Twenty-Four Hours of Anger

I remember sitting alone and asking God a question I had earned the right to ask.

Why?

I did not fear dying for myself. I feared dying unfinished.

There were four things I thought of during those twenty-four hours:

I wanted to see my daughter graduate.

I wanted to watch my children succeed fully.

I wanted to become a grandparent.

I wanted to meet my father.

Those were my terms.

After that day, something inside me shifted.

Anger is exhausting. Determination is clarifying.

Metastasized melanoma is not gentle. More people die from it than survive it. The statistics are not comforting. The surgeries were invasive. The recovery was painful. The waiting between scans was suffocating. But I have always known how to endure.

Two years of surgeries followed. The body that had carried mystery genes and hidden histories now carried scars that were visible.

I learned something in that season that I had never fully accepted before:

Strength is not independence.

Strength is choosing to stay.

Stay in treatment.

Stay in the fight.

Stay present for your children, even when your body is tired.

Stay married, even when fear tempts withdrawal.

I did not survive because I am special.

I survived because I refused to collapse.

Eighteen years later, I am still surviving.

Fighting metastasized melanoma for so many years feels like winning a lottery no one wants to enter.

It does not make me fearless.

It makes me deliberate.

I do not waste words or time now.

And I do not underestimate myself.

Cancer did not make me formidable.

It revealed that I already was.