If Cancer Is a Gift, What's the Return Policy?

(And four other things, please, please don't say.)

It was still dark.

Somewhere around 5 a.m., my husband and I sat in our car in the parking lot of the surgical center. My mastectomy was scheduled for 12 to 14 hours. I was forty years old. And I could not make my body get out of the car.

I sat on the curb instead.

I told my husband I couldn't do it. I couldn't walk through those doors. I couldn't hand my body over to people who were going to take a part of me away and tell me it was for the best. I was terrified in a way I had no words for.

Ferlin sat down on the curb next to me and held me. He didn't try to fix it. He didn't talk me into anything. He just said, quietly, "God will guide us."

Eventually, I stood up. I walked in. I registered. And then — before they wheeled me back — a chaplain came to pray with us.

I want to believe that the chaplain meant well. I really do. But what he told my family that morning, in the last minutes before they took me away from them for fourteen hours, was a story whose whole point was: cancer is a gift.

I remember thinking, very clearly: If this is a gift, what's the return policy? Because I would like to send it back.

It took me years to make peace with what he said. Years. I wrestled with it through chemo. I wrestled with it through radiation. I wrestled with it through every "celebration" of a milestone that felt more like survival than victory. I finally brought it to my pastor — almost a decade later — and he said something that loosened the knot I'd been carrying:

"Cancer isn't a gift. Seeing how God showed up — that's the gift."

Yes. That. That I can hold.

But what I want to say today, almost eighteen years out, is this: when someone you love is in the middle of something terrible, there are things you should not say to them. Ever. Even if you mean well. Especially if you mean well.

I want to share five of them with you. Not to shame anyone, because I have said the wrong thing too, and so have you, and that is part of being human. I want to share them because somebody you love is going to face something hard, and you are going to want to help. The difference between landing well and accidentally wounding them is often just knowing which sentences to leave in the drawer.

1. "Cancer is a gift."

I covered this one above, but let me say it plainly: no.

Sometimes hard things teach us things we couldn't have learned any other way. Sometimes God meets us in places we wouldn't have gone otherwise. That is true. But the teacher is not the gift. If you stood in front of someone who'd just lost their home in a fire and said, "Fire is a gift, look what you'll learn," you'd hear yourself. Please hear yourself with cancer, too.

If you want to honor the meaning someone has found in their suffering, ask them about it. Don't assign it.

2. "I've always wondered what it would be like to be flat again."

Yes. Someone actually said this to me, before my mastectomy.

I had not, in fact, ever wondered what it would be like to be flat again. I had never lain awake at night, curious about prepubescent anatomy. What I was wondering was whether I would live to see my children graduate from high school. Whether the cancer had already spread. Whether I'd recognize myself in the mirror when this was over.

Here is a rule that will serve you well in every hard season, not just cancer: if the sentence in your mouth begins with "I've always wondered what it would be like to..." and the next word describes someone else's loss — swallow it. They are not living your curiosity. They are living their grief.

3. "You look so good!"

I know. I know you mean it. I know you're trying to encourage me.

But I was bald. I had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. I was swollen from steroids. I had no breasts. My nails were falling off. My skin was gray. I did not look good. And when you told me I did, what I heard was: I'm uncomfortable with how you actually look, so please let me pretend you look fine so I don't have to face it.

The thing someone in the middle of something hard wants is to be seen, not to be told a comforting fiction about themselves.

Try instead: "I love your face." Or: "It's so good to see you." Or just: "I love you." Those are true no matter what the cancer has done. Those land.

4. "Just stay positive."

Friend. I had cancer. I was not going to positive-think my way out of it.

The implication of "just stay positive" is that if I am ever sad, scared, or angry, I am personally undermining my own treatment. Which means I am not allowed to have a bad day. Which means when I do have a bad day — and I am going to have many — I will now feel guilty about it on top of feeling terrible.

You get to have bad days when you've had a stressful week at work. I was allowed to have bad days when chemotherapy was rearranging my body at the cellular level. Let people in hard seasons have the full range of human emotions. That is not a threat to their healing. It is part of it.

If you want to encourage someone, try: "You don't have to be brave with me." That sentence is a doorway. The other one is a door slammed shut.

5. "God must really love you to give you a trial like this."

What does that say about everyone who isn't suffering? That God loves them less?

I know what people are trying to do when they say this. They are trying to find meaning. They are reaching for something — anything — that makes the cancer make sense. I understand the impulse. But the theology underneath this sentence is broken, and the person in the bed can feel it.

God's love for me is not measured in the difficulty of what I'm carrying. God's love is the constant. The cancer is the variable. Please don't confuse the two.

What I wish people had known instead

Almost eighteen years later, I can tell you who carried me through.

It wasn't the people who said the perfect thing. It was the people who showed up imperfectly and kept coming back. It was Ferlin, on a curb in the dark, saying, "God will guide us without claiming to know how." It was the friends who cleaned my house every two weeks during chemo. It was the women who sat with me on ordinary Tuesday afternoons and didn't require me to be brave for them. It was my pastor, almost a decade later, gently untangling a knot a chaplain had tied.

The people who love well in hard seasons are not the people with the best words. They are the people who keep showing up, even when they don't have the words at all. Especially then.

If you are reading this because someone you love is in the middle of something hard, and you don't know what to say — that very awareness is already grace. The fact that you're worried about saying the wrong thing means you care. Most people don't even get that far.

I made a free guide titled "How to Actually Help Someone With Cancer." It's everything I learned from the receiving end — the things not to say (with more I didn't have room for here), the things people said that I still carry seventeen years later, what to bring, how to love the whole family, and the long game of showing up at month eight when everyone else has forgotten.

You can download it here: https://hopelivesnow.myflodesk.com/help

It's free. It's honest. And someone in your life needs you to have it.