The Thing About Cancer…

The thing about cancer is that everyone believes they understand it until it finds someone they love. Before my mother became ill, cancer was something I had only heard about through fundraisers, awareness campaigns, and stories on the evening news. I knew it was devastating. I knew people died from it every day. I knew families gathered around hospital beds and prayed for miracles. Like most people, I believed I understood the weight of the word.

I didn’t.

There is a difference between knowing that cancer exists and watching it quietly dismantle someone’s life. There is a difference between attending someone else’s funeral and sitting across from a surgeon as he explains that your own mother is unlikely to survive.

My mother was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in the fall of 2019 after an emergency room visit changed everything. What we believed might be a migraine or exhaustion became a diagnosis that no family is ever prepared to hear. The cancer had already spread to her brain, and within moments, our lives stopped moving in years and began moving in appointments, scans, treatment plans, and conversations no daughter should ever have to hear.

I still remember that first appointment after the diagnosis. The surgeon wasn’t dramatic or overly optimistic. He simply looked at us with the kind of expression that tells you the news before he ever opens his mouth. He explained what they had found, spoke honestly about the severity of her condition, and gently told us that we needed to prepare for the worst.

There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after.

That was mine.

People often imagine death as a single day. They picture the funeral, the obituary, or the final breath. They rarely think about the months leading up to it. They don’t see how cancer slowly steals pieces of the person you love long before it ever takes their life. It steals strength, independence, appetite, energy, conversation, and hope. It transforms ordinary afternoons into doctor appointments and ordinary conversations into discussions about hospice, medication, and whether someone is comfortable enough to sleep through the night.

By the time my mother died in January 2020, just a few short months after her diagnosis, we had already begun grieving her long before we ever buried her. Looking back now, I don’t think cancer was the only thing that changed our family. Cancer accelerated everything that had already been quietly waiting beneath the surface.

Families are complicated long before hospitals become involved. Every family carries old wounds, misunderstandings, childhood hurts, and different memories of the same events. Most of the time, there is enough life ahead of us to slowly work through those things. We mature. We apologize. We gain perspective. We learn that our parents were simply people doing the best they could with what they had.

Aggressive cancer doesn’t give you that luxury. It doesn’t wait for siblings to grow into adulthood together. It doesn’t allow families time to revisit old conversations or heal old resentments. It interrupts everything, demanding impossible decisions from ordinary people who are trying to make sense of something that cannot be fixed.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized something that would have been impossible for my younger self to understand. My mother was not a perfect woman.

She made mistakes. She struggled with things that affected all of us. She carried burdens from her own life that sometimes spilled into ours. There were seasons when she took wonderful care of us, and there were seasons when she struggled to take care of herself. She was stubborn, resilient, funny, loving, frustrating, and deeply human all at once.

For a long time, I believed that loving my mother meant defending every decision she ever made. But now I know better.

Loving someone doesn’t require pretending they were flawless. In fact, I think the deepest kind of love is the kind that sees the whole person, the good, the difficult, the admirable, and the broken, and somehow chooses to love them anyway.

Age has a way of teaching us that our parents were never superheroes. They were simply people trying to survive lives that were often harder than we realized as children.

Cancer taught me another lesson I wasn’t expecting. It taught me that grief rarely divides itself equally among the people left behind.

No two people lose the same mother. We each carry different memories, different regrets, different questions, and different versions of the same story. The hardest part is learning that two people can sincerely believe they are remembering the same events while carrying entirely different emotional truths. Sometimes those differences bring families closer together. Sometimes they drive them further apart.

For years, I believed it was my responsibility to make everyone understand my heart. I thought that if I explained myself one more time, defended one more decision, or corrected one more rumor, people would finally see what I had been trying to say all along.

Eventually, I realized something much quieter. Not everyone wants understanding. Some people remain committed to conflict because conflict has become familiar. Some people find purpose in keeping old wounds open instead of allowing them to heal. I cannot change that, nor is it my responsibility to.

