Episode 3: Reset. Reframe. Reclaim.
by Ditas Katague
An essay on the forty-six terrifying days that stripped everything away: about the thing I convinced myself I did not want because I had already decided I could not have it, and what it means to finally, honestly, reclaim a life that belongs to me.
That was May 1st. The day it got a name.
Between that first CT scan and June 1st, forty-six days in all, time stood still.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
I could not bid on new work. How do you sign a contract when you do not know if you will be able to deliver? I could not make travel plans to DC to help Carenna move to Philadelphia. I could not book the trip to the Philippines I had been planning for November. Everything that required a future was on hold. Because I did not yet know if I had the future I was planning for.
I do not entirely know how I got through those forty-six days.
I unpacked.
That is the honest answer. I moved back into my East Sacramento home after nine months of nomadic life, housesitting, driving across the country with Leif, living out of boxes, and I unpacked. I ordered a new bed. An adjustable frame. Just in case surgery required it. I rushed to get the heavy boxes emptied and sorted before a potential operation made lifting impossible.
I was reclaiming my home with both hands while simultaneously preparing to have part of my body removed.
That is what those forty-six days looked like from the inside. Not brave. Not graceful. Just one box at a time. One drawer at a time. One room at a time. Because it was the only thing I could control.
The biopsy had been scheduled for June 15th.
I could not wait six weeks. I simply could not.
So I did what I do. I made calls. I sent emails. I pulled every thread I could find. And I was blessed, genuinely and specifically blessed, by a friend who helped me get that biopsy moved to the end of May, to when Carenna was home visiting.
After weeks of protecting her. Of carrying this alone. Of sitting in a graduation audience in Washington, DC holding a secret so heavy it had its own weight.
I wanted her there. When I went in. And when I came out.
And she was.
*
But first: Carenna's graduation.
I was scheduled to fly to Washington DC on May 13th. My daughter, who lost her father to cancer when she was nine years old, was about to walk across a stage and receive her degree. Summa cum laude. The culmination of everything she had worked for. The moment I had been looking forward to for years.
And I was going to be sitting in that audience carrying a potential cancer diagnosis I had not told her about.
The question that consumed me in those weeks was not about surgery or chemotherapy or biopsy queues.
It was simpler than that. And harder.
How do I tell her?
And the answer I kept coming back to, the only answer that felt right, was:
Not yet. Not until I know more. Not until I can hand her information instead of fear.
So I packed my bag. And I got on the plane. And I watched my daughter walk across that stage, brilliant, beautiful, summa cum laude Carenna, and I clapped and I cried and I held her and I did not say a word.
Because some things you carry alone for a little while longer. Out of love.
Because she had enough to carry already.
I was beyond proud.
I had brought Lolo, my father, 91 and a half years old, on this cross country journey to witness this moment. Think about that. Ninety-one and a half years old, crossing the country to watch his granddaughter walk across that stage.
We did it. I did it. We got Carenna through this extraordinary milestone.
And yet, these huge moments, the ones you have been waiting for, the ones you have worked toward and sacrificed for and held on for, they have a particular bittersweet quality when someone who should have been there is not.
Nick would have been so proud.
He did not get to see her walk that stage. Summa cum laude. His daughter. The little girl who was nine years old when he died, now a young woman receiving her degree with highest honors. And this fall, heading to the Ivy League. The University of Pennsylvania for her master's degree.
I sat in that audience, holding a secret I could not yet share, watching my father watch his granddaughter, feeling the fullness and the absence simultaneously, and I thought:
This is what grief looks like fourteen years later.
Not the acute, raw, shattering grief of the early years. But this. The quiet ache at the edges of joy. The empty chair you learn to see without being destroyed by it.
The bittersweet that becomes, over time, simply part of how love feels.
*
June 1st. A Monday. Late afternoon.
4:44pm.
I was in the kitchen making dinner when my phone rang. The Drs office on the caller ID. I knew immediately.
It was the Dr.
He said the pathology results were back. And then he said a word I did not recognize.
Serous cystadenoma.
A serious what?
No. Serous. Without the i. S-E-R-O-U-S. Cystadenoma.
I made him repeat it. And then I asked him: what is that?
He explained. A rare benign pancreatic tumor. Arising from ductal epithelial cells. Accounts for approximately one to two percent of all pancreatic tumors. Happens most often in women. Somewhat related to ovarian cysts.
And then he said the words I had been waiting forty-six days to hear:
The most important thing is: it is benign.
I said the word back to him like a question.
Benign?
As in, not cancer?
As in, not pancreatic adenocarcinoma?
Yes.
I exhaled. For what felt like the first time since April 16th.
And then, because I am who I am, I asked him again.
Triple check. Triple check this is confirmed benign and not PAC.
I could tell he was smiling on the other end of the phone.
Yes. Triple confirmed.
No surgery needed at this time. Only if symptoms present. A follow-up CT scan in six months to monitor.
