Part 1: Loss of Confidence
Often times with aging or any serious medical condition, it can be difficult to tell in real time when one starts to lose their abilities, or grieve things one was once able to do. When one is diagnosed with cancer or some other threatening medical condition, hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back you can often see that symptoms and the grief surrounding them were present if you only knew what to look for.
 
Often, when a diagnosis hits, such as with Kim, and life all of a sudden speeds up, you can get completely lost in the day-to-day. Trying to navigate the new stormy waters of appointments, research, treatments, sharing news with people close to you and getting yourself ready for the unknown ahead. Because of this there is very little time for introspection. You're simply in survival mode. But with the passage of time, and the need to begin to process the experience, you begin to notice all the small griefs and losses along the way; things you experienced but never fully realized or put into words at the time.  
 
I don’t know if it was THE first grief we experienced when cancer entered our lives, but close to it, was a loss of confidence in Kim’s body. What I mean by this is the ability to NOT notice all the little aches, pains, sounds or twitches that all of our bodies make throughout the day. Cancer makes you lose the ability of ignoring all of these perfectly normal aspects in living in a physical body. When things go wrong, that innocence is lost, and it is often replaced with an obsessing over every little bodily abnormality.
 
The human body is capable of incredible things. It is constantly doing things we aren’t aware of, and the regular things we are aware of, well, more often than not we don’t give them too much thought. When we are considered healthy, or without a medical history, things like wheezing or becoming short of breath is chalked up to allergies or being a little over tired. Aches in muscles or bones are given the excuses of aging or doing something we are not used to. Again, shrugged off without too much second thought. Stomach and digestive issues are given many different perfectly plausible excuses. Maybe something we ate not agreeing with us, food poisoning that will pass, eating too much or drinking a bit too much. Anything more serious is often just chalked up to IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).  And the incredibly vast majority of the time these excuses and reasons are all bang on. Cancer is on the rise and becoming more common, it is one of the reasons we feel inspired to do this fundraiser, but it is not nearly as common as all the different things we might feel in our body on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The body is amazing, and the number of things it can absorb without too much of a second thought is astounding.
 
But when cancer became a personal diagnosis for Kim, and for myself as her husband, all of a sudden the daily and normal aches and pains, random digestion anomalies or moments of feeling short of breath all become moments of panic, things to be examined and obsessed over. Anxiety about another potential growth, wondering if the cancer cells were congregating and growing somewhere new. We had lost confidence that all the things Kim felt in her body could just be normal everyday things we all go through. There is something so blissful about ignorance.
 
When cancer entered the conversation, the innocence of ignoring or chalking things up to “that’s just what the body does” was lost, and we began to worry about everything. Everything happening within the body, but also everything happening outside the body. How much rest is too much? How much do we need to change our diet? How much should Kim be working? What does it mean when she feels this pain, or that weird sensation or pressure? All of sudden Kim forgot what it felt like to have a body without the cloud of cancer hanging over it. Hundreds of thought and concerns flittering through our minds each day as we became more and more aware of all the little things the body does, the vast majority of which are totally, organically, normal.
 
And so, there was a loss of general confidence in how her body should feel to her. We became aware, and at least in the beginning, questioning and analyzing everything with much fear and anxiety. Kim had to relearn what her body felt like. What was normal, what needed paying attention to and what could be left alone as the new normal. But the blissful ignorance of having a healthy body and not giving too much of a second thought to this or that, that reality was gone, left behind on the day we entered the cancer clinic for the first time.

​Have you ever lifted up a piece a plywood that has been laying for a period of time in a field, vacant lot, or even just your backyard? You dig the tips of your fingers underneath the wood, feeling the moist ground below the edge of the plywood, grab hold of the decaying wood, and then brace yourself for whatever you might find (organic, mold or rodent) living underneath it? Whatever is under that piece of wood, you know it won’t be pretty.
 
This is a metaphor that has been floating around my head for the better part of the last half-year as it relates to grief. I’ll admit, I didn’t know that there was some residual grief still living under the surface of my life until earlier this year, as plans for this fundraiser began coming together. But then something happened, and as usual, it began innocently enough.
 
I was on one of my post-lunch walks, working off the sugars from my meal. I was walking along one of the streets of our neighbourhood, earbuds in playing a random playlist of songs, when all of a sudden the data on my phone cut out. Wanting to continue listening, I switched over to a playlist of songs that I had downloaded on my phone, songs from about eight or more years back. As I walked along with my feet pounding the pavement and thumb scrolling through song titles, I noticed a growing lump forming in the back of my throat. I found myself scrolling through old song titles, and stopping to play snippets of music I had not listened to in quite a while. What I noticed though while I played these songs, was not so much the songs in and of themselves, but strong flashes of memory, things I had not thought of in a very long time, if ever. They were all memories related to Kim’s struggle with cancer.

On my walk, I hit play and listened to the first minutes of, Beloved, by Mumford and Sons. As the music opened, I all of a sudden remembered driving home late at night from a church council meeting, descending the hill between Langley and Cloverdale, having just shared with the church board about Kim’s final diagnosis, and my need to resign my position as pastor of the church to help care for her in her final months.
I clicked on the song, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, and I saw a scene of Kim and I one evening, me sitting at the desk in our living room listening to this song on our computer, Kim puzzling on the couch. Without looking up, she asked me to change the song because of its almost mournful tune. It was in the middle of her 2018 chemo treatment and life was very tough and uncertain at that moment and she didn’t want to hear that kind of slow music. It brought up too many “what if” emotions.
Seeing many of the faster, heavier songs on the playlist, I began having visions of listening to these songs at an almost deafening volume, both in the car leaving work to come home to a nauseous Kim a couple days after chemo, or in my earbuds biking in the Watershed, just trying to drown out the thoughts, scenarios and darkness of Kim’s diagnosis, chemo and upcoming surgery; trying to work off the anger I felt towards the cancer that was changing my wife and our marriage so quickly.
 