What is my responsibility is the life I have built. I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a granddaughter. I am someone who has spent her life trying to protect the people she loves, even when those decisions were imperfect. Looking back, there are moments I wish I could relive and conversations I wish had gone differently. That is simply part of being human. There is no handbook for navigating the death of a parent, especially when every decision feels as though it carries the weight of someone else’s future memories.

Cancer showed me that life is far too fragile to spend years reliving battles that no one can truly win. The thing about cancer isn’t that it changes the person who dies. It’s that it forever changes the people who survive.

Grief has a funny way of revealing who we are. Some people become quieter. Some throw themselves into work. Some lean on faith. Others need to talk about the person they lost every chance they get because they’re afraid the memories will disappear if they stop saying their name. There isn’t a right or wrong way to grieve, and I don’t believe any two people ever carry the same loss the same way.

Looking back now, I don’t think grief changes everyone in the same way. If anything, I think it magnifies the parts of us that were already there. Some people become quieter. Some grow closer to the people they have left. Others spend years searching for answers that may never come. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to grieve, but I do think grief has the power to reshape our memories if we’re not careful.

In the years following my mother’s death, I found myself defending accusations I never imagined I’d have to answer. I was accused of kidnapping my own mother, holding her hostage during the final months of her life, and countless other things that still hurt to repeat. For a long time, I believed that if I simply explained myself one more time, people would understand my heart. I thought the truth would eventually speak for itself and things would somehow return to the way they had been before.

They never did.

Years later, I picked up a copy of Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. I had heard people recommend it for years, but I wasn’t prepared for how much of myself I would find in its pages. I found myself underlining passage after passage, especially the parts where Morrie talked about death and the people left behind. It wasn’t that the book gave me answers. It didn’t. What it gave me was perspective. It reminded me that grief doesn’t ask permission before it changes people, and no two people will ever carry the same loss in exactly the same way.

That realization didn’t erase my own hurt, but it did help me understand something I had been struggling to accept. The same loss can leave one family carrying completely different versions of the same story. That doesn’t make one person’s grief more important than another’s, and it doesn’t mean my experience is the only one that matters. It simply means grief can take people to very different places. Some eventually find healing. Others spend years searching for someone or something to blame because it feels easier than accepting that some losses simply don’t have satisfying answers.

Somewhere between grief, forgiveness, impossible decisions, and the passage of time, I finally learned two words that brought me more peace than years of defending myself ever could:

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself coming back to that phrase, “Let them.” For a long time, I thought it meant giving up or allowing people to believe whatever they wanted about me. I thought it meant staying silent when I wanted to defend myself. Looking back now, I don’t think that’s what it means at all. To me, “let them” means recognizing that not every person is looking for understanding. Some people have already decided what they believe, and no amount of explaining, defending, or pleading is going to change that. At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to rewrite someone else’s version of your story or whether you’re going to start living your own.

Cancer has a way of teaching you that time is far too precious to spend fighting battles you can never win. It forces you to look at life differently, not just while someone is dying but long after they’re gone. One of the things I think about most now has very little to do with hospitals or chemotherapy. I think about the conversations we never had. I think about the things we assumed there would always be time to talk about.

My mother was fifty-four years old when she died, the same age as her father and grandfather. Whether that’s simply coincidence or something more, I don’t know. I only know that fifty-four has never been just a number to me. It’s a reminder of how quickly life can change and how easily we convince ourselves that tomorrow is guaranteed.

Like so many families, ours wasn’t prepared. My mother had talked about certain things over the years, but she had never sat down and put her wishes on paper. There was no will explaining every detail, no written instructions telling us exactly what she wanted, only conversations we had to remember while trying to process the fact that she was dying. Looking back now, I wish we had talked more openly about those things. Not because I enjoy talking about death, but because I know how much uncertainty it leaves behind when those conversations never happen.

