The Only Thing Worth Leaving Behind
After a cancer diagnosis, I gathered the unpublished work I thought I had abandoned and remembered why my writing mattered
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
What Chapter Are You…
Leaving:
The ordinary world of teen drama, hiding my age, and planning for the future.
In:
Between receiving a late-stage cancer diagnosis and having a solid reason to hope.
Entering:
A post-diagnosis world with a clear understanding that nothing is guaranteed and every day is precious — I'm lucky enough to see every single ordinary moment.
On November 13, 2024, during my first appointment with a surgeon after a shocking diagnosis of ovarian cancer, I was told I had a fifty percent chance of living five years.
What do you do when you are suddenly looking death straight in the face?
Besides sob. Because of course, as a mother of two young daughters, I sobbed hard. Ferociously. Endlessly. The grief knocked me flat on the floor.
There were two weeks between that appointment and my surgery, a surgery I wasn’t sure I’d survive. I felt certain that I had two weeks to live. So, in the moments when the sobbing abated, I did something else: with grim, single-minded determination, I did the only thing I could, the only thing that seemed urgent. I gathered up my long-abandoned writings and started collecting the only thing worth leaving behind.
Excavating this work was like returning to a familiar but distant home. I’ve published two novels with a university press, but there were things worth keeping in my unwieldy drafts of unpublished works, scattered across old drives and computers. The only person who would ever know what was worthy — and how to find it — was me. And so, driven by fear and fatalism, I dove in.
For hours every day, I pulled up each unpublished manuscript, reformatted it, threw it into a book template I found online, and uploaded it to a self-publishing platform. I did not design covers. I did not spend time editing out the brackets or all the placeholders for material I meant to fill in later. This was not a vanity project. It was far more important than that. I needed my words to be printed, to live in the world of my family — to be readable by my children. Those works are my voice. My worldview. They’re what I have to teach them.
Slowly, the works collected in my ready-to-print cart. There was a book of essays I wrote while living in Paris with a French boyfriend — older, disastrous — during the summer of 2003; a novella that was nearly published many times, still unpublished but close to my heart; a novel I wrote while living in Barcelona, one I had tinkered with for years, earning several revise-and-resubmit requests from agents and becoming a finalist in multiple contests; and another novel, one I nearly finished but never got the nerve to submit. I loved that story. I loved those characters. But I was daunted by the prospect of querying again. This was the novel that finally made me think, I can’t do this anymore. In 2021, I put it aside, decided the writing part of my life was over, and got my first full-time job in twenty years. But just because I couldn’t face another querying process didn’t mean my family shouldn’t know the world I had built.
And finally, there were 500 pages of short stories, written between eighth grade and middle age. Excavating them was a time machine. Those stories held my childhood voice, my adult voice, and the lifelong habit of making sense of the world by putting words on the page. Collecting them in readable form felt like saving my own life.
I ordered five printed copies of each work. I prayed the books would arrive before the surgery, and they did. They arrived in a giant box, all with plain white covers, only the titles in black. By Margo Orlando Littell. They were not beautiful. But they were there.
Knowing that my family would be even more stricken if they knew about my macabre obsession, I showed no one. The box remains in my closet, unsealed but not unpacked.
During those two weeks in November, I held on to the notion that my children, should I have to leave them, would know me. I would not disappear. In reading my words in great volume, they would hear my voice in their heads. They would see the world as I do. They would know compassion for flawed characters, a deep love of small moments, and a way of connecting ideas to form a story of their own lives and the lives of others.
After my surgery, my diagnosis changed from high-grade ovarian cancer to low-grade ovarian cancer — less aggressive but incurable and difficult to treat. Not exactly a reprieve from the worst, but perhaps a slightly longer timeline. A diagnosis like mine changes everything. I thought I was done with writing, that I’d moved on to a new stage of my life. I see now that I was fooling myself.
With frontline treatment behind me but many more treatments ahead, I’m battered but clear-eyed, stripped of what I thought I knew. What I’m sure of now: I’m a writer. I always have been. It’s how I make sense of the world, and of myself. During those two weeks when I believed I would die, I frantically worked to save my writings from what felt like an impending fire, already close enough to feel the heat on my face. What was important to me had never been more obvious.
Maybe I’m not quite done with those unpublished works. Maybe it’s time to return to the in-progress novel, the one that has suddenly taken on new verve and new layers. Without pressure, without self-consciousness. There can be no imposter syndrome anymore. There can be no question of the value of spending my time this way.
Until I find a treatment that keeps my rare cancer at bay, I’ll be living between chapters of my life; maybe it’s where I’ll always live. But here in this in-between space, my priorities are clear. Aside from being with the people I love, I can’t imagine a better use of my time than leaving my truest voice behind.
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