When someone in your life is diagnosed with cancer, the words drop to the bottom of your stomach and start coming up again. You know the meaning of what has been said to you, but you still ask for clarification, because your life, starting now, is never going to be the same.

The journey through cancer can vary in lengths. Some can be diagnosed and gone within five months, and others five years. Being the family member of someone struggling through cancer is something hard to explain. You support them and love them, but what are you supposed to say? It will be okay? How do you know that? You don't. You want to be strong for them but how can you when the outcome is so unknown?

You sit by your loved one's side as they start to complain that they don't feel good, their body hurts, and they can't keep their food down. They lose weight, their skin color changes, their hair falls out to almost nothing, and suddenly they are not your family member anymore. Sure, they look like who they were before, but that is just the shell. They will never be that person again because of the monster that has taken over them.

You watch as a selfish, healthy person as your loved one loses their self. It gets harder for them to walk for a period of time until it's hard to walk at all, until it's hard to get out of bed, until they can't get out of bed anymore. And you wonder, why did it have to be them? You're too selfish to wish it upon yourself instead of them because you don't want the monster either. So you watch and you try and you help, but that's not enough.

Throughout the process you're so worried about them you forget about yourself, and you too become a shell of the person you were before. Suddenly, you're angry all the time and you snap at people when they tell you something positive in their life. Don't they know what you're going through? Don't they understand that nothing can be happy in your time of chaos?

For some, the journey ends and the monster leaves your family alone. But for others the monster carries on full force until it whisks your loved one away. It's hard to explain the emptiness you feel when they are gone because part of you already accepted that you might have to live without them a long time ago, you just never noticed. And now you are faced with a life without someone who made so much of it worth it, all because of some monster that no one can seem to fix.

You will be angry for so, so long, left wondering why it had to be your family. You will snap at people and their condolences will fall on deaf ears- there is nothing anyone can say to make you feel better, until you do. One day, everything will be right again. You will still be sad, but you won't feel like living is selfish anymore. You'll see things that remind you of them and you will smile at the memory instead of wanting to smash whatever you saw.

For family members of those who won, congratulations and I wish you a monster-free life of happiness. For those who lost, I am with you and I feel you on every level. For those who are still fighting, love them and cherish them and take as many pictures as you can despite their protest. Cancer is ruthless and disgusting and will take the souls of even the living, but it is OK to be happy again.