Double F*ck Cancer
I'm sitting in my office scrolling through pictures trying not cry before a work call. Because y’all I’m an ugly crier. My friend Linds went into hospice this morning. She's 40. I don't have a clean way into this one. Or the right words (even though I love wordsmithing).
The first time I met Linds, she invited herself to stay at my house for four days. I told my husband I really hoped she wasn't weird because I had apparently just handed a stranger a key and a guest bedroom. She was not weird. She was the kind of person who invites herself into your life and six minutes later, you can't imagine it without her. The audacity of her was the whole damn point.
She got ocular melanoma a few years back. Lost an eye to it. And because she is exactly who she is — Storyteller, Mother, Connector, Survivor — she didn't hide a damn thing. She made it a statement. A prosthetic eye that could be beautiful brown to match the other one, or a neon softball, or full galaxy, depending on her mood. Because she’s a badass. Go look her up at lindsspeaks.com and you'll understand everything I'm trying to say in about thirty seconds.
We celebrated her 40th last May. Got tattoos in Minnesota. Absolutely tore up Mystic, Connecticut. My friend Sarah — a force of nature in her own right — caught me on video eating an almond croissant from a little bakeshop that I still think about every time I’m PMSing. Every memory from those trips is so damn good, and it stings to sit with right now.
She read every single blog. Every week. She was waiting for the book. And she helped name this whole f*cking thing — corporateish.io, the URL where the messy middle lives, that came from her brain.
So this one's for her. All of it.
Last week I put a Seth Godin question in this space that I haven't been able to shake loose:
"When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming — is it going to be a cause for celebration or a cause for heartbreak?"
I have my answer now. Linds — the life she built, the people she loved out loud, the way she walked into rooms and made everyone feel like they'd been waiting for her specifically — that is a cause for celebration. Not a life half-lived. Someone who showed up full throttle with a galaxy eye and a warmth you could feel bone deep, and the nerve to invite herself wherever she wanted to be.
Rewind to days: While I was sitting with all of this I was also in our church parking lot waiting for Josey to finish youth group Wednesday night, reading a chapter I'd enhanced that day out loud, ugly crying into my steering wheel, voice wobbly, and thankful nobody could see me in the dark. The chapter is called The Fourth Man in the Fire. It's the one where God and I finally had the long-overdue conversation about what it actually looks like to walk through something that tries to take you out. About fire. About ashes. About standing in the rubble as a version of yourself you don't recognize yet, wondering what in the hell just happened.
I've been on fire. The painful kind. I've walked through it anyway. I've stood in the ashes.
My person said to me during the worst of it: "Babe. You are winning at not being dead."
I laughed. Then cried. Then wrote that sh*t down immediately. Because that's what I do.
The manuscript is at 54,129 words. Three chapters this week — the recliner, the dreams dying, the surrender. Each one a different kind of hard to climb inside. Chapter 15 made me choke up reading it back out loud, and that's exactly how I know it belongs in the book.
The book exists because of the fire. And because of people like Linds — who believed in it before it was a single word on a page, who gave it a name, who kept asking when it was coming out like it was already inevitable.
The person I'm becoming is trying every damn day to be worth that. Still working on it. Still becoming.
