Floating on Anyway
The age of your parent at their death feels like a deadline. As a result, I’ve spent my entire life grieving my entire life. When life is dominated by grief, how do you live... anyway?
I was 8 years old when my father died. He was 35. I remember everyone at the funeral remarking that my dad was “so young” when he died. That part confused me. 8 was “so young,” 35 was just… a normal age. While I knew that my father’s life was cut short, I also knew that he was my father. How could someone who created me be… incomplete?
He couldn’t be, so I decided that he wasn’t. He lived. It was a whole, full life. There was so much more that he could have done, but also, he had done so much already. He had a beautiful wife, two children, a beautiful house with a pool & a treehouse, advanced degrees, mentees & congregations, and a million stories of a whole world that he lived in before I even existed.
35. That was it. That was the age.
It would be FOREVER before I was in my 30s, like AGES and AGES away, so I needn’t worry— I had so much time to live my full life, too.
I do not think it would be an overstatement to say that I have always had a deep dread of my 30th birthday.
As my 20s waxed on, anxiety built into presentiment. I was close now, and disaster was imminent.
My 20s ended with a cancer diagnosis. I’ve included a hyperlink to information about my diagnosis. I don’t want to explain Follicular Lymphoma right now. I have spent months explaining Follicular Lymphoma, caught in a weird tension between vulnerability and assurance, conversations looking something like this:
“I have cancer and I’m scared.”
“You are dying?”
“It’s a slow-growing cancer. The prognosis is positive, I can live a long, happy life.”
“So, it’s a good cancer, then? Why were you so worried if you’re going to live?”
“I don’t know that I’m going to live. Inside my body some cells are already dead, and they’re sorta like little zombies, trying to make the healthy cells like them.”
“Don’t even say that! You have to stay positive. You are so lucky that you have such an easy cancer.”
I’m not saying that people on the other side of this conversation are doing anything wrong. It doesn’t have to be wrong for it to be tiring, though.
I spent 15 years with the best cat in the entire world. Kittypuss. In late February, I had a lymphadenectomy to determine what type of lymphoma I have. My sweet cat stayed with me through my recovery as if she was guarding me. On April 29th, Kittypuss died. I will treasure this picture for the rest of my life.
I hold a lot of grace for “saying the wrong thing.” If you said something wrong, that means you said something! I thought that cancer ghosting was a myth, but one of my close friends completely disappeared from my life once I was diagnosed. Maybe she didn’t want to say the wrong thing? Maybe the tangible reminder of my mortality was too much like a mirror, reminding her of her own impermanence? I don’t know the answer to this question, and I know first-hand that sleepless nights trying to find an answer will not bring ease or clarity.
Everyone’s afraid of their own life
If you could be anything you want
I bet you’d be disappointed, am I right?
… It’s hard to remember that we’re alive for the last time.
—Modest Mouse, Lives
My 30th birthday was a bad day. A really bad day. In fact, May 21st, 2026 felt so absurd, that had I read about it in a novel, I would have thrown the book away because the author was trying too hard. My suspension of disbelief completely broke, and so did I.
That’s not important right now.
… Okay, well, it is. But it’s not what I want to talk about. I don’t want to give that single day any more power than I already have.
I want to talk about the days after. Time and time again in my life, imminent disaster has faithfully fulfilled destructive prophecy. I have spent my whole life crying out to God that “I can’t do this,” and still, onward I go, living anyway.
I’ve written before about the way that I find purpose in presence & gratitude. I’ve also written before about my belief in trusting the grieving process. I will feel. At 8 years old, I didn’t want to feel. If life really was so short, then why would I waste it all, being sad?
Memories of forced merriment bring no joy. The most treasured memories from this period are the true ones, not the “happy” ones.
People ask me how I am so close to my mom and brother, and I think back to the nights where we stayed up crying, holding each other through our grief.
At the time, I wanted the pain to end more than I had ever wanted anything in the world.
“Grief is a robber, undefeatable. It just sneaks up, takes all you got, and completely rearranges your life. It’s a long chain without an end… [Grief] is like an elephant sitting on my chest and I’m all crushed up.” —My Diary, 2006 (10 years old)
I remember that pain in my chest. Still today, that is one of the strongest physical manifestations of my grief. These days it feels a little more hollow. I feel like the pressure is coming from the inside now, not the outside. Grief demands to be seen, shining a spotlight on the deep, empty hole somewhere in the core of my being.
Grief is dizzying, sickening, dreadful, and profoundly beautiful. I think a lot about that quote from WandaVision, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” I am not grateful for death. I am not nearly evolved enough for all that, no matter how hard I try to understand. I am so grateful, though, to have lived and loved so deeply to be able to hurt.
The moments spent sitting in grief with people I love are the most beautiful in my life. I’ve also noticed that times of deep grief are followed by times of unbelievable joy and presence.
Michael: “You said that every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you’re going to die.”
Eleanor: “Yep.”
Michael: “And that knowledge is what gives life meaning.”
