What Was Already in the Room
The Seven Years Before Advanced Prostate Cancer
Three weeks after my wife shattered her shoulder, I sat in a doctor’s office and heard the words advanced prostate cancer.
Neither of us looked at the other and asked, Why us?
We didn’t have the energy left for that question.
We had already asked it.
Years before.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting an answer.
If you’ve been following Jonesing for the Journey, you probably know much of what came after that room. You know about the diagnosis. The surgery. The pathology. The recovery. The decisions about what came next.
What I haven’t talked about nearly as much is everything that came before it.
And I’ve come to realize that you really can’t understand how Sue and I walked into that diagnosis without understanding the years that taught us how to sit in a room like that and not completely fall apart.
Or maybe that isn’t quite right.
Maybe what those years taught us was how to fall apart — and somehow keep going anyway.
So let me take you back.
2018 — Losing My Mother
In 2018, my mother died.
I’m not going to walk through all the details of that loss here. Some parts of our story I’ll tell completely. Others deserve to remain a little more private.
Losing your mother is one of those experiences that doesn’t need much explanation.
If you’ve lived it, you understand.
Grief became part of our family story.
What we didn’t know then was how much more grief was still ahead of us.
2019 — A Prostate Problem That Seemed Manageable
A year later, I was dealing with prostate problems.
At the time, I was diagnosed with what appeared to be a benign prostate issue and underwent a procedure to address the symptoms.
It felt significant then.
And it was.
One thing this journey has taught me is that we shouldn’t minimize what we were experiencing just because something harder came later.
Everything feels like a big thing until life introduces you to the next big thing.
At that point, prostate cancer wasn’t the story I thought I was living.
I certainly didn’t imagine where that road would eventually take me.
2021 — The Knock No Parent Should Ever Receive
Then came 2021.
At approximately 2:30 in the morning, there was a knock at our door.
We received the news no parent should ever have to receive.
Our son had died.
He was twenty-one years old.
He was killed by gun violence.
There is much more to that story, but it deserves its own space and its own time.
I won’t reduce it to a few paragraphs just to keep this story moving.
But I also can’t skip over it.
Because every single thing that came afterward happened to two parents who were already carrying the loss of their son.
That grief didn’t simply become something that happened “back then.”
It came with us.
It still does.
2023 — When the Ground Shifted Again
In 2023, I lost my job.
It wasn’t simply a professional setback.
It was our household’s source of income.
We were already carrying grief, and suddenly another layer of uncertainty arrived.
That’s one of the things I’ve learned about hard seasons:
The next difficult thing doesn’t wait politely for you to recover from the last one.
Around that same period, Sue’s parents began requiring full-time care.
They were aging and dealing with dementia, physical limitations and growing needs that meant they could no longer safely live independently.
So we became caregivers.
We moved them across the country to live with us.
We became their powers of attorney.
And caregiving became woven into nearly every part of daily life.
Meals.
Hygiene.
Finances.
Appointments.
Medications.
Medical decisions.
Safety.
Conversations about what they could still do and what they could no longer do.
Nobody really explains what full-time family caregiving feels like until you’ve lived it.
It usually isn’t one dramatic moment.
It’s thousands of small decisions.
Thousands of interruptions.
Thousands of moments when someone needs something from you while part of you is already running on empty.
We did what needed to be done.
Because that’s what families do.
But I’ve become very careful about one distinction:
Doing what you have to do and being okay are not the same thing.
We were doing what we had to do.
That didn’t mean we were okay.
Our Own Bodies Were Struggling Too
While we were caring for Sue’s parents, our own health didn’t politely wait its turn.
Sue faced melanoma and needed surgery.
My wife was dealing with cancer surgery while simultaneously helping care for both of her parents.
Around that same stretch of time, I developed a serious infection in my foot.
It didn’t resolve.
It progressed.
Eventually, I lost a toe.
I say that plainly because the accumulation matters.
We were caring for two aging parents while Sue was undergoing treatment for cancer and I was dealing with an infection serious enough that part of my body had to be removed.
There was no clean dividing line anymore between caregiver and patient.
We were both.
Then We Lost Them Too
In late 2024, Sue’s father died.
Six months later, her mother died.
The two people we had spent years caring for were suddenly gone.
Caregiving is complicated that way.
You spend so much of your life organizing everything around someone else’s needs that when the caregiving ends, the silence and the absence can feel enormous.
There’s grief for the person.
Grief for what they endured.
Grief for what you endured.
And sometimes there is even grief for the years that disappeared while everyone was simply trying to survive.
We weren’t living one difficult event at a time.
We were carrying all of it together.
Grief.
Caregiving.
Our own health problems.
Financial uncertainty.
Loss.
There was very little space between one event and the next.
And eventually, some things had to be dropped.
Not because we stopped caring.
Because human beings can only hold so much at one time.
Three Weeks
Then came December 2025.
A week before Christmas, Sue shattered her shoulder.
It was a serious injury, and suddenly our world was again filled with appointments, pain, uncertainty and decisions about what came next.
Three weeks later, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
Three weeks.
That was the distance between my wife suffering a major injury and me sitting in a doctor’s office hearing that I had cancer.
After everything that had happened since 2018, life gave us three weeks.
I wish I could tell you there’s some meaningful explanation for timing like that.
I don’t have one.
Sometimes life doesn’t arrange itself into a lesson.
Sometimes it just keeps coming.
Everything That Followed Us Into That Room
When I think back to the day of my cancer diagnosis now, I realize Sue and I weren’t the only two people sitting in that room.
Everything we had lived through was there too.
My mother.
Our son.
The job I lost.
Sue’s parents.
The years of caregiving.
Her melanoma.
My foot infection.
The toe I lost.
Her shattered shoulder.
Seven years of accumulated grief, uncertainty and survival walked through that door with us.
And then the doctor said:
Advanced prostate cancer.
That’s the part of this story I hadn’t completely explained before.
We Had Already Learned How to Keep Walking
I’m not sharing this because I want anyone to feel sorry for us.
I’m sharing it because I think it explains something about what you’ve watched since Jonesing for the Journey began.
Sue and I didn’t enter the prostate cancer journey as two people encountering hardship for the first time.
We walked into it as two people who already understood, somewhere deep inside ourselves, what it meant to keep moving when you didn’t feel like you had anything left to move with.
I’m not sure I would call that a gift.
In fact, I would trade that strength in a heartbeat for many of the experiences that taught it to us.
But it’s what we have.
And it’s what we’re using now.
You Don’t Have to Understand Why
Maybe your story looks nothing like ours.
But perhaps you understand what it feels like when difficult things begin stacking faster than you can process them.
A diagnosis.
A death.
A job loss.
A parent who needs you.
A spouse who becomes sick.
A financial problem.
Another appointment.
Another phone call.
Another door you never expected to have to walk through.
If that’s where you are, I want to tell you something I’ve had to learn myself:
You don’t have to understand why everything is happening while you’re still surviving it.
You don’t have to find the lesson immediately.
You don’t have to turn every loss into inspiration.
You don’t have to pretend that hardship somehow becomes easier just because you’ve survived hardship before.
Sometimes the next step is simply the next step.
The next appointment.
The next conversation.
The next morning.
The next door.
And then the one after that.
That’s what we did.
That’s what we’re still doing.
This diagnosis became another mile marker on a road neither of us expected to travel.
But it didn’t erase everything that came before it.
In many ways, everything that came before is part of the reason we’re still walking now.
My name is Mike Jones.
This is Jonesing for the Journey.
Real Life. Real Journeys. Real Hope.
And So… The Adventure Continues.