There has been a lot of noise about Kate Bowler’s book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. And rightly so. In it she is incredibly honest about what it is like to live with a cancer diagnosis. How difficult it is to go through treatment, cope with friends’ and family members’ processing, as well as receiving endless explanations from strangers about why she has cancer (she wrote an article for the New York Times).

Knowing about my Unmasked blog series, Kate’s publicist and publisher offered me the chance to share an extract of my choice from the book. It feels especially poignant to be doing this now, as just last week I lost a dear friend to cancer. I am certain that she is now fully pain-free, and with her Saviour, but for those of us who are left behind we mourn and grieve. I am so grateful for those moments that I was able to share with her in her last days. Grateful too for this book, as it taught me how important touch is – and so I remembered to reach out and give my friend a hug as I said goodbye for what turned out to be the last time. It’s also taught me that grief starts early, which I am finding in another situation I am currently experiencing.

I know cancer is a particularly emotive subject, and full of pain for many. I hope that Kate’s naked honesty, and sprinkling of humour, will help others to understand what it is really like for those with cancer – and how we can be better at supporting them even as we process the emotional pain ourselves. Over to Kate…

There must be rhythms to grief, but I do not know them.

People begin to take their turns grieving me because it can’t be done all at once. Family and friends who could not be at the hospital for my operation come to stay at the house, and we start all over at the beginning.

I sit outside, wrapped in the same blankets and taking in the sunshine, all my favorite people orbiting around me. My pastor takes out her Psalms and reads a little, gripping my hand. My mom cooks a lot, stocking the freezer with everything that is suggested to be anticancer. My older sister, Amy, sends treats and constant encouragement, while Maria, my younger sister, gives me her words when she can’t be there, sending me poems and bits of trivia from New York, where she is working as an editor for a Catholic magazine. She has two big hopes for me: one, that I will be cured; the other, that, before it is over, I will punch the nearest inconsiderate person in the face.

I have so many fears, spoken and unspoken. When I first got my job at Duke and realized that I was going to live in the United States for some time, I made a lot of loud protestations about how “I will not die in a foreign land!” I also made clear that I would not die in my office, not only because that had happened before to professors (prone, as they are, to get preoccupied by their research) but also because it seemed sad, at twenty-nine, to feel exiled to the Land of Opportunity for eternity. I think back on how I casually strategized about where I would be buried, concerned that I would never be able to reconcile all the parts of my identity. A daughter who lives far from family. A friend who spends too much time at work. A wanderer but a type A planner. I wondered if I would ever be one, whole person. But now I am not hoping for completeness of any kind. All I can think of are the logistics. One night I wake up almost every hour because my mind has seized on a horrible question: Wouldn’t it be a paperwork nightmare to move my body? To take me home?

When I teach pastors at the seminary where I work, I lecture them about the First Great Awakening and religious responses to the Civil War and how their political differences will ruin their next Thanksgiving if they don’t learn to shut their traps. But as a historian, I have never spent any time teaching them how to perform baptisms, officiate weddings, or conduct funerals. And I have certainly never told them what to say when they visit someone who is dying and how not to sit on her couch, mouth full of cookies, and ask endless questions about how cancer treatment works. I did not tell them how few of their words are needed but how much their hands are wanted, a hand on my back as I tear up, a hand on my head for a soft prayer for healing. When I feel I am fading away, these hands prop me up and make me new. When my older colleague Frank, who lost his own adult son, found his way into my hospital room, he wrapped his strong hands around mine and said, quietly: “I wore this clerical collar to impress you. And also to get through hospital security.”

Kate Bowler is an assistant professor in the school of divinity at Duke University. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and son. Currently the experimental immunology treatment she is undergoing is working, and studies suggest Kate has at least another year to live.