2017–Present: When Family Called

When I returned to Virginia in 2017, I came back to the same house where I had spent my teenage years. I was unemployed and uncertain about what I would do next.

Then someone needed me.

My mother's best friend had been part of my life for so long that I thought of her as my second mother. At the beginning of 2018, the signs of Alzheimer's became difficult to ignore. Whenever her family couldn't provide care, I stayed with her.

I watched her needs increase as familiar parts of her life began slipping away. Caregiving wasn't something I had planned. It began with a simple truth: someone I loved needed help, I was available, and I came.

At the beginning of 2019, she entered a memory care facility. By then, I had begun learning what caregiving asks of a person. It requires patience when the same question comes again. It means being present when there is nothing you can fix. Sometimes love is simply refusing to leave someone alone in what they are facing.

Later that year, my mother began having stomach pain. She put off seeing a doctor until my father and I took her to an appointment that had already been scheduled. We learned that she had stage four lymphoma. The cancer had spread through much of her body.

Until then, I had thought circumstances had forced me back to Virginia. Now I began to wonder whether God had brought me home before I knew why.

My mother’s cancer carried our family through much of 2019 and into 2020. She survived it, but life at home had changed. By January 2021, helping care for my parents had become my main responsibility.

My mother spent much of her day in a chair because of back pain. My father, then eighty-nine, tended to her needs, making trip after trip up and down the townhouse stairs. I did what I could to care for them both.

Then, on February 17, 2021, I felt a lump in my left breast.

The tests eventually confirmed something I had never expected: invasive ductal carcinoma. Breast cancer. In a man.

My thoughts quickly moved beyond what the diagnosis meant for me. My parents depended on me. If I became seriously ill, who would care for them? And after spending so much of my life being the one who came when others needed help, who would care for me?

On August 5, I underwent a modified radical mastectomy of my left breast and the removal of nineteen lymph nodes. Three of those nodes contained cancer.

I had spent years learning to answer when family called. Now my own body was calling, and I had to listen.

I thought cancer would be the great trial of 2021. I had no idea the hardest weeks were still ahead.

After my mastectomy, the doctors recommended an aggressive course of chemotherapy. Cancer had been found in three lymph nodes, and the test results showed a high risk of recurrence.

On October 19, I prayed about what to do. The answer came with startling clarity:

“No chemotherapy.”

I understood this as God’s direction for my life, not medical guidance for anyone else. It did not come with a promise that everything would be easy. I was still afraid, but I chose to trust what I had heard.

Then another danger surfaced. A cardiac evaluation revealed five serious blockages in my heart. One artery was ninety percent blocked. The cancer that had threatened my life had led doctors to a heart condition that might otherwise have remained hidden.

On November 30, I underwent quintuple bypass surgery. By early December, I was home recovering from open-heart surgery only a few months after losing my left breast.

Before I had time to heal, my mother became critically ill. She entered hospice on Christmas Eve. I wanted to care for her as I always had, but my own body was still weak, and there were things I could no longer do for her.

My mother died on December 31, 2021.

Grief did not wait for my incision to heal. I had survived cancer surgery and a quintuple bypass, but I could not save my mother. I could only love her and let her go.

When that year ended, I was alive, but I was not the same man. I had learned that trusting God does not mean understanding everything He allows. Sometimes it means staying with Him when the life you knew is changing all around you.

In January 2022, while the grief of losing my mother was still fresh, I began radiation treatment for breast cancer. My chest had barely begun healing from bypass surgery, yet each day brought another appointment and another reason to keep going.

Radiation ended in March. There was no grand celebration. There was simply the quiet relief of having made it through.

My father was grieving too. He had lost the woman with whom he had shared most of his life, and he was soon facing prostate cancer. As he went through radiation treatment of his own, caring for him became part of my daily life.

My recovery did not stop while I cared for him. It continued alongside his needs. Through 2022 and into 2023, I lived with medical follow-ups, medication, and the work of learning what my repaired body could do. I also began to understand that caring for someone else did not mean ignoring what was happening within me.

Those years were quieter than 2021, but they were not easy. God did not remove the grief or the uncertainty. His presence often came as enough strength for the next day.

I was beginning to see that even the years I would never have chosen belonged to the story I had been writing all along.