Editor’s Note: This post documents events from June 2025. I’m writing from the other side of treatment, but as any survivor knows, “the other side” doesn’t mean finished. It means still fighting, still watching, still trusting. — Scott
Two days. That’s how long it had been since the doctor delivered the news. Only forty-eight hours since the total breakdown in the living room where Barb and I had to look our daughters in the eyes and tell them their dad had throat cancer.
The weight of it was suffocating. The mind runs at full throttle when you’re forty-eight hours out. You haven’t started treatments yet, you don’t have a plan, you just have a terrifying word echoing in your head. But somewhere in those frantic, sleepless hours, a decision had already been made in my soul: Fuck cancer. I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I didn’t know Emma Grace had already joined the army.
The night before, she’d asked me what the head and neck cancer ribbon colors were. Just asked it casual, the way kids do. Filed it away, said okay, and never brought it up again. I had to look them up myself. Ivory and burgundy.
Should’ve known better.
That Saturday was an attempt at survival. I got home from the night shift, took a nap so I could at least be halfway human, and the kids all came by. We were trying so hard to pretend the sky wasn’t falling. I fired up the grill, threw some hamburgers on, tossed some roller dogs alongside them — rectal rockets, for the uninitiated — and we just sat around the porch. The air was heavy, everyone walking on eggshells, just trying to enjoy each other because suddenly, “each other” was all that mattered.
Emma Grace was over at the table making bracelets. Creative kid with her craft running wide open. I watched her for a minute, just grateful for the quiet distraction of a kid being a kid.
Then she walked over and handed it to me without a word.
I looked down at my hand. Ivory and burgundy beads. And right in the middle, letter blocks strung onto the cord one at a time by a 12-year-old girl who’d seen her Papa break down two days before and decided she wasn’t having it.
F-U-C-K C-A-N-C-E-R.
I froze. I don’t know how long I sat there. The backyard noise just faded out.
The tears came and I wasn’t going to stop them. Barb saw it first, but everybody saw it. Forty-eight hours of terror and bottled-up grief just poured out of me. But it wasn’t just sadness anymore. It was relief.
I looked at Emma. She smiled. Not a surprised smile. A satisfied one.
Mission accomplished. She’d set out to do something for her Papa, to give him the words he didn’t know how to say yet, and she’d done it.
That phrase — fuck cancer — it belongs to everybody now. You see it on shirts, bumper stickers, hospital waiting rooms. It belongs to anyone who has ever sat across from a doctor waiting for words that could change everything, or held somebody’s hand through treatment, or just felt completely helpless in the face of something they couldn’t fight with their fists. Emma Grace was 12. She didn’t know all that history.
She understood all of it anyway.
Two days before, when Barb and I gave the girls the news, she disappeared. Just slipped out of the room while the rest of us came apart. I let her go. Some things a kid works out on her own time, not yours. Turns out she’d been working on it the whole time — just not with words.
The bracelet doesn’t live on my wrist anymore. I wore it proudly the day I got the all-clear. I wore it again after my first clean PET scan. But I work the night shift, throwing freight and moving rigs, and I couldn’t stand the thought of those plastic beads getting snapped or ruined out in the dark.
So now, it sits on my headboard.
It rests right next to a picture of Emma and me. There are a few other things up there too, things Kristen gave me along the way — little anchors from the people who carried me through when the water got deep.
Every single day when I wake up, I look at that ivory and burgundy cord. I think about a little girl who asked about ribbon colors and didn’t say why. Who sat at a porch table two days after the world shifted, using her own two hands to tell her Papa exactly how we were going to fight the thing that was trying to take him.
We won that fight. And I will never get rid of it.
Until Next Time, stay strong.
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” — Philippians 4:13
