The Language of Survival:

Before you begin: This essay centers on the heartbreaking loss our community experienced this summer. If you can, please stay with me until the end. 💚

Beau seems to think talking about having had cancer is remarkably casual.

Not the cancer itself. He knows that part was hard. But the talking about it? No.big.deal.

After nearly every speaking event he spends the next thirty minutes being oohed and aahed over by attendees who can't believe he's willing to get on stage and tell his story. Adults approach him with some version of the same question: How are you so brave? He accepts their compliments, shrugs them off, and then wanders off in search of snacks like none of it was particularly remarkable.

Cancer as an Icebreaker

Today Beau had his first day of ninth grade. High school.

At breakfast he planned for the inevitable icebreaker: Two truths and a lie.

"What will you say?"

"Well... I had cancer."

"Oh really, that'll be one?"

"Yeah, but I say that one last, like I just thought of it. That way everyone thinks it's the lie."

I think I keep expecting him to tuck it away. To mention it eventually, once someone knows him. Instead, he leads with it.

There Isn't a Script

As I mentioned in my post about the multiverse and alternate endings, Beau approaches talking about cancer with a level of casualness I still can't quite understand. Since I have to share a stage with him, the least he could do is humor me by pretending to worry about what we're going to say.

Instead, he seems mildly confused that I think there's anything to prepare.

This summer we were invited to speak at a couple of events in Seattle. I was buried with work leading up to the trip. I had put together a PowerPoint but was dragging my feet on writing the script.

On the drive to the airport I confessed to Beau that I was thinking about winging it.

"What if I don't write a script at all?" I broached as if I was sharing a most wild idea.

He barely looked up.

"There isn't a script, Mom. It's our life," he scoffed as teens are known to do.

Summer in Seattle

The night we arrived, we checked into our hotel overlooking Lake Union. Beau stood on the balcony watching paddleboarders drift across the water before we walked to dinner.

It was one of those evenings that makes you fill with hot tears just thinking about its perfection. Warm enough to eat outside. World Cup fans spilling through the streets. We played This or That over tacos and walked home wondering if Seattle had just become our favorite city.

· · ·

I woke early and slipped downstairs for breakfast while Beau slept in.

Seattle was buzzing with World Cup fans. The hotel lobby was full of Bosnians dressed in yellow and blue rallying before their match. I enjoyed breakfast, refilled my coffee and headed back toward the room.

While I waited for the elevator, a text from Josh came through:

One of Beau's friends and teammates had died unexpectedly the night before.

My stomach fell straight to the center of the earth. I dropped my full cup of coffee as I gasped and started weeping. I called Josh and sobbed for details, of which he had very few.

I hung up with Josh and my body shook. I had to speak in front of a crowd in ninety minutes. I immediately started running through all the ways to cancel.

Do I tell Beau?

Of course I have to tell Beau.

How do I tell Beau?

Only then did I realize that while I had been crying, a hotel employee and another guest had quietly gathered around me. The staff was cleaning up the coffee. The woman beside me held me gently by the elbow.

"I'm so sorry," I kept saying. "My son... we're here to speak and... his friend died... oh God... he died."

Nothing I said came out in complete sentences.

Nearby, an empty bell cart sat discarded. I pushed away from her, sat down on it, and sobbed.

She came and sat beside me.

"My son died seven years ago this week," she said quietly, rubbing my back. "It won't get easier. But it will become possible."

She paused.

"You're going to cry as hard as you can, like you're wringing out a soaked sponge. Then you're going to get on that elevator, tell your son what happened, and get on the stage and do your speaking thing. When you're done, you can come back and wring out the sponge again."

...

Ninety minutes later Beau and I were on stage sharing what it means for a child to survive cancer.

I hadn't scripted a single word. Yet for thirty-five minutes I spoke with the ease of someone fluent in the only story I've ever had to tell.

The final slide was one I had chosen weeks earlier to show how wonderfully ordinary Beau's life had become. It was a photograph from flag football the previous fall.

Standing beside him was the teammate who had died.

I didn't notice the picture until I turned around after I concluded and the audience began to applaud.

"The gift of survival is to be so fully alive in body and in spirit that every single day is received as the fragile gift that it is. There is no script for how to detail survival, there is only showing up and telling the truth."

The Language of Survival

I've thought about the impossible timing of that woman appearing in the lobby, and about the fact that she knew exactly what to say because grief had made her fluent in a language she never wanted to learn.

For a long time I thought survival meant putting distance between ourselves and death. That somehow, if we could just get through treatment, enough ordinary days would string together that cancer would become something we used to talk about.

Quite the opposite.

Survival has only sharpened my awareness of just how astonishingly precious life really is. Every ordinary day whispers that it was never guaranteed in the first place.

A warm walk to dinner. A fourteen-year-old wondering if Seattle had become our favorite city. Ninety minutes between unbearable grief and telling our story. The intersection of gratitude and lament.

This is the only story I have to tell.

...

Beau is remarkably casual about cancer. He isn't trying to inspire anyone. He isn't trying to be brave. He's simply telling the truth about his life.

The woman in the hotel lobby did the same thing.

One person telling the truth about their life until someone else recognizes their own.

Beau was right.

There isn't a script.