I’ll be serious with you for a change, as fun as I’ve made cancer out to be. There needs to be a disclaimer: don’t try this at home. In other words, don’t go looking for cancer.

But sometimes, cancer finds you or a loved one, and then all the jokes stop, and the tears come rolling down. Why did this have to happen? It was only funny when Stephanie talked about it.

I’ve shared my story often enough (it’s always a different version of humor), but I get the same response. After the laughter stops, my friend says, “This is exactly what I needed to hear.”

Maybe it’s unrelated to cancer. But even if some part of my story can help someone else, it makes my heart sing. I’m not doing this just for the laughs, you know.

Or maybe they have a loved one who’s stage four, and they need to understand, “Are they in pain? What are they going through? What can I do except watch my loved one suffer?”

Now there’s where this gets painful. Not everyone survives illness. Our departed brothers and sisters weigh heavily on us all–every last one of them leaves a gaping hole in our hearts.

My job has been to take the fear out of cancer. It doesn’t mean I’m trying to pretend there’s no fear, no suffering, no hardship. There’s no acting brave in the beginning. Everyone remembers how the journey started, miserably at best. And some of us even know how things don’t always end the way we want them to.

That’s a lot of fear, right?

But now that I’ve stared down suffering and seen it for the imposter it is, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of it, and I can speak my truth.

We can never lose sight of the essential point of it all. Serious health issues are our teacher. It’s trying to tell us something that we were incapable of seeing or hearing before.

It feels vengeful and angry and makes us rage at first because it’s not giving us the life we wanted. But inevitably, somewhere at the midpoint of the journey, we have no choice but to surrender. No matter what the outcome, everyone going through a change of this magnitude finds themselves in a halfway house between life and death.

It’s when you don’t fit in with the living or the dead. You see life going on above you, and you can look down and acknowledge that there’s death and suffering. But you aren’t part of either.

It’s a place I’d go back to in a heartbeat because there’s no responsibility, intelligence, expectations, or demands placed on me there, except one. I had to be me: the hero of my story.

It’s so easy to live there. You feel love beyond the earthly experience–coddled like an infant held in the arms of your mother. Love abounds in this halfway house.

No matter what stage of cancer your loved one suffers in the heat of her earthly trials, rest assured, she’s learned to overcome fear and surrender to that great love.

If they kicked cancer’s butt, re-entry is humbling. We learned things in the halfway house that doesn’t apply to this world. Go around telling strangers you love them and calling yourself Wonder Woman; you might even get arrested.

But take someone else who surrendered the fight and is no longer with us. That dear soul learned skills that will be invaluable. Go around saying you love all the people on the other side, and you’ll fit right in.

If you need to know, what about my loved one who has to go through this horrible disease or illness? The story I tell might be different, but my answer is always the same. In the middle of life and death, you’re loved ones feel the love that we can’t experience in life.

Somewhere amid all that suffering, suffering ceases to exist. That is the true meaning of joy.

Just as you’re worried about them, they’re only thinking of you. You’re the ones carrying the brunt of the responsibilities (who’s taking them to the doctor’s appointments?), you have to be at the top of your game (listen and implement all the doctor says), and you have to be the one to learn to live without your dear loved one, if the case may be.

They’re going to be in a happier place, where you have to learn to go on and face life without them.

So when you marvel because your loved one who’s suffering so much is only worried about you, remember they’re coming from that great place of selfless love–the same place you’re coming from.

Suppose we could shed the responsibilities of life and meet our loved ones at the halfway point–at that place where there’s love as far as you can see and beyond that into infinity. Our loved ones are ready and able to teach us how to surrender into those hands that embrace us there and to the love that awaits.