Still sitting in the pantry.

Just in case.

We threw the cans away.

My grandparents had only been children during the Depression, but hunger, scarcity, and the fear of not having enough had clearly stayed with them for life.

I remember going through the house and laughing at the expired food. Then crying. In my family, grief and dark humor have always gone together.

This past Sunday, while reading a Globe piece about cancer survivorship and the physical, emotional, and financial aftermath so many of us live with, I kept thinking about what my grandparents had held onto.

The cans. The dust. The beautiful, fragile glass my grandfather had brought back from Belgium. The magazines, records, cassettes, and 8-tracks beloved enough to survive move after move, decade after decade. The way people hold on to what once helped them feel less vulnerable.

That is what stayed with me.

Not just that my grandparents had kept too much, but that survival had kept living inside them, long after the original emergency was over.

I know this is true of cancer, too.

Treatment ends, or changes. Scans improve, or don’t. Parts of the body start responding again, or don’t. The body continues. The bills continue. The fear continues. So do the habits of mind illness leaves behind. Stockpiling. Scanning. Bracing. Holding on.

Just in case.

I do not write this to flatten cancer into some universal metaphor. I know what it costs to survive this disease. I know its specific brutality.

But I am beginning to understand that what looks strange, excessive, or irrational from the outside is often just survival that has overstayed its original moment.

Looking back, I regret making fun of the expired cans.

They were not foolish.

They were evidence.

Still, because I am human, the misses hurt more. I could stack the wins high, acknowledge them fully, and still find myself stuck on the one thing that had not gone right. Even when it barely counted in the overall tally.

Lately, I have been doing a physical performance review of my last 21 months.

The review includes three biopsies, a Stage IV melanoma diagnosis, a craniotomy, three rounds of combo immunotherapy, kidney stones, uveitis, adrenal insufficiency, thyroid damage, more than 30 scans and MRIs, five new daily medications including a lifelong steroid, perimenopause, a 30-pound weight gain, stopping work, putting my house on the market, selling it, moving 40 miles away from my son, and putting more than 11,000 miles on my car so I could still see him regularly and show up for his baseball games.

In that same stretch, I kept walking nearly every day, returned to the gym, and am now close to finishing the Livestrong program at my local YMCA.

I also started this blog. Created Cancer Sharks. Hosted our first annual live storytelling event. Started to paint. Reached out for professional help every time the darkness began stealing too much light.

And still, the metric that catches in my throat is the weight gain.

That is the truth.

Not the brain surgery. Not the steroid dependence. Not the adrenal insufficiency. Not even the fact that my thyroid is damaged. The weight.

I wish that were not true. I wish surviving all of this had made me more evolved than that. More grateful. More free. I want to take greater pride in being alive, in still finding joy, in still creating, in still showing up for the people and moments that matter.

And yet there is still an asterisk in my mind. Because I got through all of this, but I got through it in a body that gained more weight than it ever has before.

Yes, more than pregnancy.

And if you are wondering whether I tried a GLP-1, I did. It made the darkness more frightening than it had ever been. So I chose physically heavier over emotionally unbearable.

Which means I am back in the same old review cycle: staring at a long list of what was met, survived, endured, and built, and still getting hung up on the one measure that may not be the most important KPI but somehow still drags on every other win.

Maybe that does not mean I am unchanged.

Maybe it just means the body remains one of the hardest places to stop keeping score.

My mom is staying with me. Because this house is mine.

The house I bought on my own, with my own money, after the divorce.

I’m prouder of this shower than I am of the whole house, which is saying a lot, because the house usually has me beaming. It isn’t big or grand, just a simple New England cape in a fantastic neighborhood. The kind where my kid made friends just by going outside.

The plan was to stay here until Briggs graduated high school. He’s in eighth grade. I’m 43 and, because of treatment for Stage IV melanoma, which began with brain surgery, I’m nearly unemployed, very, very tired, and deeply stressed. I came home from surgery to a busted water heater and a cracked oil tank. I’m not so certain the house will survive this season.

Whether from pain or worry, I wake up between two and three in the morning and make one or two grilled cheeses before going back to bed until the afternoon. I can’t even keep my dog home with me right now because she wants our usual two-mile walks, and at this point that feels like summiting Everest.

So yes, the shower is a big fucking deal.

I even managed to comb my hair without disturbing any of the 47 staples in my head.

Treatment starts in days, and while I’m grateful it isn’t chemo, immunotherapy still terrifies me. I understand how it works in theory. I still don’t really know what it will do to me, practically.

So I leave the internet mostly for friends, family, and former colleagues.

For feeling loved.

Every time I’m on my phone or computer, my mother gets concerned. I asked my neurosurgeon whether I could use both, and he assured me I could, but my mother believed I was misremembering. I later confirmed that I was not.

My mom and I haven’t been under the same roof for this many consecutive nights since I was a kid. I moved out at eighteen for college three hours away and never moved back home.

Everyone is out of sorts. Everyone is worried. Everyone is in their own part of grief for the living.

