Cancer Sucks (but love wins)

A loss of someone we love to cancer is a tragedy that bonds so many of us. Each time I face new losses, it is hard to not thinking about the deepest loss I have suffered, that of my mother. The only comfort that I can offer myself is to remember how that experience helped me to recognize the love of the community that surrounded me and the strength I had within me. The hardest period of my life was the time between when my mother got her prognosis and when she died. I spent that time reflecting around the clock about how I would go on. In that time, I joined the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training program for the Marine Corps Marathon, I started doing yoga, and I started attending Meeting for Worship - so many of the things that are now defining elements of my life. And the friends and colleagues who supported me through that time are inked permanently on my heart. Cancer is like the Westboro Baptist Church of diseases - it brings so many people together to stand for love in the face of ugliness. We embrace the suck.