I saw a screening of a beautiful documentary the other day about a young man who, during a remote hike, came across a bear carcass in a barrel. Curious by nature, he poked the bear with his pocket knife only to find the barrel was sitting on a live wire. The man was electrocuted and ultimately lost a hand, parts of his chest and his skull. During a long and arduous recovery, the doctors found evidence of testicular cancer, so he had to undergo chemo on top of having to learn to navigate his life with a new and very changed body.

After the screening,  I approached the young man because what resonated with me was how much gratitude and how much grief was in his story. He had piles of love and people who stayed by his side nursing him back to physical and emotional health. And obviously he had suffered incredible loss. I asked him about his grief process and how he deals with those types of feelings, if and when they come up.

He started to answer, most of his response focusing on the village of love that has gotten him to where he is now. But then he stopped and looked at me. “The thing is,” he said, “It could be worse. I mean, I don’t have cancer anymore.”

He had no idea that the person standing in front of him does have cancer. Not that it would have altered his response although it might have.

It got me thinking about the traumas of stage iv cancer. They are not single or even double life altering events that you get to heal. Healing is rarely complete, rarely whole. Healing is typically just enough until the next trauma comes along. And by trauma, I mean surgery, new treatment, bad test result. Anything that feels like a chipping away at the you you have come to know.

Of course, the real you, the essence that is uniquely yours, can never get taken away by anyone or anything. Not even cancer. But through the physical and emotional struggles with this thing, I am not always clear enough to express my unique essence. I don’t always feel lucid or well. And most of the time I am fighting to heal just enough so my body can handle the next medical obstacle course coming down the pike.

There are those moments of wholeness though, where, despite the daily pain or discomfort, I feel life force energy guiding me along. I can self express and am energized by self connection and connection to others. I try not to harp on the fact that those moments are so fleeting, because they are. I prefer to take them as tiny blessings I can soak up. Of course, I am not always good at doing that, especially with the knowledge of how this works.

Last week, a pre-operative nurse told me to stay positive when I admitted I was nervous about getting brain surgery. Naturally, I wanted to punch her in the nose. Plus I don’t agree that staying positive is the answer to any of my problems.

Stay here, stay aware in the moment, stay authentic, even if it means being a negative whirlwind. Stay open and listen. Because for me, forcing a version of nervous positivity closes me off to hearing things I might really need to hear. Blanket “I’m fines” don’t allow me to see people reaching out to support me. And without that, I am shutting out an opportunity for gratitude. It is in this space where profound healing and presence is available. Gratitude. Where essences brush up against each other.

I have seen this in my own journey as well as in Charged, the documentary I mentioned in the beginning of this post. Absolutely worth a watch. http://www.chargedfilm.com/story/