PART 8 – The Woman I Had Been Before Cancer
After everything ended, people expected me to become inspirational.
I hated that.
They wanted the story to become:
Cancer survivor defeats abusive husband and starts a beautiful new life.
I did start a new life.
It was not beautiful every day.
Sometimes it was boring.
Sometimes lonely.
Sometimes I cried because a restaurant played the song Daniel and I danced to at our wedding.
Sometimes I missed him.
That confused people.
“How can you miss someone who did that?”
Easy.
I missed the man I married.
I missed the years before fear.
I missed Sunday mornings.
Inside jokes.
Road trips.
The version of myself who did not know what would happen.
Missing a person is not a legal argument for letting them back into your life.
I learned that in therapy.
I also learned that I had spent too much time dividing Daniel into two men.
Good Daniel.
Bad Daniel.
The husband who made soup.
The husband who shoved my head over a trash can.
The man who held me after diagnosis.
The man who forged my signature.
They were the same person.
That was harder.
People can love you and still hurt you.
They can care about you and still feel entitled to control you.
Recognizing one does not cancel the other.
My scans continued.
One year.
Then eighteen months.
No evidence of recurrence.
I never used the phrase “cancer-free” casually because my oncologist was more precise.
But I was well.
Getting stronger.
I went back to work part-time.
I was a public library administrator.
Not glamorous.
I loved it.
The first day back, my coworkers decorated my office.
I told them it looked like a funeral home.
They removed half the flowers.
I laughed until my abdomen hurt.
Normal pain.
Not surgical pain.
Not fear.
Just laughing too hard.
Rachel and I stayed in touch.
She refused every gift more expensive than coffee.
So each year on the anniversary of the forgotten bag, I sent her coffee.
The first card said:
To the woman who came back.
The next year she sent one to me.
To the woman who answered.
I kept it.
Laura and I grew closer too.
Cancer had revealed how ridiculous our old distance was.
We had stopped speaking much after an argument over our mother’s estate.
Not money.
Furniture.
A ridiculous china cabinet neither of us even wanted.
Years wasted.
One afternoon at the lake cabin, she pointed at it.
Yes.
I had moved the china cabinet there.
“You still have that ugly thing?”
“You fought me for it.”
“I was grieving.”
“So was I.”
We stared.
Then laughed.
Later that night, we burned nothing.
Sold nothing.
We just drank wine and admitted we had both been idiots.
Healing is disappointing if you expect fireworks.
Mostly it is people finally having conversations they should have had years earlier.
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