—The Good Place, Whenever You’re Ready
Because I’ve danced with death so often in my life, I am intensely aware of how temporary this all is. Sometimes this awareness is excruciating— am I truly present? Am I here, making the most of it, doing it right?
At other times, it is so freeing.
I hope that you live to be very, very old. I hope that I do, too.
There is no guarantee of that, and it doesn’t really matter anyway: at 8, my 30s felt old, but now they are here. Today, my 90s feel old, but will I feel so old once I am there? Maybe life always feels like it is meant to last forever.
I recently went through a breakup, and as part of my healing journey I re-watched the “I’m ready to wallow now” episode of Gilmore Girls. I thought I would spend this past weekend wallowing alone. Ironically, I was acting a lot more like Rory Gilmore at the beginning of her grief phase where she is walking around with an itinerary of things to get done, except I was trying to schedule the wallow. If I wallow as hard as I can this weekend, then it’s over with! I’m done! I don’t have to think about the breakup during the work week or ever again!
Life, as it often does… had other plans.
I got off of work around 5:30 PM on Friday night, and after a long work week, I wanted to go do something. I didn’t really have ideas. I knew that I didn’t want to be in my office any longer, but I also didn’t want to be home. I felt yearning— a visceral desire to be in my body, to create, to live and know that I was alive.
“Let’s go sky-diving tomorrow,” I texted my friends.
“There is a lightning storm tomorrow,” they responded.
Fair enough. What else is there?
Scruffy’s Cat Café was hosting a “Catnip and Paint” night at 6:00. Yeah, sure, that’ll do.
Talisa is the owner of Scruffy’s Cat Café and is one of my best friends. So automatically, this was a great decision. I’d been trying to plan a time to meet at the café with a newer friend of mine, Fryderyk, for quite a while. So, you already know. I called up Fryderyk, booked us tickets, sent Talisa a text, and we went to paint with the cats.
I could not get the cats to co-operate with me. The idea is that you put paint on a canvas, then put the canvas in a plastic bag, pour catnip over the bag, and the cats come and “paint” on your canvas. I was so proud of my dark background and the little white dots of paint I put on top. I was going to let the cats paint the night sky.
The cats did not want to paint the night sky.
I tried so hard to get them to interact with my painting. I would hold toys above the bag, and they would intentionally walk around the painting, craning their necks forward to grab the toys. Avoid painting the night sky at all costs.
I begged and I even cheated! Fryderyk was being all cool and laissez-faire, “I’m not going to put catnip on my painting. I will just let whatever happens happen.”
Okay, cool, yeah, more catnip for me. This would be a wonderful time for a metaphor about how Enjoying The Moment For What It Was ultimately rewarded Fryderyk because so many cats came over to his painting, but nah, my cheatery worked as intended. The cats were underwhelmed, but engaged— and really, that’s all I asked for. Meanwhile, Talisa alternated between giving attention to cats and her painting.
I wish that I had photos of us all on the floor with our paint and catnip. I took several photos of all this, but now they are lost forever.
Talisa, Fryderyk and I stayed up until about 2 AM. Through my friendship with Talisa I have learned that after-hours at a cat café are the perfect time & place for “trauma-dumping.” That’s what we call it, but we’re kidding. (Y’all, we’ve got to stop overusing that phrase. A stranger randomly unloading is trauma-dumping. Back and forth conversations about life with people you love are The Point.) Really, what happens is that the relaxed atmosphere, good people, and enduring conversation create an environment where vulnerability feels a little bit easier.
Like in outer space, time moves differently in the walls of a cat café. I am always completely unaware of the passing of time. Time feels… infinite? No, non-existent— like for a moment we have built a small universe where time doesn’t exist.
It sort of reminds me of flow state. One of my favorite movies is Disney Pixar’s Soul, and I love the part about flow. It shows people are so engrossed in presence that their inner being is physically in another dimension.
Sometimes a conversation can feel like this.
Three people, each with plenty to grieve, sat in a cat café after-hours… for hours. Consequently, I think our lives changed?
There are times in life where things are so good, that for a moment my brain takes a little note: “even if it’s just this. JUST this would still be worth it.” Even just those little realizations are life-changing. If one must imagine Sisyphus happy, then surely they must imagine everything. If you are imagining everything then anything can happen, and maybe one day the sky is exceptionally blue. Imagine it, you have to imagine it all, maybe one day Sisyphus smiles, and that is different. Maybe he thinks of a joke, so how can you tell me that one beautiful moment is not enough to change a story?
I stayed at Talisa’s that night. We slept in late, and even after we woke up we were still sort of sleeping in. We sat on her couch watching YouTubers screaming at each other, and though I cannot understand how, this kept lulling us into deep sleep and out again, into deep sleep and out again. Around 3PM we order a pizza, and Fryderyk calls and asks us if we want to go on a boat ride with him and his friend. And you know, Knoxville’s a small enough city, so I asked who his friend was. The friend is a colleague of mine who has always been mentally sequestered in a “colleague” box, and though I think very highly of him, we had never had a conversation that wasn’t about work.