I love her, and she loves me. Being the oldest of four girls was always a lot for me, and I think having me first was a lot for her, too. When I was a kid, she’d call me Amanda Never Enough. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be working on something. Dreaming up a play. Writing a book. Trying a new food. I have spent most of my life hungry, ambitious, and independent.

Now, at 43, I am suddenly somewhat incapacitated and undeniably dependent on other people to keep an eye on me.

I am the kind of person who, until it became true, never imagined feeling this grateful and proud to have taken a shower by herself.

But I had. And I was.

And when I made it back to the nest built for me on the couch by visiting neighbors, friends, and family, all clean and fresh, I let out a deep sigh of relief.

From the guest room, which was actually my office, my mother called out, “Feel good?”

“Oh my god, yes. Fucking unreal,” I said.

Then she went into the bathroom and came right back out.

“Amanda, you don’t have to make more chores for me by leaving your dirty clothes and towel on the floor.”

I managed to squeak out, “That’s not what I was doing,” and then got up off the couch to pick up the clothes and towel.

Recognizing, the entire way, both my gratitude that she was exactly where I needed her and my complete understanding of why I had never moved back home.

Even then, I knew that while plenty of peers and adults were aware of how involved I was, there was also invisible work I wanted made visible.

So I did.

Even now, decades later, I feel embarrassed admitting the self-nomination. The first thing the critic in my head says is, Typical. Tooting your own horn.

Lately, though, I have been thinking that maybe I have kept self-publishing all these years, here on Substack for the last year and before that, on and off at amandathanks.com, because the internet may be the last place anything, or anyone, goes to die.

And when I do die, as we all will, traces of my thoughts and stories and ideas may still be sitting in the cloud, with a chance of one day raining down on relatives near or distant who never got to know me.

When I’m dead, while I believe it’s important to be honest about the missteps, questions, and impulses I acted on, I also think it is just as important, and just as vulnerable, to cite the monumental and still sometimes invisible achievements.

So, taking a note from Rindge, New Hampshire’s 1999 Youth Citizen of the Year, I have decided to name what the last year and a half has required of me.

It has only been a year and a half since melanoma entered my life, and right now I am in undetected disease status.

At this moment, no scan shows visible evidence of cancer.

That is not my doing. That is the miraculous work of modern medicine, the discipline of following medical direction as closely as possible, and whatever divine force lives in air, water, breath, and human care.

I believe attitude matters. But I do not believe anyone can think, pray, wish, or hope themselves into or out of chronic illness.

I also do not believe humility requires silence.

I did not disappear the cancer, but despite its best efforts, I also did not allow the cancer to disappear me.

Here is what I did while fighting for my life and co-parenting a teenager:

• I survived emergency brain surgery, brain radiation, and both combo and single-dose immunotherapy.

• I learned to live with adrenal insufficiency and a damaged thyroid.

• I sold my house, resulting in a 100 percent return on investment.

• I moved 40 miles away.

• I accepted help, even when it felt like it was eroding the most precious parts of my identity.

• I navigated complex insurance, medical, and financial systems.

• I spoke up when the people in charge were not listening.

• I made friends.

• I became closer with family.

• I learned to nap and say no.

• I stayed present at my son’s baseball games.

• I found my way back to movement.

• I kept writing and started to paint.

Treating this disease has left lasting damage. The key word in that sentence is: lasting.

So, while the year is not even halfway through, I am claiming Midlife Citizen of the Year, 2026.

I can’t remember what the all-hands was officially about, but I know now it was absolutely about money, because the part I remember clearly is that I was quiet and gave a shrug or some other body cue of nonchalance at the new policy. Then one of the general managers, a tall, handsome black man, spoke up.

“Sure, for some, this might be no big deal, but for the rest of us, this isn’t some way to earn some beer money. This is our lives. Our homes.”

I’m honest enough to admit I was offended. The notion that I somehow did not need this job because I was pursuing a degree.

The audacity.

My audacity.

I was too unaware then to realize that my whole “not that big a deal” posture could come across as belittling. More likely, what I took personally was simply a genuine expression of concern that had very little to do with me.

I’m certain this exchange came back to me this week because I started training to pick up a few shifts hosting at a local independent restaurant that I believe in.

And while the hours and responsibilities are a very good match for what I am trying to rebuild at this point, I would also be lying if I said it wasn’t stirring something older in me.

It has taken me a long time to understand that much of what I experience as deeply unfair, or even as an attack, often has far less to do with me than I think.

That irrational sense of rejection, or the assumption that I am an annoyance, may be one of the most destructive forces in my makeup.

I hesitate to call it personality, or even brain wiring, but whatever it is, it has shaped plenty of reactions, situations, and decisions.

The evolved position would be to stop letting it lead. But even now, I’m not always willing to catch it, and even when I do, I can lack the discipline to work it fully out of my system.

I’m not even certain it can be worked out.

Another example of how a mistake makes me feel stupid. These things showed up even though I actually ordered a car cleaning kit. The mistake was on the sender’s end, but I assumed it was mine. It took me DAYS to register for the refund.

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