“My life is there, in the disease”

You are 21 years old when you diagnose you, in 2016, breast cancer. How do you receive this ad?

I did not realize right away. I had just arrived in Lyon (Rhône) for a sabbatical year. Doctors were not particularly worried: I was young, with radiotherapy it would go. It was for me a parenthesis lived on forced march: I would advance, hugged my teeth and smiled. At that time, being a Christian meant, for me, to live things without complaining. God could act in my life and heal me. I prayed for that.

A year later, you have a relapse. What’s going on then?

First there was a phase of denial. It took me a while to understand that it meant that cancer clung, that it was more serious. Then I started chemotherapy. The disease was there and exposed me to the face every morning. We had to stop fleeing and face this reality.

What has tested you the most?

I felt very alone. My friends and family were there, however, but I discovered more existential loneliness. The disease has an intimate dimension that cannot be imagined without living it in its flesh. From the outside, we only perceive part. No one could really join me in what I was going through. Except God.

However, your prayer is not granted …

The question of healing has become very painful, almost heartbreaking. So many people prayed for me! Why didn’t God act then that I tried to put my talents at the service of his church, to move forward in projects that seemed to me to be his? And yet, I was prevented by my body, which suffered and disintegrated. I could no longer ask for my healing. It was too difficult for me to go back and forth between my prayer and reality.

A few months later, you enter a new phase of the disease …

In the summer of 2018, I learned that my cancer metastasus, the parenthesis will not close. My life is no longer the one before: it is there, in the disease. There is no other. Healing is no longer possible. Now we can only stabilize crises.

You are under heavy treatments until January 2022, where you are asking to “take a break” …

My body was at the end, I couldn’t do it anymore. It was so difficult that death seemed preferable to me. I then understood those who are exhausted to the point of wanting to die. It had to stop. I dared not claim the end of the treatments, fearing to do too much pain from my loved ones. I then asked a break. We entered a palliative logic: the goal was no longer to prolong my life but to get care allowing me less suffering. A few months later, I joined a palliative care unit. Significant medical decisions had to be made. Then came the question of death, end of life. And the questions that it raises.

Which ones?

Where do I want to die? What scares me the most: physical or moral suffering? What does it matter to me before I leave? Do I have to put my business in order to facilitate the task of my loved ones? So many things that I had never considered at 27 years old …

You were not really armed to answer it …

I felt out of step. Around me, no one asked these questions. I fell back into deep solitude. I was told: “The most important thing is what you want”, but I knew nothing about it! I couldn’t talk about it either, it was too intimate, too difficult. I was very well accompanied. Both by palliative care staff, trained to help us gently confront death with death, and by my spiritual guide, present until the writing of my early guidelines. Without eluding or spiritualizing the questions.

Your faith does not protect you from the real … Does it engage you there?

The most spiritual is also the most realistic. It is the heart of faith. We are not here to flee our human condition, nor to extract us. Having faith does not save us from human experience. God himself embodied in Jesus, to the cross. The more we advance in spiritual life, the more we are pushed to take root in reality. To live here and now.

What do you ask God today?

Always more life. I feel how much eternal life is more and more in me. One day, she will take up too much space for my body and it will then be the rocking towards this other life that awaits me. Healing is a provisional grace: good, but not the best. Understand this soothed me. Once in heaven, I would still like God to explain to me for what purpose I lived all this. I live it without understanding, seeing only a small part of the painting, not always bright. I ended up accepting that there are things that we will not understand until later. I can’t wait to say to him: “So that was what you were preparing! »»

Does believing in eternal life are enough to no longer fear dying?

At 18, I was sure I was not afraid of dying. Today, I can’t say as much. By being confronted more concretely, I found myself paralyzed, taking anxieties at night. And I guilty: if I believe in eternal life, why am I afraid? Now I feel less disarmed. To believe that death is only a passage spares the fact that our bodies are made for life, and that in the face of death, there is natural resistance. I know it’s going to be hard, that I’m going to be afraid, but that it does not matter. When I came, I will receive graces.

What does hope mean for you?

Younger, I thought I live hope because I was not afraid of death. It was especially carelessness. At the start of the disease, I hoped healing: a legitimate hope but which is not yet hope. Death had to be more imposed on me so that I grasp that hope is to realize that eternal life has already started. Do not flee reality, be anchored in what I have to live. And in this reality, prefer what is eternal.

That’s to say ?

When we speak with people at the end of their lives, relationships appear as the most expensive. When I am faced with two treatments, my criterion of choice is as follows: which one that allows me to continue to be related to others, rather than keeping myself life longer by preventing me from being available for them? It is a question of fertility. It is not the amount of life that counts.

Today, how are you?

Rather well. I am still in palliative care. There are improvements, but this can ignite overnight. I can’t let it believe that it’s easy, but I can’t say that I’m going badly either. I am happy. I see how God takes care of myself. When I hurt, that I cry, that I am afraid: it is present.

Holy Week, that millions of Christians are preparing to live, must have a singular resonance for you …

I understood in recent years that there is no possible resurrection without cross. Being a Christian does not consist in attaching to glory by closing your eyes on the rest, because it frightens us. We cannot be content to wait for the light: you have to consent to cross the night. After agony, the intensity of the cross, there is the silence of the Holy Saturday. This is what looks like our lives most: this moment when we don’t feel anything, when we hear nothing … but where we expect. We do not know when life will come, nor how – but we stay there. Here. This path taught me not to run towards tomorrow, but to stay where I am.

When everything becomes uncertain, painful, how do you stand in the present?

I live the present because I have no choice. I discovered how rich it is. Learning to stay there, even in what is rough, painful, turns out to be a deeply fruitful experience. This is where God awaits us. One day, while I was apprehensive about a difficult treatment, my spiritual advisor told me: “To imagine the trials in advance is to live them longer, and without grace. When you are there, there will always be grace. These words have changed everything. They helped me no longer flee forward, but to live in this fragile time, this present. And to hold on it.