The word “cancer” landed like a crack in glass—silent at first, then spreading through everything. His body, once just his, became a battlefield of scans, biopsies, and fluorescent-lit hallways. I watched nurses tape needles to the same arms that had carried groceries and children, and I wondered how something as small as a rash had been the first warning of a storm we never saw coming.

Life shrank and deepened at the same time. We measured days in lab results and quiet victories: a meal kept down, a night with fewer winces, a laugh that didn’t sound borrowed. I learned that courage isn’t loud or cinematic; it’s sitting in plastic chairs, asking hard questions, signing forms with shaking hands. It’s choosing to love in the face of uncertainty, to stay when every instinct screams to run from what you cannot fix.