When I first learned of the disease, my initial thought was the same as everyone else’s.
“Am I going to die?”
It’s the first thought we all have when confronted with a cancer like mine. I remember that my next thoughts were about my wife and kids, and whether they might be taken from me, or me from them, and if there was anything I could do about it. No one knew for sure. We didn’t have enough information. We needed to run more tests and create a plan to fight back.
Then came this first bit of good news. My cancer, though serious, was not terminal. Beating it was going to be tough, and the process of curing myself would be filled with all kinds of awful but necessary treatments. To endure those treatments, I would have to find something powerful within myself. I would have to find the will to do incredibly difficult things, incredibly painful things, if I wanted to survive.
Had I decided that I could not do those difficult things, or had I decided that it was someone else’s responsibility to cure this cancer, I’d be dead by now. My kids would have lost a father, my wife a husband, my mother a son, and so on. And all the future good I could do would have been lost. And the responsibility to determine which outcome would become real, that was entirely on me. If I wanted to live, I’d have to find the courage to do so.
I chose to fight. In fact, it was an easy choice. There are so many wonderful things in my life to fight for, so many things that are good and pure and decent, and I just refuse to let them go. And once I made that choice, I found out very quickly that I was not alone. I had people, many more than I ever knew, and they started coming out from everywhere, from my neighborhood, from my workplace, even from my past, to let me know that they would join me in the fight in the ways that they could, that while the burden was still mine, I need not carry it without help. I carried it, but at times, they carried me.
Today, I’m in the later stages of my treatment. I’m winning the fight, and the cancer is diminishing significantly with each passing day. Soon, it will be entirely gone. This has been a terribly difficult process, and I can’t lie; there were moments when I didn’t think I would make it. But human beings can do the impossible when we work together and lift each other up. Whether we’re building great big things, launching astronauts into space, or someday soon curing all cancer, none of the accomplishments will belong to one person alone. They will be shared by everyone who rolled up their sleeves and got a little dirty for the right reasons. I will survive, but I will do so because we refused to let me die.
That, my friends, is America.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.