In thinking about this over the past couple months, and finding myself unwilling to go back to listen to those songs for fear of those emotions rising up again, what I have come to realize is it that though I think I did a fair job of working through my grief around Kim’s passing, (I did a series of blog posts on this which you can find my scrolling down a couple pages on this blog), I have done very little work in dealing with the grief of Kim’s cancer journey itself. Of seeing Kim suffer through her cancer, and the death by a thousand cuts to the life we had once envisioned for ourselves. The roll of being a caregiver to a spouse, the five-year burden seeing Kim change because of the cancer, seeing myself change because of the role I had, seeing our marriage change because of this cellular intruder. The countless suppressed emotions, the jumping to end-of-life conclusions, while at the same time denying what was happening in front of us. It all takes a toll that sometimes you don’t realize in the moment as you are just trying to hold life together, trying your hardest as the caregiver though none of it comes naturally, and seeking to put on a brave face while doing it.
 
What I have come to see, and has become apparent through the process of writing thus far in this fundraiser, is that the grief of being widowed, and the grief of watching your loved one suffer through cancer are two different things. They are related, but I have come to see that though I have worked through a lot of the pain of being widowed, I have never really come face to face with the grief of being an intimate witness to the hardship of cancer.
 
And so I find, though this was not the plan at the beginning of this fundraiser, that it is time to dig my fingers into that forgotten moist soil and lift up the plywood that I have kept overtop of the grief of having watched Kim suffer for five years, particularly the last two and a half years of her life. To see what needs to be exposed, and maybe in the process, help others on a similar journey.
 
More to come next week.

​This year, on Kim’s birthday, June 12th, Carrie and I found ourselves camping out near Vernon, outside of reliable cell service. For Carrie and I, this was our first camping trip together, and now that we are back home I can say that we got through it without killing each other.
 
Now I am not a natural camper, most of what I know about camping I learned from Kim, so naturally, I shared a lot of my wisdom, passed down from Kim, on this trip. I also spent a lot of time last Friday, June 12th, Kim’s birthday, reflecting on many Kim camping stories, which is when I wrote this post.
 
Kim loved to camp. She came by this love honestly, camping each summer as a child and teen with her parents and siblings, and in her later teens with her friends at a cabin in Orville. As single young adults, our group of friends would head out into the woods from time to time as well.
 
After my transplant, Kim and I ventured out on our first camping trip in 2011. We packed up her parents tent trailer and hit the road. Soon after this, her parents bought themselves a trailer, and Kim and her brother, Paul, took over the pop-up trailer. We spent roughly 6 summers holidaying in the old Jayco red-and-white. Sometimes the fridge would work, other times it was hopeless (at least to me, her dad always had a way to get it to fire up). It was a great time, with a lot of laughs and miles put into those small single axle wheels.
 
While Kim was recovering from her second surgery in 2019, we realized just how fragile life was going forward, and how much Kim was now being effected, due to her chemo treatments, by the cold and other environmental factors, so we decided to throw financial caution to the wind and bought our own custom made Escape Trailer. We received it in early June 2019, and hit the road.
 
Kim made that trailer her own. She put her stamp on every square inch of that trailer, customizing all the cabinets with what went where. She loved outfitting it with its own dishes, silverware and supplies, everything one might need in it to simply be able to hook up and go whenever we wanted to.
 
It was in that trailer or just outside it, while camping with Kim’s parents outside Cranbrook in summer 2020, that we got the confirmation over phone call that Kim’s cancer was back. That trip, in late July, was the last time I pulled that trailer. After spending time with her parents in Cranbrook, Kim and I backtracked to Christina Lake, our favorite place to camp, and met Tim and Heidi and their kids there for a week of camping, Kim’s final camping trip.
 
That was an emotionally awkward number of days. In many ways we knew that this final diagnosis meant, but being in Kim’s most-happy place, we didn’t want to admit or acknowledge it. We didn’t want to face or name the reality that we knew we were potentially dealing with, but we knew it within our hears to be true.
 
On our last day there, with check-out being at 11:00am, Kim and I went for an early swim. I was secretly wondering if this would be the last time we would swim together, the last time Kim would swim at all. I said nothing, trying to keep the early morning dip lite, but as we stood on the shore drying ourselves off, looking at the beautiful crystal clear water in front of us, Kim named what I already felt, saying, “I wonder if this is the last time I will see this place.” It was more than heartbreaking, if there could be such a thing.
 
And indeed, it was Kim’s final day of camping.
 
I would say that camping really was one of, it not Kim’s most favorite pastime. She loved lakes, loved to be in natural bodies of water, for just loved the peaceful atmosphere of the BC outdoors. Kim was a great camper. Lists of everything needed, everything packed and found again in its proper place. Organized and detailed. Efficient, practical. It all came back, again, to the things she valued––the people who made camping fun, the efficiency and organization of a trip well planned and executed, and the generosity that our beautiful natural surrounding have to offer.
 
It has now been six summers since Kim graced a BC Provinical Park with her camping-loving presence. But I know her camping legacy still lives on in the lives of the people closest to her. The Escape Trailer is long gone, I knew I could never camp in it again. But her supplies are littered around with her brother’s camping supplies, and as I write this, looking around the campsite that Carrie and I are relaxing in, I see as well many pieces of equipment that Kim used, or techniques of washing or storing things that she taught me. Her finger prints and legacy everywhere. I can still see the smile on her face, standing behind a camp stove, or her head bobbing as she swam in a crystal blue lake.