Widening The Lens: What Illness Has Taught Me About Presence, Memory, and Time

Each photograph is lined with a thin layer of dust that clings to my fingers. I flip through them slowly. I grasp at the last twenty-four years preserved in four-by-six rectangles, as if the strength of my grip were enough to rescue what had been lost between then and now. I set aside a small pile to keep for myself, almost always candids. 

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Photos of me between zero and three, before I learned how to arrange my face into a smile that could hide pain.

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Photos of my grandparents, taken before travel became impossible and grief began slowly wearing down their bodies.

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Photos of my cousin Lori, radiant and mid-laugh, before she was killed by a man fleeing police at one hundred miles an hour.

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When her daughter called me screaming one fall evening during my junior year of college, I understood before she could form the words. Something inside me split open.

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Even now, Lori’s laughter echoes somewhere in memory, softened by the years but never completely gone.

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And then there are the photos of my father.

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His scrappy tank tops. His muscular arms. His smile beside mine, different, but the same. Looking at him now, frozen in film, my chest burns. For years after his suicide, I avoided thinking about him. Avoidance was easier than acknowledging the hole his absence carved in me. In the photos he took of me and my sister, I still feel his loving gaze in their angle and light as if his eyes were the lens.

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As I sit on the floor, surrounded by fragments of the past, I think I am reminiscing. In truth, I am reaching back, desperate to pull memories forward. Since cancer entered my life, I’ve been reaching for everything at once.

 

Cancer has made control feel like oxygen. My body thirsts for it and panics when it is not present. So, I divide time, preserving the past and obsessing over the future. I do all of this in the hope that if I manage the narrative tightly enough, I can change or, at least, soften, the outcome. 

 

I have learned, however, that time, following a cancer diagnosis, fractures our identities. In this fracture, control becomes both an obsession and an illusion. I obsess over the control I do not have even if this control is unattainable. 

 

Cancer is a ruthless teacher that has taught me where and when control of my own becomes unattainable. The disease exposes the limits of resistance, dismantling the illusion that if I am vigilant enough, informed enough, strong enough, I can prevent loss. My illness has forced me to confront what I have spent much of my life avoiding: there are things that I cannot save. 

 

The hours I spend looking at these photos pull me into a vulnerable immersion in memory, one that feels both dangerous and necessary. I used to think of my life as a tide: rolling in and out, crashing and foaming, but ultimately continuous. My cancer diagnosis has shattered this sense of continuity. Time splits in two: before cancer and after cancer.

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Before cancer, I believed I had control, even when I didn´t. Now, I understand just how fragile that belief always was.

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There were losses before my diagnosis — deaths that shook me and reminded me that life is not predictable. But nothing dismantled my sense of control the way cancer has. It has rearranged not only my body, but my understanding of time, identity, and possibility.

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When I look at the girl in the photographs — wide-eyed, smiling without effort, convinced she could become anything — I feel an almost desperate need to protect her. I keep her separate from the cancer narrative, as if allowing the two to meet would contaminate her innocence. I draw a hard line between who I was and who I am now, because imagining that little girl growing into this diagnosis brings me to my knees.

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So I try to preserve her. I try to protect the people around me from my illness. I try to manage every variable, research every option, anticipate every outcome. I try to outrun pain by pretending it is temporary, unreal, reversible.

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I try and I try and I try.

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Only recently have I begun to recognize the pattern: this obsessive circuit is not strength. It is my mind grasping for control in a reality that cancer has shattered. I am trying to secure a present that feels unstable and salvage a future that no longer feels guaranteed.

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“Memory cannot become immobility.” I repeat the sentence to myself.

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Cancer tempts me to live everywhere but here. Some days I ache to return to the version of myself untouched by diagnosis. Other days I want to fast-forward past treatment, past uncertainty, into some imagined clarity, even if that means death. But presence requires something far more difficult: feeling both joy and fear without trying to eliminate either.

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After my father died, I once convinced myself that I could have saved him. I replayed the past obsessively, searching for a different ending.

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If I had stayed with him in the living room instead of going up to my room. If I hadn’t let us sit in silence after he told me, his hands shaking on the steering wheel of his minivan, that he was lost. I heard the desperation in his voice and said nothing. If only I had turned around and gone down the basement steps when I felt the house shake and saw the couch sitting empty. If only I had told him I loved him one last time. 

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Time and therapy eventually taught me that there are limits to what love can control. 

