I remember telling people after Addy’s first month of cancer treatment that she was in remission. To most people remission sounds like a magical reversal from sick back to healthy. You had cancer. You are now in remission. Everything is fine. But remission is an early step in a progression that can last a very long time. It is not an end result. It divides terminal from treatable, not healthy from sick. It may even define levels of treatable. And it is not synonymous with cured. Before a cancer patient is considered cured, cancer corrodes every quadrant of life — the tangible and intangible.

Addy achieved remission in May of 2016. But her treatment lasted another 25 months. Addy won’t be considered cured until May 2026, an entire decade later. Before Addy was diagnosed I just assumed that cancer could be contained, encapsulated, as in not affecting anything beyond its start date and end date. I thought you could look back on it passively. “Remember that one time…” But cancer is such a tidal wave it reconfigures the whole purview of life. Cancer leaves a residue on everything. It corrupts and injures bodies as well as relationships and emotional well-being. One of many lingering effects in our house is the entrenched friction between Addy and her older siblings.

When Addy was diagnosed at age three, her older brother and sister were five and seven, respectively. It is impossible to prevent the healthy siblings from feeling left out or overlooked. They saw attention and gifts funneled straight to Addy, bypassing them. They noticed and they were mad. I could not contextualize the physical and emotional toll this was taking without causing fear and panic. The kids did not see Addy’s dire circumstances with empathy or compassion. Their own burden naturally eclipsed everything else. It is a heavy lift for an adult to look beyond his/her own suffering to see someone else’s; it is an enormous ask for kids. Their response was natural and predictable and it has been one of the abiding struggles in the aftermath of cancer — after remission and after treatment and likely long after the cure.

Their contempt and rejection is leveled at Addy as if she planned, with malice at age three, a coup to overthrow their position in the world. Even after thousands of conversations earnestly seeking harmony and understanding, the older kids struggle to allow her to be innocent of blame as a result of those years that still ache. The hostility burbles up with white hot intensity, even now. Their grudge repeatedly justifies their infernal tactics.

Yesterday morning unfolded with all the normal hiccups that are present in getting four school-aged children out the door. It involved me saying the same things in rapid succession until tongue tied: Get dressed. Eat your breakfast. Brush your teeth. Get your socks and shoes on. The chafing between Addy and her older siblings could not be diffused. It reminds me of that fact that tectonic plates ride on pools of molten lava and when the conditions are right there is a catastrophic eruption. I walked in the bathroom to find Addy on the floor defending her body from her brother’s flailing limbs and this is after she came to tell me three times of her sister’s punishing retaliations in the kitchen.

There was no more placating or offering strategies to avoid and disarm. It was like a gong. Enough is enough. I sent the offending siblings out of the house with the instructions that they better hustle to catch the bus because I wasn’t going to drive them to school as I do every day. They thought I was bluffing until I drove away without them. On the return trip, there they were, standing at the bus stop with the bus long gone.

“What are you doing? The bus is gone.” I hollered from my car window.

“We are walking to school.” They snarled back like a threat.

The route to school involves two miles of heavily traversed highway with a narrow shoulder. If they were too averse to ride the bus, I reasoned they were too scared to trudge through the soft gravel shoulder while 18-wheelers blew past them. I was banking that their fear would force them to come home. As I predicted they stomped angrily up the walk. They were furious that the status quo had been challenged.

I directed them to sit on the couch. It was only after belligerent confrontation that they did so. I explained that each act of meanness may be nothing if taken on its own, like the weight of a single sheet of paper. I asked them to see their actions as a whole, in their entirety. Day after day, small unkind words or deeds, they become a crushing burden. Through a cracked voice I told them, “You are capable of destroying her and every time you add another page of hatred you are closer to that. I can only compensate so much. You are going to have to be different.”

My emotional plea cracked their hardened angry demeanor. They cried some for themselves and a little for their sister. Reluctantly they entered into reflection and problem solving. It was no small feat. They missed all of first period before I finally felt like they had made enough headway to relent and drive them to school.

Cancer made long term problems where there was none. It ate away at healthy relationships and noble ideas of family cohesion. I feel a relentless summons to reverse the damage and restore both what was and what could be. After remission, the end of treatment, or the promise of Addy being cured, is the commitment to restoration impervious to destruction, a familial love refined by suffering. I can’t let cancer have the last word.