Send the Pain Below
Pain has more than one layer. There’s the physical pain — the headaches, the fatigue, the way my body doesn’t cooperate anymore. But underneath that is the deeper ache: the knowing that I’m leaving people behind. People I love, people who love me, people I won’t be able to protect when I’m gone.
That is the pain I can’t medicate away. That’s the weight I carry into every night and every morning. There are things I will never have the time to fix. Words I’ll never get to say again. Problems I won’t get to solve. Life doesn’t pause and wait for me to tidy it all up. It just keeps moving, and time keeps slipping, faster now than it ever did before.
What breaks my heart most is knowing I will never get to see my grandchildren grow up. I won’t be there for their birthdays, their graduations, their small moments that make a childhood. I won’t be able to watch them become who they’re meant to be. That thought tears at me in ways the tumor never could.
I’ve made peace with my own leaving. I don’t fear it anymore. What I fear — what tears at me — is the heartache it will bring to the ones who still have to live in the aftermath. The people who will wake up and feel my absence like a hole in the air. The ones who will wish I was still here when I can’t be.
Sometimes all I can do is try to send that pain below the surface, to bury it deep enough that it doesn’t paralyze me. I write here instead of carrying it alone. I pour it out in words so that when I’m gone, the people I love will know: I thought of them until the end. They were my reason for every fight, every page, every breath I could still manage.
There is too much to do and not enough time. That’s the truth. But love doesn’t end when I do. It lives on in them, and maybe in these words. If you’re reading this, know that the pain was real, but so was the love. And I’d choose love every single time, even if it hurt.