One of my clearest memories from those four months happened shortly after her diagnosis. We had left the hospital in Colorado and were making the drive back to Kansas in her car. It was just the two of us. I drove while she drifted in and out of sleep from the pain medication. Every so often she’d wake up and we’d talk about life. I wish I could remember every word of that conversation, but grief doesn’t always preserve details the way you hope it will. What I remember most is the quiet. I remember looking over every few minutes to make sure she was comfortable. I remember realizing that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t riding with my mom. I was taking her home.

It wasn’t a dramatic moment, and at the time it didn’t feel like one. It was simply a daughter driving her mother across the prairie. Looking back now, it became one of the memories I treasure most because it was one of the last times life felt almost normal. For a few hours, cancer wasn’t the center of every conversation. We weren’t talking about treatments or test results. We were just talking, and I’m grateful for that.

My mother was a woman of inconsistencies, complexities, and contradictions. She had always been. She could make me laugh until I cried, and she could frustrate me beyond belief. She loved deeply but didn’t always know how to show it. She made choices I admired and others I struggled to understand. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that loving someone doesn’t require pretending they were perfect. In many ways, I think it’s just the opposite. Real love allows room for honesty. It allows us to remember someone as they truly were instead of turning them into either a saint or a villain after they’re gone.

There was only one Lisa Ann Jamison, and there will never be another.

Cancer didn’t change that. It simply brought every part of who she was into sharper focus. It also taught me something I wish every family understood before they needed to. We spend so much of our lives planning for birthdays, weddings, vacations, and retirement, but very few of us plan for the one thing every single one of us will eventually face. Having your affairs in order isn’t about expecting the worst. It’s about loving the people you’ll leave behind enough to spare them from making impossible decisions while they’re trying to grieve. Whether someone wants a large funeral, a small gathering, or no service at all, those wishes deserve to be known. They’re deeply personal, and no one else should be left guessing.

I’ve also come to understand that funerals aren’t what define a person’s life. They are one way families choose to say goodbye, but they are not the only way. Some people find healing in gathering together. Others find peace in something quieter. After watching someone battle cancer, I can understand both. By the end, many people have already said goodbye a hundred different ways. They’ve endured enough hospitals, enough visitors, enough conversations about dying. Sometimes what they want most is simply to rest.

I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to leave this world. I only think there is value in letting the people you love know how you hope to be remembered. It is one final act of kindness in a season that asks so much of the people left behind.

Growing up on the eastern plains of Colorado and reaching adulthood in western Kansas taught me something long before I realized I would ever need the lesson. Out here, trees don’t grow in sheltered forests. They stand alone against the wind with nothing around them to break the storms. They endure blizzards in the winter, hail in the spring, scorching summers, and winds that never seem to stop blowing. Over time, they become twisted and scarred. They lose branches. Lightning may split them, and drought may leave them weathered, but somehow they keep growing.

I’ve always thought people were a lot like those prairie trees.

Life has a way of leaving scars on all of us. Some are easy to see. Others stay hidden beneath the surface where only we know they’re there. We don’t get to choose every storm that comes our way, but we do get to decide whether we’re going to let it uproot us or whether we’ll continue to grow around the damage.

Cancer was one of those storms.

It changed my family forever. It took my mother far sooner than any of us were ready for, and it left behind wounds that each of us have carried differently. Some of those wounds may never fully heal, and maybe they aren’t meant to. The rings inside a tree don’t disappear after a hard year. They simply become part of its story.

I think people are the same way.

I will always carry those four months with me. I’ll always remember the drive back to Kansas, the conversations that are now little more than fragments, and the impossible decisions that no twenty-four-year-old ever imagines she’ll have to make. Those memories have become part of who I am, but they no longer define me.

The prairie has taught me that surviving isn’t the same as standing still. Every season brings new growth, even after the harshest winters. Branches stretch toward the sun again. Grass grows back after fire. Life quietly begins again.

I think that’s what healing really is. It’s not forgetting. It’s not pretending the storm never happened. It’s simply choosing to keep growing anyway.

When I think of my mother now, I don’t think about cancer first. I think about the woman who came before it.

Originally published at https://vocal.media.