I don’t even know how to write this without sounding like I’m losing my mind… but maybe I am. Jason Roberts would agree!!! 
As we sit at clinic, getting our 8th dose of immunotherapy my thoughts won’t stop. The dry cough Will had the whole way here or the pain he says is getting worse in his jaw….my mama heart just knows down deep, this disease is spreading.
Cancer will drag conversations out of your child that should never have to exist.
The other night Will asked me in the dark…
“Mama… if I die… will it feel like a long time before I see you again?”
There are no strong words in moments like that.
There is no “faith speech.”
There is just a mother laying there feeling her heart physically hurt inside her chest and a pain from having to hold tears back with everything I had.
I wanted to lie. I wanted to tell him he’s not going to die. I wanted to promise something I do not have the power to promise.
Instead I told him what I am desperately clinging to myself.
I told him Heaven doesn’t run on our time.
That if Jesus calls him home before me… it won’t feel like years and years of waiting. It will feel like he closed his eyes here… and then opened them and I was already there.
Like I had just stepped into the next room.
But the truth nobody wants to say out loud…
Here on earth… time can feel like torture.
Time is waking up every morning wondering how many mornings you have left. Time is watching your child sleep and being scared to blink because you don’t trust life anymore. Time is smiling for pictures and then crying in the bathroom so nobody sees you fall apart. Time is pretending to be strong for your other child while feeling like you are failing both of them.
This kind of fear and love is suffocating and the thought of living in a world where my child doesn’t exist in it… feels impossible.
So yes… we pray, we believe in miracles, and we keep fighting. But some days faith feels loud and some nights fear is louder.
If God writes our story differently than what I am begging Him for… then I will spend the rest of my life walking around with a piece of my heart missing while believing that to Will it only felt like a moment until we were together again….like the car ride to the beach when I used to tell him to go to sleep and when he woke he would see the ocean. I pray that analogy, that he grew up with can give him somewhat of peace should God grant us anything other than what I beg for.
I hate cancer.
I hate what it has done to our family. I hate that there are parents everywhere laying in the dark having the same conversations. I hate there are other children having the same fear as Will.
But I also know this…a love as deep as you have for your child has to go somewhere and I choose to believe it goes straight into eternity.
If you have your kids with you, hold them tighter.
Even if they’re teenagers and act like they don’t want you to. Even if they just got in trouble. Even if life feels busy. Hold onto them and know that in the blink of an eye everything that you know in this moment can change and you will long for what you once knew.
And if you pray… please say Will’s name.
Because the honest truth is we are scared.
We are tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.
And we are fighting for every single day… some days through tears, some days through laughs, most days through a messy mix of both.
I keep telling myself this road won’t always feel this heavy.
I believe God is right here with us in these clinic rooms, in the waiting, in the fear, and that one day He will ease this burden and help us breathe again.
Until then, I sit here and watch him sleep. And just on the other side of this thin curtain are the same sounds and the same thoughts coming from other parents who are fighting this fight too.
Different families.
Same kind of fear.
Same kind of love trying to hold it all together.
