By Morgan Louise Daehn 
I have never suffered so much grief as I did through my battle with cancer. But grief wasn’t there to walk a worsening Morgan home to wherever we go after this life. Grief held me as I got better, healed, gained my strength back, and started a bright and shiny new life made of all the things I ever wanted. Compassionate and romantic partnership. Aligned networking. A path toward a fulfilling career. Safety and adventure—at the same time.
I learned that grief isn’t picky about when it appears, so long as an ending is transpiring. It needn’t be an ending of something defined by love . . . the loss of a loved one, the growing apart of friends, a break up with a partner. Grief comes whenever we are tasked with a death, be it literal or metaphorical, whether the ending is to our benefit or our detriment. And this, I have found, is complicated.
As humans, we often find comfort in black-and-white explanations and the things we can easily understand. Grief is two truths at the same time, creating an infinite spectrum of gray. It is therefore easy to become distorted by the many colors of grief when the world only recognizes two: black and white.
Grief isn’t saved solely for the endings of that which we wanted to hold onto longer. Grief is intimately connected with endings of all kinds, falling somewhere on that endless spectrum of the reality of grief.
In my experience, the self-proclaimed wrongness of the grief I felt meant I had to stay with it, and it with me, longer. I’ve known bright white shining down over my life, casting away any shadow of doubt and bringing everything hidden to light with unwavering clarity. I’ve also known the black cavernous moments, spaces that held secrets so deeply in their depths. Both are equally unnerving, but no one tells you about the vast, infinite, looming void that is yours and yours alone to traverse, hoping to find a definition for your experience. The gray.
Grief met me first after my diagnosis in contrasting black and white. But I met it unexpectedly again when, after a determined battle, I was declared cancer-free. I was grieving the death of what my life was before my diagnosis while evading the death that had been entirely possible until that point. If the doctor had seen my reaction, witnessed my grieving at the confirmation of color returning to my cheeks, he might have wondered if he saved the wrong patient. To him, I would have said this:
Just as I have grieved relationships that should have never started, opportunities that weren’t meant to be, and the ever-evolving “girl I once was,” I grieve this cancer that took me by surprise and turned my life into something entirely different, that reinforced the constant cycle of that girl who once was.
On the other side of cancer, I can appreciate how lucky I was in comparison to most, and how supported I was from its inception to its death. I can also grieve the new lease on life I was given because it means that the old way of being must go. Saying goodbye to a Morgan comfortable with the uncomfortable, birthed out of fear, is just as hard as saying goodbye to cancer and hello to the beautiful, wide-open unknown.
That said, grief is without rules, death is unavoidable, and life is meant to be lived fully. I will forever exist in the infinite gray. The place without limits, that some misunderstand. But if there’s infinite grief, then there’s infinite joy out there too.
by Angela Hampton 
by Lacy Lain 
by Nancy Brier 
