Who Showed Up (And Who I Thought Would)

I made a list a few weeks ago, not because I wanted to, but because my brain does this thing where it needs to sort information into columns before it can rest. One column: people I expected to disappear who didn't. Another: people I expected to be there who weren't. A third, the shortest one, and the one I keep coming back to: people I never would have predicted at all, who showed up anyway, and stayed.

I'm not going to pretend I feel neutral about any of these columns. I don't. But I've learned something true in each one, and I think the truth is worth more than my hurt feelings about how the sorting went.

The people who disappeared

Nobody announces it. That's the part I wasn't ready for — I think some part of me expected a conversation, an explicit "I can't do this," something I could respond to, argue with, understand. Instead it's just quiet. A group chat that used to include me stops including me. A friend who texted daily starts texting monthly, then not at all. Invitations that used to come automatically stop coming, not out of malice, I don't think, but out of some kind of avoidance nobody wants to name out loud, not even to themselves.

I used to take this personally. I've mostly stopped, not because it doesn't hurt — it does — but because I've come to believe most of it isn't really about me. It's about what I represent now, which is a thing a lot of people aren't equipped to sit next to. Mortality is contagious in the sense that being near it forces you to think about your own, and a lot of people, I think, genuinely do not know what to do with a friend who has made their own mortality unavoidable to think about. So they don't do anything. They just quietly step back from the thing that's making them think about it.

I don't think that makes them bad people. I think it makes them people who haven't been forced yet to learn the skill I've had no choice but to learn this year. I hope they never have to learn it the way I did. I also, if I'm honest, wish they'd tried harder anyway.

The people who showed up

Here's what actually surprised me: it wasn't always who I expected.

A friend from a college internship, someone I hadn't talked to in probably four years beyond the occasional like on a photo, sent a card in the first week after my diagnosis and then, without me asking, kept sending them — once a month, no update required from me, just "thinking of you, no need to respond." She never asked me to perform gratitude back at her. She just kept showing up in a form that cost me nothing to receive.

A neighbor I'd never done more than wave to started leaving a bag of groceries on my porch on infusion weeks, no note, no text asking permission first, just there when I opened the door. I still don't fully know how she tracks my treatment calendar better than I do. I've stopped asking and started just saying thank you.

My mother-in-law, who I'll admit I braced for — not because she's unkind, but because our relationship has always been a little formal, a little careful — turned out to be one of the steadiest presences in this whole year. She doesn't ask how I'm feeling in the abstract, open-ended way that requires me to do emotional labor to answer. She asks specific, answerable questions. "Did you eat today." "Do you need me to take the kids Thursday." Practical love, offered without needing anything back. I didn't know I needed that particular shape of care until she started giving it to me.

What I've learned about showing up

The people who stayed close mostly had one thing in common: they didn't wait for me to ask. Every single person who disappeared, if I'm being fair to them, might have stayed if I'd told them explicitly what I needed. But cancer doesn't leave you with the bandwidth to manage other people's uncertainty on top of your own. I don't have it in me to coach someone through how to be my friend right now. The people who figured that out on their own, who just quietly showed up in whatever form they could manage without requiring instructions — those are the friendships that got stronger this year, not weaker.

I think that's true outside of cancer too, honestly. I think it's true of every hard season anyone goes through. Showing up without being told how is the whole skill. Most people don't have it. The ones who do are worth everything.

What I want to remember

When this is over — and I have to believe, some days more easily than others, that it will be — I don't want to remember this year as the year people let me down. I want to remember it as the year I found out exactly who my real column was. It's smaller than I expected. It's not always who I expected. But every single name in it is a name I'll be grateful for as long as I'm alive to be grateful for anything, and after everything this year has taken, that's not a small thing to walk away with.

💜 Kayla