Troubled times on the widower front

The battle against NET cancer has been especially hard for me these last few months. While it seems we are making progress on the disease and that we more than met our fundraising targets for the year, I have been plagued by doubts about the time I spend writing and working on this site.

I want NET cancer dead.

In nearly 17 months only nine items have garnered more than 100 views. And where once we were averaging nearly 40 views per day, December averaged but nine. Every NET cancer post takes three hours to write–and never mind the time to do the research and find appropriate links. Every article I read or video I view takes at least a half an hour–and too many contain nothing new or useful. The few comments people write are generic or clearly spam. And the search engines routinely avoid us despite every method I use to move us up the ranks.

NET cancer voices

There have been moments at which I have wanted to chuck it all and walk away. Surely I could be making better use of my time than doing what I am doing.

I have seen too closely what cancer does…

And then I get a note or a Tweet from someone. They’ve just been diagnosed with NET cancer or have suffered from Irritable Bowel Syndrome for years or were looking for a doctor or a program or a support group. What they found here gave them hope or helped them better understand the peculiar cancer they face.

That has happened twice this week. Their voices have pulled me out of a part of the funk that has plagued me since mid-November. There is, ultimately, a point to what I am doing here. And if I can help even one person a month that should be enough.

The other side of NET cancer

But for the larger awfulness, there is little they–or anyone else–can do. I have written here before about the deep pain losing Jane has caused me. I have written before about that empty void that no words or acts or hugs can fill–about the long and painful silences that infest this house at night–and that pursue me even into the most joyful and filled rooms I enter.

And then I get a note or a Tweet…

That pain, too, drives me. I have seen too closely what cancer does to a human being. I have witnessed the growing weakness, the loss of dignity, the struggle that is heroic in its hopelessness. I have seen too closely what that death does to the surviving spouse. I know too well what it is to look across 30 or 50 or 60 years of life beyond the moment of widowhood and see nothing there but an empty house and an emptier soul.

I want NET cancer dead

I want NET cancer dead. I want lung cancer dead. I want all cancers dead. I want them dead so couples and families have more time together to laugh and to sing and to do all the inconsequential little things that make a life together.

I have been plagued by doubts…

And if I can play even a tiny part in making that happen then, perhaps, how ever many empty years lie ahead of me, there will be some point in what Jane and I have gone through.