Have you ever had your heart so thoroughly pulverized that you didn’t know if you could stitch the pieces back together? Has the loss of a baby, a job, or a parent ever left you desolate and adrift? Perhaps your friends and family came together through the initial dark period and showered you with love and support.

What happened after the initial support faded and they got back to their lives? Did they assume that you had moved on too? Were you afraid to admit that your loss still crushed you?

Maybe you felt like you had used up all of their love and support and you couldn’t possibly ask for more. Maybe you beat yourself up for your emotions and acted fine so that everyone would see you as strong and capable? But did you ever wish that someone could answer the questions that coursed through your mind? Questions like: Why me? What did this mean? Who am I now?

For me, the transition from healthy person to cancer patient in October of 2009 grabbed me by the neck and throttled me. I reeled from my emotions, but the shock and fear made sense to me (even seemed like the appropriate, socially acceptable response). What I did not see coming was the overwhelming transition that I am now faced with. The transition from patient back to healthy person.

In Picking Up the Pieces, Dr Sherri Magee and Kathy Scalzo talk about Cancer’s Doubly Whammy. “While change triggers transition in everyone’s life, cancer survivors experience two world-shaking, back-to-back transitions…The first major cancer-related transition occurs when you are diagnosed with cancer…you enter a structured medical environment, are labeled a patient, given a file number, and taken through treatment. It is during treatment that you lose your sense of identity, of control, and of meaning.  The immediacy of the present precludes any thoughts of the future. No words can capture the depth of angst, fear, and worry that are characteristic of the time spent in treatment…A second transition begins on the last day of treatment when you receive the new label of survivor. The completion of treatment triggers entrance into a post-treatment Void, which is the beginning of the transition from survivor into healthy individual. This second transition is all the more cruel for often being so unexpected. It is during this time that you address the side effects of treatment and try to find a new normal….The responses of well meaning friends and family may encourage you to stifle negative emotions. People say, ‘You must be so relieved that cancer is behind you.’ Or ‘You’ve been so brave’ and you think, I’d better keep up a good front; I’d better not let them down. You begin to suppress your fears, trying to forget about the experience in an effort to move on.”

Next Monday afternoon, I will wake up from my final surgery in a morphine induced haze, eat some ice chips and begin to close the cancer chapter of my life (hopefully for good).  I am sure that some of you can’t wait for the fun, upbeat, overcommitted friend, recruiter, and sister to return. Hell, I miss her too. The only hiccup is that she no longer exists.

So, although my cancer journey will finish, the real work  of picking up the pieces of my life has just begun. The thought of shaping those pieces into a brand new identity scares the crap out of me.

I am not a big fan of feeling fear or sadness. I prefer to dull it with a big glass of Shiraz. But, I am learning that the only way to move past these emotions is to dive in and do the front crawl right through them (I’m a terrible swimmer, but you get the analogy). I have learned that I won’t get a prize for how quickly I make it to the other side and that there is no ‘perfect’ way to get there.  I have also learned that the journey through loss of any kind is complicated and unique for each of us.

So here’s to all of you out-of-breath swimmers who have the courage to join me as we dive into fear and sadness. You brave dog paddlers who teach me to make no guarantees about how or when we’ll make it to the other side. And, here’s to the friends and family who tirelessly cheer us on from the bleachers. Even if they don’t recognize us in our wet, bedraggled, chest heaving state as we climb out of the pool, we appreciate that they will do their best to love us anyways.

Here’s a quote from Pema Chodron that I am loving today. She uses a more direct approach, but as a buddhist monk, she can get away with it.

“Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.”