What I’ve learned about endurance since my mum’s myeloma diagnosis

Some nights I sit beside my mum’s bed and look back on the four years since her myeloma diagnosis. I find it hard to believe that days have turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. Four whole years? I am still trying to process that.

The man who began this journey in 2022 feels far away now. He thought endurance would be loud and heroic — fighting every day with clenched fists, resisting all the guilt and anger. He did not yet understand that endurance is mostly quiet.

It is the willingness to keep showing up even when nothing dramatic is happening. After experiencing the unpredictability of a rare cancer like myeloma, I’ve learned to be grateful for days with no emergencies, no rushing to the clinic on short notice, and no frantic calls to doctors.

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These years have taught me that endurance has a different shape than I expected.

It looks like learning to measure time in small victories: a day with less pain, a night of decent sleep, a moment when my mum laughs at an old memory. It sounds like the soft rhythm of her breathing when she finally rests. It feels like the ache in my own shoulders that has become almost familiar.

I have also learned that endurance includes making peace with things that will not be fixed.

There are questions that still have no answers. There are losses we have learned to carry rather than defeat. And yet, in the middle of it all, something steady has grown — a deeper patience, a quieter kind of faith, and the ability to find meaning in ordinary moments that I once would have overlooked.

From the side of her bed, the view is long but not empty.

Four years as a myeloma caregiver have shown me that endurance is not about never getting tired. It is about learning how to rest inside the tiredness. It is choosing to stay present even when the road ahead remains uncertain. And it is discovering that love, in its most patient form, can become its own kind of strength.

Over these years, I have had to learn and unlearn so many things. I have learned a different language, the language of caregiving. I am still learning. But I am no longer the same man who started this journey, and perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts this long road has given me.

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