me while I searched the edges of this grief, asking cancer: What is your lesson? What do you want from me? 

They’ll say I must be cursed—what else explains a life that falls apart in chapters? Let them say it. Let them think it. I’m the one sitting in the ruins, arguing with God. Bitter? Fine. Angry? Of course. Cynical? Hardened? I’ve earned it. But don’t mistake me for faithless.

I am Hagar arguing with God in the ruins. I come from a long lineage of wrestling with suffering. I am the Israelites—lost, broken, and begging for deliverance, only to wander forty years in the desert and be given manna. And manna means: What is it?

Cancer is my What is it?

A gift I didn’t ask for.  An unanswered prayer that’s shaped my soul. A teacher I never wanted. A path I would never choose. But it is what I’ve been given. And even in its cruelty I have seen God in it. I’ve seen God in an LDS bishop who paid to fix my car and filled it with gas so I could chase a treatment in another state. I have seen God in the face of my best friend who offered up her couch to me. You meet grace in places you never looked for it.

The gifts I receive from cancer come in the ordinary dressed up as radiant—showers that become baptisms, food that becomes feast, a kind word that becomes a lifeline. 

You dismantle hope, piece by piece—and then cancer teaches you to build it back again. You learn that the body keeps its own secrets from your mother’s suicide, and sometimes tells them too late. You begin to go a little easier on yourself. Permission arrives quietly, in the space where shame used to live. You begin to move through the world without apology. It strips away the fear of disappointing anyone, because once you’ve stared down your own mortality, what is left to fear in the judgments of others?

And still, this brutal chapter gives something back: a stripped-down knowing, a fierce clarity, the chance to touch each moment as if it could dissolve in your hands. It asks: What would you do if this was your last good hour? And then it asks again. It teaches you the difference between being alive and truly living.

Cancer shows you how shallow most conversations are—and how few people can bear your truth. Cancer shows you that love is not always enough—and that some people will run. But the ones who stay, those are your people. It's a gift that softens the heart—yours toward others, and theirs toward you. Love becomes unconditional. Forgiveness becomes reflex. You speak your truth, because there may be no other chance. And you finally understand that love is the only thing you can carry with you.

It reveals how little you truly need. In losing so much, you learn what can never be taken. The exquisite economy of time becomes clear. Ego dissolves. No one is immune. No one is above this. You are brought to the human core. It teaches you how to receive, because survival depends on surrendering to what is offered—grace, kindness, money, food. And it clears the clutter of life, making space for purpose. The noise falls away. What’s left is what matters. 

Grief is infinite. So is love. Both stretch wider than the body can hold. The gift is not the suffering but what suffering makes possible. It brings you face to face with your mortality—and your life begins there.

And what comes back is yourself—not the performative one. Not the curated one. The self beneath the debris. The one you were meant to be all along. The one beneath the layers of expectation and striving and survival. The one who knows how to sit with grief and still recognize beauty when it flickers by. The one who can lose everything and still be—still belong. 

And when there is nothing left—no hair, no plans, no certainty—cancer leaves you with this: the terrible, brutal freedom of nothing left to lose, and the beautiful clarity of what matters most. 

In the end, cancer strips you raw, but it does not leave you empty. It leaves you truer. And maybe that is the gift: not the cure, not the miracle, not the rescue, but the return—to the unvarnished self who can stand, trembling, in the wreckage, and still whisper: “I am grateful for this chapter.”

If you’ve made it this far—thank you. The next chapter is unwritten.