The Quiet We Stood In

And the long, slow work of finding peace.

My neighbor came to me yesterday while I was out in my garden with news I wasn’t prepared for. His cancer has grown beyond treatment.

I’ve seen him out in his yard for the last few years. He’s often friendly about the garden, sharing his plans for the land behind his house where he and his wife have fixed up an overrun area of the community land. His wife is a little standoffish, but that’s just how some people are, or so I thought. I never looked too closely. You don’t, when life is moving fast and everyone seems fine.

But yesterday, after he shared the news with me, I pulled myself away from the task at hand and I took him in. I really looked at him, and I could see it. The frailness. The weight of what he’s been carrying. And suddenly everything I thought I knew about that yard, that house, that family didn’t matter anymore.

We spoke for a little while about what was to come. The changes that, as neighbors, we could anticipate. I could see the strain and worry on his face as he tried to speak calmly. But how does one speak calmly about his own pending death? I can’t imagine.

Once the conversation ended, I came inside and told my husband, Mike.

We were both quiet.

All the small thoughts we’d ever shared about the lawn being cut too short, about his wife’s cool demeanor, disappeared in an instant. Just gone. Replaced by something heavier and more humble. Because we’ve been there. Not in the same house, not with the same diagnosis, but in that same terrible corridor where you realize the road is ending and there is no resolution. Only the long, slow work of finding peace inside something that has no redeeming answer.

Mike’s dad died of colorectal cancer about eight years ago. We didn’t have to say that out loud yesterday. We just stood there and remembered it together. The way grief lives in your body even after the storm has passed. The way it never fully leaves — it just takes a different form after a while.

For my neighbor, there is still time. Time to feel the sun. Time to be with the people he loves. Time, maybe, to find some peace in the struggle.

But for his wife. His kids. His family. Their grief is just beginning. It will show up in ordinary moments for years — a smell, a season, a Saturday morning in the yard — and take their breath away all over again.

Life is cruel sometimes and we don’t always get to know why.

My faith-filled friends will find solace in their beliefs. Others will find it in spirituality or ritual or the comfort of community. I’ll be somewhere in between, trying to understand the bigger picture, sitting with the questions I can’t answer, making peace with the fact that I can’t.

But at the end of the day we are all just trying to be good humans. To show up for each other in this strange, brief existence we don’t fully understand. To remember that nothing is permanent — not the pain, not the beauty, not any of it.

To my neighbor, and to anyone out there sitting with illness, or loss, or the anticipatory grief of watching someone you love move toward the end of their road — you are not alone. Find your people. Find comfort in whatever you believe. Find your third place — the garden, the trail, the water, the gym — somewhere you can breathe and feel and grieve without apology.

You never know how long you have. None of us do.

Thank you for being in this space with me.