“I don’t want cancer to define who I am,” Jane said shortly after her diagnosis. “I am more than a cancer patient.”

Jane stayed a human being throughout her battle with the disease. There were times she got angry–times she screamed at me out of frustration and impatience. Those were the times I knew I was talking to the cancer and not my wife. She asked me once about how I stayed so cool when she got angry at me–why I didn’t scream back. I said that to her–and she nodded and smiled. She knew what I was talking about.

Not that there were not times I wanted to scream right back at her. There is an anger and frustration on the caregiver side of the equation as well. But her burden was heavy enough and I would not add to it.

“I don’t want cancer to define who I am.” Those words echo down through the last 15 months–because I have so far failed to live up to them. Cancer did not define who my wife was–but it and grief have very much come to define me. When grief, or my struggle to come to terms with it, does not have me by the throat, my struggle to understand this disease and find new ways to raise awareness about it and fight it consumes me.

“I am more than a widower,” I want to scream at the world. “I am more than a small soldier in the war against this cancer.” But that is too often what I have become: a man lost in grief, a man lost in the fight against the disease that took half his soul away. I want vengeance–but my chance of achieving that vengeance is vanishingly small.

The problem with cancer–among other diseases–is that it does not just destroy the person who has it. It often destroys, in subtle ways, the lives of that person’s loved ones–as it has sometimes been doing with me.

I lost 20 pounds from the day Jane was diagnosed until the day we buried her on the hill next to her mother. But that was the merely one of the physical effects of those days. The mental and emotional damage was far greater. I no longer have the patience I once had. Frustration is a daily companion. Where I once was truly living, I am now–to quote T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral–too often only partly living.

That has to change–or the cancer will have killed us both.

That does not mean this work is going away. I made a vow–and I keep my vows.

But it does mean I have to let go of vengeance and become mindful again. It means I must relearn patience. It means I must let go of anger and embrace love–not romantic love, but the love that is encompassed by the word caritas.

Then I will be more than a widower–more than a small soldier in this war: I will again be a human being–and truly alive.