Twice through
the fire.
Changed both times.

I was thirty-five years old and teaching full-time at an inner-city magnet school, running a writing center for elementary students, when I found the lump. My mother had died just eight months earlier from small cell lung cancer, and I had heard the cancer in her cough months before the doctors confirmed her diagnosis. That same intuitive knowing arrived in me now, certain and quiet, before any physician confirmed what I already understood to be true.

The diagnosis was triple negative breast cancer — the most aggressive and difficult-to-treat form — and the treatment that followed was the kind that strips a person down to her most essential self. Surgery in late August. Four rounds of chemotherapy through the fall, each one separated by three weeks to give my body time to recover. Six weeks of daily radiation after that. I kept teaching through most of it, creating detailed lesson plans for my substitute on the days when I was too sick to stand in front of a classroom, as though refusing to step away entirely could prove something about who I was.

By December the chemotherapy was complete. By the new year I was in radiation. By spring I had been declared cancer-free, and I returned to my life the way I had been taught to return from difficult things: with my head down, my jaw set, and the deepest questions left entirely unexamined. I did not ask what the cancer might have been trying to tell me about how I was living. I went back to work. I began my doctoral program while still teaching full-time. The body keeps the score, and mine was tracking everything I refused to look at, storing it all up for the reckoning that would come twenty-one years later.

The second diagnosis arrived differently from the first. I was fifty-seven years old, and I had lived enough life between the two crossings to understand that what was happening was not simply happening to me. In the ancient Celtic understanding of threshold and passage, any uninvited crossing that strips you down to your essential nature is an initiation — a transformative rite that, if entered with enough consciousness, does not destroy who you are. It reveals who you have always been meant to become.

I sat in the infusion chair with chemotherapy moving through my port, and instead of fighting my way through the crossing the way I had at thirty-five, I turned toward it. I let the questions that had gone unasked for twenty-one years finally surface. I paid attention to what the treatment was asking of me rather than simply enduring what it was doing to my body. And in the sleepless hours between treatments, an idea arrived with the particular clarity that comes at three in the morning when everything unnecessary has been burned away: a tarot deck. Not a deck of comfort or affirmation, but a companion for exactly the kind of crossing I was inside.

Alongside the deck, the memoir began to take shape. Initiated: A Cancer Memoir is structured through the four cycles of the Celtic year — four thresholds that map the arc of the cancer journey as I lived it: the descent into darkness, the first stirrings of return, the full emergence into life, and the harvest of hard-won wisdom. It is the book I needed during both crossings and could not find, written for anyone navigating an uninvited passage of their own. Both the memoir and the deck have been submitted for publication. And for the first time in a very long career of helping others build what they were building, I am building what is mine.