Sometimes the story is dark

My life is full of light: family, friends, children, cats, dogs, houseplants, books, music . . . I live in the light of loving kindness, of good humor, good healing, of creativity, and compassion.  Most of my days are good days, reasonably painless, reasonably happy. 

I’ve been a breast cancer patient for more than fifteen years, the majority of my adult life. I have made my own peace with this disease, with the side-effects of treatment, with what it means to be a deathless soul confined to a fragile and finite vessel made of blood, sweat, and tears. My darkness is not the needle, the knife, the chemo. My darkness is not physical nor existential, but uniquely American. 

What I never knew until 2022 was that when you get sick and go broke in America, your life quickly becomes very political.  After a bad diagnosis, an abusive relationship, and a ruinous divorce, I found myself suddenly in need of Disability and Medicare. 

Until then, I never knew that in America, the line between “enough” and “nothing” is threadbare. I never knew that your work experience, your degrees, your publications, your taxes and your basic goodness don’t mean shit to abusers, to fascists, to billionaires who are using the American Healthcare System as their own personal experiment in eugenics. 

The thing I never knew, until I got sick and poor in America, is that there is rest for the wicked – just none for the rest of us. The thing I never knew was that even if you have Stage IV cancer, you will be required to labor, and you will labor to hand the lion’s share of your earnings, every fruit of your labor, back to the very people who have made your very existence a pawn in their genocidal games. And they tell you to be thankful for the money they let you keep, which is maybe enough to afford two days worth of groceries, and seldom enough to keep the lights on. 

In order to survive cancer in America, I have jobs where I work for money, and jobs where I work for free – on the phone with pharmacies, insurance companies, the cancer center’s financial aid department. Because I have cancer in America, I once had a profession, a car, and took vacations, but now take on jobs just to afford food and rent. 

I work after surgeries, infusions, Ibrance cycles that leave me with little energy and roughly three white blood cells to spare. I work when I’m queasy, headachy, fluish, I work before the sutures are dissolved, before the CT scans are read, before figuring out how I’m going to pay for next month’s meds, like the oral chemo which retails for $15,888 per 21 day cycle. 

My darkness is in knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way, but that the entire American Healthcare system has been handed over to junkies with famous last names, ketamine addled tech bros, racist billionaires, morally bereft physicians who wish to use it all to conduct their very own experiments in eugenics. 

My darkness is the worry that wakes me wondering if my Disability payments will come through this month, or if the sadistic impulse of some government fascist will render me frantically scrambling to figure out how I’ll get my next round of cancer meds, afford to feed myself, afford to live. 

My darkness has last names – Trump, Kennedy, Oz. My darkness has acronyms like MAGA and MAHA. My darkness is anti-science, anti-region, anti-life and comes from my insurance premiums that jumped from $30 to $300 a month. And those premiums come from Trump, or Kennedy, or Oz. Or some other fascist with too much money and power. Or some American so sick on white supremacy, so delirious with cash and clout,  so brainwashed by propaganda, they have forgotten how to feel human. 

Labor for food,  infusions, for pills. Suffer the menacing side-effects of chemotherapy, capitalism, and America under MAGA rule. Keep your heart and soul in the light – the friends, the cats, the houseplants – and your faith in a foggy hope that this too shall pass, and the richest country on earth will come to its senses, its humanity. That my premiums will shrink back down. That no cancer drug will cost $15,888. That Disability payments will rise commensurate with the cost of living. That my country will say to me, “Dude! What are you doing with all these jobs? With all this darkness? You have Stage IV cancer, you need to rest, to relax, to heal.” 

In service of the light, I keep this hope alive. I do my meditations, I say my prayers, and know to keep breathing deeply, because rest is nowhere on the horizon, and that shred of hope I cling to, alongside my fellow Americans, is not visible on any horizon, and I don’t have time to hold my breath. 

~A.T. GRUBER 2026