Dear Holy Father, I understand.

Well, I have an inkling anyway. I cannot claim to know what the pope is feeling or what his exact condition is, but I know what sticks with me from my own reckoning with lung cancer. 

I know what it is to groggily emerge from the fugue state of anesthesia to find a surgeon by your gurney, leaning in, awaiting your awakening so he can break the news: “I’m sorry, it’s cancer.”

I know what it is to then, instinctively, as if to put form to this incomprehensibility, reach down to where your lung used to be, to trace the hollows now wrapped in gauze and bandage, chest tubes draining red, alarming red, from wounds that pierce your back, your front, your flank. I know the bewilderment that catapults you out of any complacency as you stumble toward this new knowing that now defines so much of you.

I know, too, how it is to find yourself deep in the night after that surgery tapping wildly into your phone, searching in frenzy for probabilities that bring any faint degree of consolation. I know how it is to not find that. 

Ever since the news broke that Pope Leo’s lung surgery revealed that the nodule in his right lower lobe was in fact cancer—adenocarcinoma, the most common of the lung cancers—and that the surgeons had removed his lower right lobe, the one in which that cancer had been anchored, the early frames of my own lung cancer story have been looping and re-looping through my mind.

Three years ago, in a series of events vaguely echoing the pope’s, I found myself inhabiting the uncharted terrain of an out-of-the-blue lung cancer diagnosis, one I navigated at first only by a river of rampant fear. That fear, though, soon drew me to yet another unexpected rivulet, one that in time opened into a spiritual deepening. It is one in which the abbreviation of time, the undeniable awareness of my mortality, shocked me into a state of urgency, almost hungrily seizing each hour of each day. I realized, as Hannah Arendt once put it, “the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

If my life—any life—is to be lived for purpose, the time to live it is now.

Remembering we’ll die, the hard truth undergirding any cancer diagnosis, is an irrefutable accelerant for living. Theologians know it as memento mori, the age-old practice of remembering that very truth: You will die; your time here is swift, fleeting.

It is an ancient philosophical thread, a spiritual practice woven across time and traditions (be they moral or religious traditions) from early Stoicism to medieval Christianity, from ancient Judaism to the central teachings of Buddhism.

St. Benedict of Nursia, in his sixth-century book of precepts known simply as the Rule, exhorted his monks to “keep death daily” before their eyes. It is an awareness that winds its way through most world religions, although barely so in the West, where we do all we can to push away any whiff of dying or death.

To understand that our days are not infinite, not a bottomless pour, spilling one after another so dizzyingly that we are numb to each dawn’s awakening, is to tight-squeeze our focus on how precious this time of ours is. Pope Francis, in his 2023 apostolic exhortation “Laudate Deum,” posed three critical questions: “What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?”

Cancer puts an inescapable edge to those questions, questions that now must be surreally intermingled with all the other improbabilities of Leo’s papacy, the first American pope, the Chicago South Sider who roots for the White Sox. Leo, who now, along with the quarter-million of us who every year hear the words, “It’s cancer” regarding our lungs, or more specifically, the 100,000 Americans who hear it is adenocarcinoma in our lungs (or 1.1 million of us globally, according to the American Cancer Society), must face the inscrutability of a cancer diagnosis and its inevitable reshaping of what remains of our days, long or short.

Of course my experience diverges from Pope Leo’s. I know nothing of how it might infuse or inspire him. I don’t know how dark the hours of his fear might appear, or if he’ll be afraid at all. I can only reach my hand—and my prayers—across the abyss, across the Midwest prairie, the rocky Atlantic coast and the ocean beyond to where he lies awaking each new dawn, wonder whether he too feels every flinch of muscle pulling his chest taut, or every shift in bed is one that makes him wince and gasp.

We are mortal, after all. This is what cancer reminds us. And a cancer in the bellows where you breathe, it’s one that sucks the air right out of you, but it can also make you vitally attuned to the very Breath of God. 

My prayer, my unending prayer, is that Leo, the one whose voice is so imperative in these dark times, breathes deeply for a long, long time.

Barbara Mahany, an author and longtime journalist, was a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune for nearly 30 years. She was a pediatric oncology nurse before becoming a writer.