Chris Chow was already bracing himself for bad news when he learned that he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2010. He’d been experiencing a persistent and progressively intense low-back pain, and after seeing his family doctor for x-rays and blood tests early one morning, it was clear there was something wrong.

“I went to work about 9 o’clock, and got a call right away on my cell phone,” Chris said. “My family doctor said, ‘I need you to go right away to the emergency room. I have hematologists standing by to meet you, so get there as soon as you can.’”

Over the next 19 hours, Chris underwent a battery of tests at the hospital. At the end of the grueling day, doctors still had no news, but after a biopsy the next day Chris was diagnosed with stage II-B cancer. He was just 30 years old, but the way he dealt with his treatment was strongly influenced by someone even younger.

At the time of his diagnosis, Chris had been tutoring a 17-year-old student who had cancer himself, nearly a year to the date before Chris learned he was ill.

 “We worked really well together,” Chris said. “When I quit the learning center, he sought me out for private tutoring. I’d been seeing him for about six years, twice a week. He was one of the very first students that I met.”

He was also the first person Chris knew who was going through cancer, and their friendship provided Chris the kind of connection and grounding he needed.

“I never saw another young person at the hospital,” said Chris, of Ottawa. “When I would go to my chemo, I’d be in a bay with 12 other people, but I really didn’t want to talk to the old people. So I would sleep, and my mom would talk to them about knitting and stuff like that.”

Chris knew he could expect an energy loss during chemotherapy because of how treatment had affected his student.

“It was really crazy, because he still wanted to be going to school and getting tutored,” Chris said. “I said, ‘You know, you’re going through cancer, you can stop tutoring, and it’s okay.’ But he was determined – he was like, ‘No, I want to graduate on time with all my friends.’”

So when Chris began treatment, he was heartbroken that his own severe energy loss wouldn’t allow him to continue tutoring. But he and his student kept contact through Facebook, checking in on each other through chemo treatments.

“I gave us a goal, because we were going through it together,” Chris said. “The goal was we’re both going to get through this cancer, and then we’re going to get him graduated out of high school. So we had something to aim for, which was nice … even when I was going through really miserable times, I kept the goal in mind.”

Tragically, Chris’s student passed away – less than a week after Chris learned he was in remission.

“I was absolutely gutted,” Chris said. “It was the worst feeling in the world, and I had so much survivor’s guilt. I think everybody has a bit survivor’s guilt when someone they know has passed – but for me – we never accomplished any of our goals. I’d known him for so long, and we talked about things so long, like what he was going to do in the future.”

Chris stumbled across A Fresh Chapter and saw a potential window of peace in the opportunity. He went with a group of volunteers to New Delhi in February 2013, and he drew on his experiences as a tutor, teaching English at the Vidya Okhla School in Delhi to students ages 6 to 12.

“One of the main things that I wanted to get out of this was letting go of the survivors guilt, because that really was – and still kind of is – a big issue for me,” Chris said. “I wanted to go because India is such a spiritual place, and there’s so many temples, and so many religions, all within in this one country. I knew it was going to be one of those places where I could maybe let go and leave some baggage there.”

The very last day of the trip, Chris was able to leave at least some of the heaviest of it behind.

“We were walking to the restaurant that we were going to have our dinner at and we stopped at this temple,” Chris said. “We had stopped at other temples before, but for some reason, that temple, that was just the moment. When I lit the incense and said the prayer in my head and put the incense into the urn, it was just my release. I was done. Like I knew, at that point, I have to let go of these things. And I just let them go. That was when the floodgates opened.”

Nikki Kallio is a writer and cancer survivor. She has worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Maine and California in a number of roles, including as a health reporter and opinion writer, during which time she traveled to the Mideast and Central Asia as a part of the National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW). She’s a graduate of the Goddard College MFA creative writing program, and her fiction has appeared in several literary publications. She currently writes for a business magazine in Wisconsin, teaches fiction writing classes, and is completing edits on her first novel.