Page 58 of While I’m Still Here

I stare at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence. There isn’t. Marcus takes another drink as though he hasn’t just informed a woman with four-day-old cancer that her terror is an encouraging development. “That’s your comforting advice.”

“I wasn’t trying to comfort you.”

“You’re terrible at this.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been coming here for two years, and that’s the best you’ve got?”

That finally does it. Marcus smiles properly, and the change is startling enough that I forget what I was about to say. It’s not a huge smile, but Marcus doesn’t strike me as a man who does anything unnecessarily, including facial expressions, but it softens the severity of him and puts faint lines at the corners of his eyes that weren’t there a second ago. “No one here is going to tell you not to be scared, Bea.”

My name catches strangely, but of course he knows it. I introduced myself to the entire room twenty minutes ago while contemplating whether throwing myself through the nearest window would constitute an acceptable reason to leave early. Still, hearing it from him feels different. Perhaps because he is the first person I’ve met since Thursday who isn’t standing safely outside this thing, trying to imagine what it might feel like.

Marcus sets his empty mug beside the kettle, then turns toward me properly. “Being frightened doesn’t mean you’re handling it badly. It means something frightening is happening.”

And there it is.

The first thing anyone has said to me since my diagnosis that doesn't feel like an instruction.

Everyone means well. I know they do. Be strong. Stay positive. You've got this. You're a fighter. Every sentence arrives wrapped in love and somehow leaves me feeling as though cancer has come with homework. As though there is a correct way to be ill and, if I panic too much or cry too hard or admit that I don't feel remotely fucking positive about potentially waking up without breasts, I might be failing some test nobody warned me I was taking.

Marcus isn’t asking me to perform cancer correctly. He’s just giving me permission to be fucking terrified of it. I look at him for a long moment, trying to decide whether I can ask the question sitting behind my teeth. “Were you?”

“Fucking terrified.”

“Even after surgery?”

“God, yes.”

“During treatment?”

“Yup.”

He answers without hesitation, and because he isn’t dressing them up, I keep going. “What about after?”

He pauses. It isn’t long, barely more than a second, but I notice it. His eyes drop to the floor before returning to me, and when he answers, his voice is quieter. “Yes.”

For some reason, that’s what frightens me most. “You’re two years out.”

“I am,” he nods.

“And you’re still scared?” I whisper.

Marcus leans one hip against the counter. “Sometimes. Cancer doesn’t leave your head on the same day it leaves your body. The fear that it’ll return and I won’t catch it in time lives with me daily.”

My eyes drift towards the circle of chairs behind us. There are women there who finished treatment months ago, some longer. Women who still come back every week and sit beneath aggressively cheerful posters while drinking terrible tea and talking about scans, anniversaries, medication, side effects and all the ordinary things that apparently exist after the part where everybody expects you to be grateful it’s over.

Until now, I hadn’t really thought about why.

I think I’ve been treating cancer like a horrific administrative problem. There will be appointments, surgery, treatment, and then eventually somebody will stamp a form marked done, and I will be released back into my regularly scheduled life. It hasn’t occurred to me that my body might finish before my brain does. “That sounds shit,” I say, because I’m apparently out of words.

“It can be.”

I look back at him. “You really are terrible at inspirational speeches.”

“I've worked very hard at it.”

A laugh slips out of me again, quieter this time. “So that's it? I get cancer, become terrified, possibly lose both tits, go through whatever treatment they decide I need, and then get to remain scared afterwards? Fantastic. Really selling survivorship here, Bennett.”