What do you do if you just can't make lemonade?

My purpose in writing this blog as a part of my coaching practice, is to share the things I have learned and continue to learn as a cancer survivor, hoping to teach and to inspire others  - to make lemonade out of lemons, so to speak.

Sometimes though, you just can't manage the lemonade.  There are some things you can’t turn around, or shift your perspective on.  Some things you just need to accept and often, that’s not easy. 

This past weekend, a dear friend posted on Facebook that he had lost his good friend to cancer.  He posted a link to her blog, and feeling the cancer connection, I spent some time reading what she had posted over the past few years.  The more I read, the more I realized what a cool woman she was, how her sense of humor about her cancer seemed like mine, how honest she was about the things that pissed her off.  And then I got angry, because cancer had taken away someone so cool, someone that I didn’t even know, but now would never get to meet.  I didn’t know her, but I felt a loss at her passing.

I have lost a lot of things to cancer.  I lost the feeling in my toes, my ability to have children, my metabolism and sense of balance.  I lost the ability to have an ache or a pain without that nagging bit of worry – is it back? And, sadly, I have also lost friends, far too early.  My childhood friend and I will not grow old together as we planned.  My chemo friend’s children will grow up without her.  There is no way to change any of these things.  And so, I try to accept them.

Accepting doesn’t mean you get to a place where you think, ‘oh well, it’s ok’.  It’s not ok that young people die.  It’s not ok that I was denied my dream of carrying and giving birth to my own child.  It’s not ok that I can work out like a fiend, eat next to nothing, and I still can’t get the number on the scale to move.  When the anger wells up in me, I allow myself to feel it.  I give myself space to grieve for the things I have lost, and then I breathe, and allow myself to accept that I cannot change these things.  Sometimes, acceptance takes a lot of breathing, and a lot of time.

My heart goes out to my friend.  He has experienced a great loss, and it will never be ok that his friend is gone.  There is no way around it.  He can only move through the grief, to the acceptance that will hopefully bring him some peace.