The past few months have been challenging to say the least. Battling pain, fatigue and too much time spent in acute medical settings. But above that horror, most of all, I’m feeling lost.

It’s hard to know how to navigate this cancer journey, hard to know how to find my way through all of the multitude of choices, to know how to live as fully as I yearn to, whilst also accepting the new limitations of my body.

And here’s where I search for path-setters, for the ones who went before who can show me the way to do this, or at least, leave a hint of a route. And here’s where I find a huge void…in our death phobic society, we have many tales of bad deaths, many horror stories that flood the news and fuel the assisted suicide debate.

There are also many of folk who overcame illness with power of their mind, wheatgrass juice, coffee enemas, just buy my book and I’ll tell you the secret…but frighteningly few of living well, with and through illness and into dying times.

I’m not looking for battle stories, for those who “fought bravely” to the end. I don’t want to spend the years I have left fighting. I guess what we need more is stories of living in balance, in grace, of holding hope and reality at the same time.

I’m re-reading the wonder filled “Die Wise” by Stephen Jenkinson and he talks much of the desire for “more time”…we all want that, right? I’m given my more-time by fearsome drugs that didn’t exist a few years ago. Only a generation or two back, my cancer would have been a death sentence.

Now, like many, I’m living with the gift of more time…yet lost in confusion and doubt. There are many days when I feel I’m wasting this opportunity of the more-time. Days when I achieve nothing, days I drift through aimlessly. Days when I feel so overwhelmed by the screaming need to make meaning, to make this life have a point and to leave a lasting legacy that I feel like I’m drowning in the responsibility of that.

How do we make a difference? How could I spend my time more fully, more richly, more deeply honouring this gift? How can I find a way to do that, without the stories that are missing? Look on any bookshop shelf and there a numerous step by step guides to birth, to menopause, to relationships. How many are there for navigating incurable cancer? Most cancer guides wrap up with a list of symptoms that indicate recurrence or progression. That’s it, stay in fear of this list. Nothing about what happens when you cross that threshold.

And yet so many more of us are living for years, even decades in this in between land. Walking with our mortality beside us, yet trying to mould ourselves into normality, into the myth of immortality that our culture is based on. Eternal growth, eternal youth, stay fit, stay healthy, just, whatever you do, don’t look ill….

It’s really, really tough, it’s an isolating, lonely place to find yourself, and I have not yet found my path through it. I keep searching, hoping that in my flailing around, in my hunt for meaning, in sharing my lostness, that sense will follow, maybe lostness is part of this path. Maybe lostness is just how it is.

Or maybe, just maybe, the wandering is what it’s all about. As Tolkien said- “Not all who wander are lost”.