Gratitude as a Cancer Survivor
It is November. Thanksgiving and the beginning of the holiday season. It’s a cozy comfy month, signifying lower temperatures and warm fires, hot chocolate or mulled wines, wrapping up projects, harvesting the fruit of our crops, and coming together with family and friends. It is associated with feelings of thanks and gratitude: for others, for our bounty, and for our community. In all these expressions of thanks, however, we often forget to give thanks for the biggest part of our life, ourselves.
As a cancer survivor, we are sometimes stuck in the cycle of anticipation and anxiety, frustration and sadness, or even anger. Anticipation and anxiety over what the future holds for us. Frustration and sadness that our body is not doing what it is supposed to do or what we want it to do. Sometimes our anger is directed outward and sometimes it is directed right back at us, at our bodies that we feel betrayed us with this evil thing known as cancer. And while all feelings are valid, I would challenge you to look at your body and yourself with gratitude.
Give thanks that your body is trying. It is trying to fight this beast called cancer. How do we know, because the body is set up biologically to heal and protect itself. It may not have been strong enough at the time to stave off cancer, but it is trying. Sometimes it needs a little help – medication, nutrition, rest. Give thanks to your body for all it is doing to try and keep you healthy and strong. Even when it fails at times, like we all do, it is trying.
Give thanks for those scars: from surgery, from radiation, from your port. They are reminders of your fight, of your strength, of your fortitude. Beautiful scars that remind us despite this cancer that was inside of us and that may still be inside of us, we fought and are not accepting any fate other than life.
Give thanks for your diagnosis, for without it the cancer would have been left unchecked, continuing to grow and ravage your body. Your diagnosis is nothing short of a blessing and something to be so thankful for. Now you can do something about cancer, where before your diagnosis, when you didn’t know you had cancer, you could not.
Give thanks for yourself and for your life. Thanks that you get to spend one more holiday with your loved ones. Thanks that you get to eat turkey, whether you love it or hate it, one more Thursday in November. Give thanks that you are still here. We all know that there are so many others who are not. So many families grieving their loved ones, the first or the twentieth Thanksgiving without them. Give thanks that despite what you may no longer be able to do, you can spread your love and your kindness out to your family, friends and the world. In the end, that may be enough. As Meister Eckhart so eloquently put it, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Give thanks.