Survival Without Purpose Is Just Postponement

Every year on the first Sunday in June, we pause to recognize cancer survivors as part of National Cancer Survivors Day. The events are well-intentioned. The ribbons are meaningful. The stories shared are real and hard-won. I’m grateful to be among those who have earned the title, “cancer survivor.”

But I still feel like surviving isn’t enough.

To those simply trying to get through the day, the week, the next scan, I see you. If you are in the middle of treatment right now, or in the fragile months that follow, survival is everything and it should be your focus. This is not written for that moment.

This is written for what comes after.

I’ve been diagnosed with cancer twice. Prostate cancer first. Then stage 3b colorectal cancer. Two separate diagnoses, multiple rounds of treatment, and lots of time sitting across from doctors, nurses and research associates recalibrating everything I thought I knew. Both times, I made it through. Both times, I kept working, kept training and desperately trying to hold onto the life I had. There were lots of days when I wondered whether I would survive.

Then came the bigger question: survive to do what?

I’ve come to believe that when you are given your life back, you incur an obligation. Not a debt in the crushing sense, but an obligation in the moral sense. A responsibility to the people who didn’t make it, to the ones still fighting, and to the version of yourself that laid in an infusion room and made promises about how things would be different on the other side.

Survival confers a kind of clarity that is almost impossible to manufacture any other way. The things that were genuinely important become obvious. The things that were consuming your energy without earning it become obvious too. Cancer has a way of burning off the noise and leaving you with the signal — and then the question becomes whether you have the courage to act on what you now know.

Most of us don’t. Not fully. We recover, we return to our routines, and slowly — almost imperceptibly — the clarity fades. The urgency softens. The promises made in the MRI machine begin to feel like things we said in an extreme moment rather than instructions for a life. Within a year, sometimes less, we are back to the same compromises, the same postponements, the same quiet settling that the diagnosis had temporarily interrupted.

I understand how that happens. I have done it myself.

But I keep coming back to this: if you were given more time, what are you doing with it? Not in a grandiose sense — not everyone who survives cancer needs to run a marathon, write a book or overhaul their career. But in the most personal, honest sense. Are you living closer to what matters? Are you saying the things that need to be said? Are you showing up for the people who need you in the ways they actually need you, rather than the ways that are convenient?

Are you helping?

That last one matters to me as much as anything else. Survival that turns inward — that becomes only about protecting and preserving the life you recovered — is survival that stops short of its own potential. The people who have been through something hard have something the rest of the world needs. Not just their story. Their presence. Their willingness to sit with someone else in the difficulty and say: I know this place. You are not alone here. Let’s do it together.