I tell Fryderyk that I don’t know if I can go on the boat. He asks why not. Well, his friend is my colleague. What’s that got to do with anything. Well I think I’m kinda like a mentor. Well that’s good. Okay yeah but it could be weird. How. Well maybe it would be weird to see me in a bathing suit.
“It’s a boat, Bethany. You don’t need to wear a swimsuit on a boat, and it’s only weird if you make it weird.”
Fair enough, except for the fact that I make everything weird.
I went— no swimsuit, just normal life clothes.
When you think about a day out on the lake, it sounds wonderful. Still, no matter how vivid your imagination, it will always pale in comparison to exactly how wonderful it is.
Sunshine, wind, and water. Seamless transitions between Sigur Rós and Macklemore. I look around the boat and for a moment it’s like David Byrne has taken over the podcast in my head, “Well, how did I get here?”
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground.
My wallow weekend was spent bathing in the sun on the Tennessee River with three people who, by all accounts, I shouldn’t have known.
I think you’ll know what I mean by that. When someone tells you how they met their friend, and they say, “school, church, or work,” you’re like, “ah okay, yeah.” Then you have the introductions that make you wonder if there really are invisible strings after all.
I met Talisa by knocking on her door. I was canvassing, but she wasn’t on my list. I wanted to knock on her door anyway. She wasn’t even home. A kind-looking man with a long beard answered the door and said, “I think that one day you will be best friends with my daughter. Can I give her your number?”
I “stopped by” a crowded Knoxville event that I didn’t have to be at, and certainly didn’t want to be at. Fryderyk always looks like he is exactly where he wants to be. He stands out— I shared my business card under the pretense of networking.
Colin I met in a more normal way, since he’s my colleague, but the shock rendered from stepping onto a boat and seeing Colin behind the wheel, of all the people in the world, is enough to make up for the normalcy of our introduction. Actually, “normal” is… probably a strong word for how we met. I was running a medication safety takeback on campus, and then some guy dressed as Buddy the Elf came up to us and asked if we’d like to collaborate some time. We did.
Time isn’t holding up. Time isn’t after us.
At this realization, I thank God that I am me. Life may not be long, but I live it.
Just look around at this moment, what more proof do I need? I’ve gotten to have so many wonderful experiences with the wildest connections— or even the lack thereof. This conglomeration of people was absurdist in the best way.
The sunset cast the most beautiful shades of orange over Neyland Stadium, and the reflection on the water brought re-wrote the poetry of a firmament separating waters from waters in a way that felt a lot like baptism. We laughed, danced, sang and screamed with abandon. At that moment, there was no imagining necessary: I was SO happy.
Fryderyk looks over and asks, “are you feeling a little more like yourself?”
It’s not really a question. He already knows the answer.
Talisa reaches out and squeezes my hand for a moment, and because close friends create shared nonverbal languages, I know that she is telling me that she wants me to remember this moment.
I move my head around like an owl trying to take it all in. I’m memorizing this moment.
Once in a lifetime.
The other day I saw a sticker that said “I hate my immune system.” I get it, and I totally understand how, for a lot of immunocompromised people, that could be a helpful message to share.
I thought about trying it out. What would hating my immune system feel like? I think it would feel a lot like, well, hating me. And I don’t.
I am so proud of my lymph nodes. People will say my lymphatic system “sucks,” but if they could see what’s happening on the cellular level, they’d be handing out medals of honor to the cells that are doing a pretty damn good job keeping me alive.
There are cancer cells. Death surrounds my cell walls. Still, there are good cells, and they don’t stop. My exhaustion and fevers aren’t because my body is giving up, it’s living proof (emphasis on living) that my body is strong and is doing what it is supposed to. When my bloodwork shows heightened immune activity, I whisper a little thank you to my cells. Onward, tenaciously. The only way is through.
My therapist describes grief as a pendulum. Mourn deeply. Throw yourself into it. Feel it all. As deeply as you feel your pain, though, you must also feel exploration and joy. So long as our deepest sorrows are met with our grandest adventures, we are still moving forward. Let the pendulum swing back. Break again— it’s okay. Then you must live again. Feel it all fully. Don’t try to stop the pendulum from moving. Don’t try to force an unearned stagnancy. In time, the extremes will not be so extreme, and the pendulum will meet somewhere in the middle. But for now, you have to feel it. You have to follow the flow, no matter how much it hurts to grieve or how badly you want to stay in either extreme.
I wish wrapping it up with this grand realization could automatically heal everything, but it doesn’t work like that. Overall, this is still an extremely difficult period in my life. I am not always doing well— I’ve had a rough six months. There is so much loss. I grieve deeply and daily. I am often confused or sad, I sometimes despair, and that crushed-elephant-void in my chest still drains me from time to time. Still, I live anyway. I enter my 30s uncertain but unafraid. Every beautiful moment is worth it. I think of my immune cells, the way that the Good Cells face the Bad Cells head-on without shying away. I look at this weekend— catnip, paint, a beautiful river, and I think that perhaps I am like those Good Cells that surround the Bad Ones.
I am so tired, but I am so alive.
This is beautiful my baby girl. Love you dearly