There was a time when death itself terrified me.
Not in the casual way people talk about being afraid to die, but in a way that consumed me physically. Even as a little girl, I remember moments where the thought would hit me out of nowhere. I would be sitting in a classroom, lying in bed, riding in the backseat of a car, and suddenly I would become overwhelmingly aware that I was alive. That my heart was beating. That I was breathing. That one day, all of it would stop.
And when that realization came, it felt like falling through ice.
I would panic so intensely that I could barely see straight. My body would go numb. My thoughts would spiral so fast they became incoherent. How could I exist one second and then simply… not? How could the world continue spinning without me in it? How could everyone else move around so casually while carrying the knowledge that life could disappear in an instant?
I could never fully grasp it.
Back then, there was no cancer diagnosis hanging over me. No scans. No bloodwork. No statistics. No conversations about recurrence or timelines or treatment plans. Death was simply an idea that haunted me long before I ever had a reason to fear it.
But cancer changed the shape of that fear.
Oddly enough, I do not spend most of my days afraid of dying anymore.
That realization surprises even me.
You would think having your mortality shoved directly in front of your face would make the fear louder. You would think I would obsess over my own ending, over whether I have enough time left, over the possibility that my body could betray me again.
Instead, the thing that devastates me most is what happens after me.
Now, when fear arrives, it comes wearing my husband’s face.
I think about the years he may have to walk this earth without me beside him. I think about the milestones I might miss. The birthdays. The gray hair. The version of him at 50, at 60, at 80. I think about holidays where my name becomes something spoken in past tense.
I wonder if he will eventually fall in love again, and if he does, I hope someone holds his heart gently because I know how deeply he loves. I wonder if that thought is supposed to make me jealous, but mostly it just makes me unbearably sad that one day he may need comfort in a world where I no longer exist to give it to him.
Sometimes I look at him and try to memorize everything at once because I am terrified one day he will be the one doing that with me.
I think about him reaching across an empty bed.
I think about him hearing a song that reminds him of me when he least expects it.
I think about whether, years from now, he will still remember the sound of my laugh or the exact way my voice softened when I was tired. I wonder if memories fade slowly or all at once. I wonder if there will come a day where he struggles to remember my face clearly, and the thought of that knocks the wind out of me more than death itself ever could.
The cruelest part of loving someone deeply is realizing your greatest fear is no longer losing your own life.
It is becoming someone they have to survive.
Cancer introduced me to a kind of grief that exists before anything has even happened. A grief that lives in the future. A grief that sneaks into ordinary moments and whispers, What if this does not last as long as you hoped?
And maybe that is why the fear feels so much heavier now. Because before cancer, death was about me disappearing.
Now it is about the people I love having to stay.
There is no clean ending to thoughts like these. No inspirational quote that suddenly makes mortality feel smaller. Some nights, these fears still shake me to my core. Some nights they sit so heavily on my chest I can barely breathe around them.
But if cancer has taught me anything, it is this:
Love makes people brave enough to imagine unbearable things.
The depth of my fear is directly tied to the depth of my love.
And maybe that is the unbearable, beautiful tradeoff of loving someone with your whole heart. One day, one of you will have to learn how to live without the other.
Until then, we love anyway.
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