Just in Case

(Or What Survival Keeps)

My grandmother died about five years after my grandfather. When our family cleaned out their house, we found what I’ve since heard many families find in the homes of people shaped by the Great Depression: canned goods years past their expiration dates.

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.