I watched my mama take her last breath, then promptly walked to her bathroom to find her favorite French lipstick…

By the time I was in labor with my third son, I had given up any romanticized notion of a quiet room, lights dimmed low, soft music playing in the background. Throwing birthing plan aside, bringing another human into the world is an in-the-moment thing—internal, singular, rabidly solo, a sacrifice of the body to usher in this unearthly, extraordinary being.

I am here to worship, to set my spirit on something far bigger than myself. But the darkness makes me bold, and my voice begins to rise as if I am the center of this moment and this is my concert crowd.

Perfect darkness. Reinforced steel concrete walls measuring two feet thick. The inside is daunting, never mind the three-and-a-half foot wide steel clad combination door that gives access to the chamber within.

On the rare Saturdays when my mama would release me from my chores, we’d pile in my denim blue, ’63 VW convertible and head to the beach.

As a child I would join my friends and we’d run to the banks of the overflowing creeks just after the rain and catch crawdads.

You would think that a man on a mission would move quickly through the crowds.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” I start, and sentences so often refuse to form.

Sometimes I would sit right down in the middle of the dust and cry.

In the early mornings we’d run through the vineyards until he’d plop down in the mustard blooms, his black coat covered in yellow.

I stood in the center of the March morning and I wept. Not because it was snowing in March.

My mama died of pancreatic cancer. My daddy, a ruptured aorta.

When everything done in your humanness seems inadequate, trust that the answers will come.

Life’s surprises are sometimes packaged as 4am wakeup calls, when the body tells the mind that something is terribly wrong.

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked for details. But I did.

I place my hands on my sides, thumbs resting just below the back of my ribcage. “Here,” I ask? “Right there,” he replies.

I begin my day with coffee but not the drinking kind.

I have always admired those who take a long breath when hard news comes.

I'm not quite dead yet.* In fact, on this other side of life with cancer there is so much life ahead.

We count out twenty and I feel the burn like the back of my legs are giving out. Then comes this far off voice whispering, “cancer.”