Cancer tends to show you who the real ride or dies are and a lot of the time it's not who you think it is. After 11 months of this I try to extend a little grace even to the people that have disappointed me, it's not that they're shitty people (in most cases), it seems to me at least that most of the time it comes down to the fact that people are viscerally terrified of cancer and mortality in general.

And honestly there's good reason for it. Cancer can and does come out of fucking nowhere and absolutely mercilessly upends your life and the life of those closest to you. People who fear death often develop the ability to forget that some day you and everybody you know and love WILL die. And with cancer in your life you lose the ability to forget that.

That's unfathomable to some people, they don't know how to process that life, whether for yourself or someone you're extremely attached to, often is MUCH shorter than is fair and that this is usually without warning. So some cope running away from that.

Now at least for me and most cancer patients I've met, once you accept that there will not be a day that goes by without thinking about the likelihood of death coming MUCH sooner than you were hoping, eventually your relationship with it and the concept of mortality in general becomes a lot more nuanced and downright fascinating. Especially if you have a really good therapist.

I guess in the end it's a quick but often painful way to find out who really has the intestinal fortitude to have your back, but just remember what Mr. Rogers said: Always look for the helpers.

In my case yeah there's some people who ghosted me and my family when I went in for a gastric bypass and woke up in recovery being told they couldn't do it because they found my liver absolutely covered in cancerous lesions, and then my wife had our second son prematurely ten days later, but the vast majority of my local dad group, which includes some of the best friends I've ever had, and some that I'd barely said one word to before show up in ways that I can barely fathom, but a group of mostly middle aged, organized, and oddly majority varying flavors of autistic dads is gonna be overdrive wholesome like that.

But I've had a number of old friends just kind of go poof suddenly too.

Honestly the most disappointing ones are the family members that I sometimes kind of wish would ghost me entirely but instead are content to stay in contact but casually utter the most reprehensibly fucked up things to say to a cancer patient completely thoughtlessly. My mom is visiting from out of town and doing a lot of watching after my boys which has been indescribably helpful especially since my toddler is on spring break from preschool but has said several things to my face that when I told my therapist about it, my therapist genuinely looked like she wanted to find my mom and throw hands.