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Cancer extends this lesson inward. My inability to save everyone includes an inability to guarantee my own survival. That truth is devastating, but it is also clarifying. Mortality is not a concept reserved for other people. It is mine, too.

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And yet, within that inevitability, there is still agency. I cannot control the existence of this disease, nor can I undo its presence in my life. What I can control, however, is whether memory immobilizes me in the past or steadies me in the future. 

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I cannot save everyone. I may not even be able to save myself. But I can choose to live the time I have — not in resistance to reality, but awake within it.

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For much of the time between childhood and my diagnosis, I lived half asleep. I suspect most of us do. Our vision narrows to numbers, expectations, and the quiet tyranny of the “shoulds.” What should I accomplish? What should I become? I chased academic perfection so intently that the small joys of living slipped outside my field of vision.

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During my university years, that lens began to widen. The same studies I once pursued with rigid perfection slowly transformed into passions: teaching, advocacy, writing, and above all, literature. Through the voices of Sappho, Rumi, Storni, Pizarnik, Neruda, Benedetti, García Márquez, Lorde, Woolf, Angelou, Oliver, and so many others, I encountered something my narrowed vision had overlooked: love, the profound, intense, yet unconditional sort. 

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As my eyes focused on the small text of each page, my perspective widened. Those voices reminded me that life is a measure of presence, rather than precision or perfection.

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When the gravity of my prognosis began orbiting me like burning asteroids, I clung to those words. They helped me refocus my life on what mattered most. It was at my most fragile — at the moment when my body was weakest and my future most uncertain — that I began to live, truly, with my eyes open.

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There is an irony in this. Many of us do not widen our lens until our film begins to run low.

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When the lens widens, we begin to see things we never anticipated. Some of them are difficult truths about mortality. Others are gentler gifts. Now and then, life places someone in our path we never expected to meet, and suddenly the world rearranges itself in ways neither of us planned. Love, it turns out, does not always arrive in the places society thinks it should. But when it does arrive, unmistakably and without warning, it reminds us that life is still capable of astonishing grace.

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When I look back now, I smile more often than I cry. I remember wandering the streets of Lisbon late at night, lost and alone with a dead phone in one hand, the other counting bridge posts until I found my way back to the hostel. I remember taking a taxi to Charles de Gaulle instead of Orly and spending the night on an airport bench in Paris, convinced my world was falling apart because my fresh cheese would spoil and I would miss Monday’s class.

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At the time, these moments felt like disasters. Now they are among my favorite stories to tell.

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In the moment, we zoom in, desperate to keep the pieces of our lives from falling apart. But when we look back, we often realize that what felt like failure was simply life unfolding.

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My days look different now. I am no longer wandering unfamiliar streets at midnight or sleeping on airport benches. Most days I am home: writing, reading, cooking, creating with my hands, playing with my dog. Half my week is spent in virtual doctors’ appointments, and all of it is shaped by the chronic pain of bone metastases.

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But my lens remains wide.

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I am still ready for the next overseas flight, but I am equally present in the subtle candids of everyday life. The sunset resting above the icy pond outside my new home — the same pond where my father once taught me to fish — feels just as expansive, if not more so, as any distant city.

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Slowly, I reconstruct the continuity that my diagnosis once shattered.

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Sometimes I imagine the younger version of myself watching the life I live now. I hope she would recognize that the path looks different not because I failed her expectations, but because life — unpredictable, imperfect, and unfinished — asked something different of me.

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Memory allows us to see that difference with compassion.

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It reminds us that the person we are today is not a betrayal of who we once hoped to be, but the result of all the roads, losses, and loves that carried us here. 

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Looking at the old photographs now, I no longer see only what has been lost between then and now. I see proof that I have lived through joy, devastation, love, and change. I see that, through it all, I kept moving.

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The mountains my father loved to photograph always appeared solid from a distance. Up close, they are carved by wind, weathered by storms, shaped by forces they cannot resist. Their strength does not lie in resisting erosion, but in enduring it.

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Cancer has stripped me of the illusion that I control time, outcomes, or even my own mortality. Yet it has also taught me something my father’s photographs always revealed: continuance, rather than permanence, is what makes something strong. 

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I shall not treat memory like a vault where I preserve untouched versions of myself and the people I love. Memory is something I carry as I walk forward. 

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I cannot save everyone. I cannot freeze time. I cannot return to the girl smiling in those photographs. But like the mountains that remain after the storms that shape them, I can endure what life carves into me.