Trending
My mom’s cancer is back.
To be fair, it never really went away. It shrank with the help of chemotherapy for a while, and now, a few months after that treatment ended, she has a serious number of lesions on her liver. We’re lucky it’s contained to just the liver at this point. But still. It’s a heavy load for one organ to carry.
It’s hard to want to write when you’re deep in your feelings and staring down actual life and death issues. I shouldn’t say it’s hard, exactly. It’s hard to confine my writing to the predetermined “finance” box that my career — okay, I — have put myself in. Writing is my release. My therapy. My flood of emotions. I have zero musical talent and maybe a smidge more in the art department, but I liken it to the feeling my friend gets when she belts out the high, angsty note in one of her songs. Or when my best friend turns a photograph into a colorful painting. It’s a release. An exhale.
I prefer to leave it all on paper…or the internet. For everyone to see.
Opening the Trunk
I wrote about the sandwich generation recently. About how some of us get eased into it slowly, while others get shoved straight into the deep end.
No matter which exit ramp you’ve taken into Sandwich Generation Town, the emotions that come with it somehow manage to remain locked in a trunk with the key lost for months on end. It’s only when you’re deep in it that you stumble upon the key in an old coat pocket while thinking about your future and their future (the “their” being both children and parents). It’s then that the trunk opens and things start flooding out. Raising kids while actively losing a parent feels like running a marathon, but you keep making wrong turns and hitting dead ends. Tears welling up and then “Mommm… can I have cheez-its?” Taking a few minutes to journal and “GET. OUT. OF. MY. ROOM!!” from down the hall. Inching towards something cathartic and bam - window closed. It’s funny. And sad.
To be clear: Losing a parent in general is brutal. Cancer is brutal. It’s stupid.
I can say a lot about how much cancer sucks, but for now, what I continue to be confronted with is: how do you process your feelings under the watchful eye of your children?
Kids rightfully want to make your pain go away and see you smile. But they also need to see that it’s okay for parents to cry, to move through a full cycle of emotion, and to still be able show up for them at the end of the day. A lot of us grew up in households where tears made people uncomfortable, where the person crying–the person who needed the release–was taught to shove it back down because their grief was inconveniencing the room. I’ve been actively working against passing that down to my own kids.
And yet here I am. The child watching her own parent cycle through fear and grief and everything else. My instinct, too, is to make the pain go away. To make her smile. I can’t do that. I can only hold space, and be there if and when she needs me to be.
Nobody Is Giving You a Gold Star for This
As a type-A woman and an over-achiever to boot, I’ve spent a lifetime showing up and showing out for other people. Some of that I need to recover from. It’s led straight to burnout more than once. Some of it has brought me real joy, and I’ll admit a healthy dose of distraction too: doting on others, throwing the party, buying the gift, taking the trip, doing the thing.
Here’s what I’ve had to actively unlearn, though: none of that showing up earns you a pass on the sad. In moments of sadness, after years of work on myself, I know it’s okay to be sad. I know it’s okay to feel the feelings all the way through instead of managing them into something more presentable for the people watching. And I also know, because life keeps reminding me, that the world keeps turning. We only get one shot at being here. The best any of us can do is make it count.
So I live. I do the things through the sadness, and I let myself forget, sometimes, that I’m losing my mom. I let myself forget the pain of what’s coming, and instead I laugh. I have long chats with my best friend. I force myself to get lost in a book. I watch my kids’ faces light up. This past week we watched fireworks with good friends, five kids running around in the dark with light sabers, having the time of their lives, and I felt the privilege of it fully. Watching my kids make memories. Being present with my own people, my chosen family.
In sadness and overwhelm, it’s easy to turn inward. To go quiet and strong and stop asking for help. It’s in exactly those moments that I try to pause and ask myself something bigger.
Three Questions I Come Back to
I wrote a few months ago about what not listening to my own intuition cost me, and about the role George Kinder’s Life Planning work played in helping me hear it again. I’ve thought about his three questions often over the past year, with clients and inside my own life. I’m thinking about them constantly now, as my mom moves through this.
They’re a lens, nothing more. We only have so much time. How do I want to spend it? How do you want to spend yours? Where do we want to actually show up?
Question 1: Imagine you are financially secure. You have enough to take care of your needs, now and in the future. How would you live your life? What would you do with the money? Would you change anything? Don’t hold back your dreams. Describe a life that is complete, that is richly yours.
Question 2: Now your doctor tells you that you have five to ten years left to live. The good news is you’ll never feel sick. The bad news is you’ll have no notice of the moment of your death. What will you do with the time you have? Will you change your life, and how?
Question 3: Now your doctor tells you that you have one day left to live. Notice what comes up as you sit with your very real mortality. What dreams would go unfulfilled? What do you wish you’d finished, or had been? What do you wish you had done?
Who Gives You Permission to Answer Them Honestly?
What’s unexpected about these questions (and similar ones) is that you can read them, nod along, even journal about them at your kitchen table with your coffee going cold, and still not actually let yourself answer them.
Because answering them honestly means admitting the life you’re building might not match the life you’d choose. And once you admit that, you’re on the hook for doing something about it. (Which, dear reader, is where I found myself a little over a year ago.)
So the question underneath the question is: who gives you permission to want what you want? Your spouse? Your kids? Your calendar? The version of you that’s been the responsible one for so long she’s forgotten there’s another option? The mother you’re watching move through the hardest chapter of her life, who never got to ask herself Question 1 out loud, either?
Nobody hands you that permission. I wish I could tell you it arrives in the mail once you hit some number in your savings account, or once the kids are a certain age, or once whatever crisis you’re white-knuckling through resolves itself. It doesn’t.
The permission has to come from you. That’s the whole, unglamorous truth of it.
What I’m Actually Doing With the Answers
I won’t pretend I have this fully sorted. I don’t. But sitting with these questions while my mom is actively living her way through this chapter has clarified a few things for me.
It’s clarified that presence is the thing I actually want more of, not the thing I’ll get to eventually. Not after the launch, the deadline, the next milestone. Now. In marriage, with my kids, my family, my friends, my client relationships. In the hard conversation instead of the version of it I rehearsed in my head on loop. It’s clarified that holding space for someone else’s grief and tending to my own aren’t in competition. I don’t have to pick one. And it’s given me permission to stop treating my own dreams and desires as the thing that gets scheduled in after everyone else’s needs are met.
If you’re in this season too. Sandwich generation, watching a loved one move through something you can’t fix, trying to figure out how to grieve honestly in front of children who are watching you for the blueprint. I don’t have a five-step framework for you today. I have three questions, borrowed from someone wiser than me, and one piece of permission I’m trying to hand you directly since nobody handed it to me.
How would you live if you knew you had enough? What would you do with five to ten years? What would you regret leaving undone if you had one day?
Whatever answer shows up first, underneath the fear and the caretaking and the to-do list, is the one worth listening to.
You don’t need anyone’s permission to take it seriously. You just decide to give yourself permission. Start there.