Chances are you know someone who has had cancer. Unfortunately, cancer is the second leader of death in the U.S. This merciless disease directly affected my life when I was 12 years old. I’m from a very small town and my grandparents lived half a mile from my house, so when I was growing up, they were always right there. My grandmother was a teacher in my school district and everyone knew and loved her. When she got diagnosed, it was like the world stopped. I remember the exact look on my father’s face when he sat my brothers and I down to tell us she had advanced stages of lung cancer. I will never forget going down to my grandmother’s house after I found out and sitting on the couch with her for what felt like hours, just crying in her arms. But, as my grandmother taught us grandchildren, she would be strong and fight this disease.

Unfortunately, we were late catching the cancer, so after months of chemo and radiation, the cancer had still metastasized to her brain. It was at that point; we knew the cancer would win. She stayed strong until the end though; man was she a fighter. It was then, at 12 years old that I knew what true strength was. She never showed her pain around us, not one time. She would always put a smile on her face and act so happy around us grandkids.

I didn’t realize how much that smile affected me until the day she was too weak to do it anymore. That smile reminded me that everything would be okay, that she was still the grandmother who would play scat with me for hours and teach me how to crochet. It was the days when she was bedridden and too weak to even form a smile, that I realized how much a smile could change my life. I realized as I watched her struggle for breath that this really wasn’t fair. That my grandmother was an amazing woman that didn’t deserve this. Yeah, she loved to smoke her cigarettes at the kitchen table and gossip with her sister; should she really suffer because of that? What I learned when her smile was fading and her breaths were becoming shallower; was how I could survive.

I curse the cancer every day for taking that amazing woman away from us before her time, but I thank it even more often for teaching me how precious life and the memories you have are. Sitting on my grandmother’s bedside as she took her last breath will probably scar me for the rest of my life but it reminds me constantly that life is so much bigger than the problems at hand. I can now reflect back at all the points in my teenage life that I thought the world was over and realize that it’s not even close to the pain I felt watching the strongest woman I know wither down to nothing.

When the boy I was crushing on broke my heart and I literally thought I was going to die of heartache; when my basketball team lost in the quarterfinal game and my dreams of a gold ball were shot down; or the day when I came to college and I realized I was in way over my head. All these feelings, in the moment, I thought were the end of the world. I thought I would never recover and I couldn’t even imagine going to bed and waking up the next day. Well, thanks to my grandmother’s cancer I realize how precious those moments really were; I learned what true heartbreak was from having to say goodbye too soon. I reflect back now and thank that boy for crushing me because he wasn’t worth my time anyways. I’m glad we lost that quarterfinal game because it taught me how to lose graciously; realizing how hard college really was made me want to change myself to be better and achieve more.

I never thought I would say these words but thank you lung cancer. Thank you for teaching me how precious life is. Thank you for teaching me to cherish every moment I have with my remaining family members and most importantly, thank you for making me stronger. I still hate you lung cancer, you took away the most influential woman in my life, but thank you for at least teaching me a lesson from it.