I stood in my kitchen for a moment.
And then I called Carenna.
*
My therapist Dalia gave me three words after June 1st.
Reset. Reframe. Reclaim.
I have been sitting with them ever since.
Reset. Not back to before April 16th. You cannot reset to before. You can only reset toward something. Toward the life you are deliberately choosing now that you know what forty-six terrifying days of not knowing feels like. Toward Pilates and moon ceremonies and estate sale treasures and creme brulee French toast on a back deck sanctuary on the Fourth of July. Toward Sacramento. Toward home. Toward yourself.
Reframe. The car accident was not a catastrophe. It was a CT scan. The CT scan was not a death sentence. It was a finding. The finding was not cancer. It was a benign cyst that had been quietly sitting in the tail of my pancreas, probably for years, waiting to be found. And the forty-six terrifying days of not knowing were not cruelty. They were the thing that stripped everything away. The most clarifying forty-six days of my life since Nick died.
Because here is what became clear:
I have spent fourteen years learning to be worthy of being seen. And I have been hiding in the one place that matters most.
Not in my career. Not in my community. Not in my grief or my healing or my motherhood or my wellness practice.
In love.
In the specific, tender, chosen kind of being seen that Nick gave me. The kind I have been quietly, lovingly, understandably, protectively closing the door on ever since.
I told myself I was protecting Carenna. And I was. That part is true and real and fierce and beautiful. I moved heaven and earth to get that biopsy moved so she could be there when I went in and when I came out. Because after weeks of carrying this alone, I needed my daughter.
But Dalia helped me see something I had not been willing to see.
Protecting Carenna became a place to live.
A reason not to have enough bandwidth, emotional or otherwise, to seek companionship. Partnership. Dare I say it. Romantic love.
As long as she needed me most, I did not have to answer the harder question.
Do I believe I deserve to be chosen again?
And the honest answer, the one the forty-six terrifying days forced out of me in those quiet evenings when the research stopped and the fear moved in, is that I do not know.
I know I am capable. I know I am resilient. I know I can carry things and build things and heal things and advocate for things and teach and create and lead and love fiercely from a distance.
What I do not know, what I am only beginning to allow myself to ask, is whether I believe I am worth the ordinary kind of love.
Not the crisis love. Not the showing up when things are hard love. I have that. I am surrounded by it.
The Tuesday evening love. The hand on the back in the dark love. The someone already there when the phone rings with news that changes everything love.
That is what was missing.
And I had never let myself name it before.
A potential cancer diagnosis has a way of burning through everything you have been pretending is enough.
So here I am. Naming it.
Not because I have figured out how to open the door. Not because I have stopped being afraid of what loving again might cost me. Not because I have resolved the Carenna piece or the worthiness piece or the what-do-I-need-that-I-cannot-give-myself piece.
But because this essay is me making the space I wish someone had made for me.
And this, this quiet, terrifying, years-in-the-making naming of what I actually want, is the most courageous thing I have written in this entire series.
More courageous than the essay about fourteen years of grief. More courageous than the blog written from inside a potential cancer diagnosis. More courageous than triple-checking benign with a smiling doctor on the other end of the phone.
Reclaim.
I am reclaiming my home. My practice. My body. My joy.
And I am, slowly, imperfectly, with more questions than answers, beginning to reclaim the possibility that I am worth seeing in the one place I have been hiding.
*
So dear reader.
Is there something you have been hiding from?
Not in your career. Not in your friendships. Not in the brave public facing parts of your life that everyone can see and celebrate and applaud.
But in the quiet place. The private interior place. The place where the research stops and the fear moves in and you are alone with whatever your version of Leif is, your dog, your journal, your midnight ceiling, and you think things you do not say out loud to anyone.
Is there something you want that you have been pretending is not there?
Because here is what I have learned about myself in the forty-six terrifying days between April 16th and June 1st, forty-six days of not knowing, of looking at my dog in the evening and thinking he might outlive me:
You convince yourself you do not want what you think you cannot have.
Not consciously. Not in a single decisive moment. But slowly, quietly, over fourteen years of widowhood and motherhood and building and achieving and healing, I decided it was not available to me. And then I talked myself out of wanting it. So I would not have to feel the loss of it.
If I decide it is not available to me, I do not have to feel the loss of it.
That is the protection. That is the armor. That is what I have been wearing so long I forgot it was armor and started thinking it was just me.
It is not just me.
And I am not sure it is just you either.
So I will ask you one more time, the way I had to ask myself, gently, without judgment, with all the love of a woman who has been hiding in the same place you might be hiding:
What do you want?
Not what is realistic. Not what you tell your friends. Not what you have convinced yourself is enough.
What do you actually want?
The naming is the intention.
And intention, chosen, deliberate, terrifying, imperfect intention, is where you begin to make the space.
You are worth seeing.
In all the places you have been hiding.
Even there. Especially there.
Make the space. Name the thing. Begin.
*
Every detour was the path.