Fear of Possibilities

Trying to remain calm when facing the unknown.

Humans have a great ability to predict the future. We’re usually wrong. What we fear will happen often does not and it holds us back from living today with gusto. We live as people dead before we actually die. Which is almost the same thing.

A friend was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, but I didn’t know this. No one did. I wanted to say something that would help, but from my time with people dealing with grief, I knew that my friend didn’t need platitudes. Words are no help right after someone receives the news that they have cancer. What she needed was someone to sit beside her for a time as the cold shadows of her fears drew near.

I know how it feels to sit beside the unbreathing body of a spouse, as well as by the bedside of a friend in a coma who is dying of brain cancer. Other friends have had to watch their spouses go through the regimen of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation as hope moved in and out like the ocean tide, and they walked along the shoreline between life and death and began to grieve the possibility of dying.

A cancer diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, and my friend wasn’t on an automatic slide into passing. That’s one of the possibilities. What is different now is the awareness that she is finite. When we’re under the age of 60, we only footnote our eventual mortality. We expect to live decades of years more, and many of us do. A good number of us don’t.

Most of us understand the landscape of cancer in general terms. Doctors locate the problem, standard treatments are administered, and percentages of survival are given. You endure the treatments and go on with your life. If there’s still a problem, doctors try immunotherapy or targeting therapy drugs as you tread water, all the while wondering (continuing the water imagery) if you will ever stand on dry, solid ground again. I’ve had enough friends go both ways to know that this is a big unknown. And this is where my friend lives, enduring the physical trauma, the burning and nausea of chemotherapy, while waiting to find out what will happen to her. It’s a hard place to live in for very long.

When we don’t know which path we are on, we want reassurance. With my cancer, I needed to hike in the woods to see the beauty of the nature and be reminded that I liked being alive. I needed to know that wonders still existed. I wanted to feel the hope that lived beyond my fears, and I didn’t want the possibility of death to put a damper on the sharing of my heart.

I sat with my friend later and we talked about her life, the dreams she didn’t know if she would ever accomplish, her tiredness of living with the stress, and about some of her regrets in life, which she was grateful for because they taught her things she needed to know. When we find out which direction her future is going to head, then we will talk about that.

What we have is today, and today we choose to live.

© 2025 Mark Liebenow