Zaya's Army: Join the Fight Against Cancer
Though we are reeling with shock and grief, we MUST hold tight to the belief that healing is possible.
It was the kind of text message that stopped time and shattered the air.
I had reached out to the mother of my daughter’s friend, Zaya, curious about a playdate. The response I received was the last thing I ever would have expected that day as I drove through the spectacular scenery of the Colorado mountains on my way home to Lyons.
They were at the hospital. They had found a tumor in Zaya’s pelvis. It had metastasized to her lungs. It was a total nightmare.
The words of the text message scrambled on the screen in front of me as my nervous system catapulted into a frenzy. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. My heartbeat throbbed in my temples as blood surged through my body. What? Zaya? No. But she is so healthy. How? What? No. No. No. Not this. Not her. Not now. This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.
Zaya is a ferocious and wild-hearted 11-year-old girl, who befriends every creature she meets, from lizards and snakes to her many rambunctious classmates. She has been a beacon of light for my daughter, often embracing her like a sister, welcoming her with an ever-open heart. She seemed healthy and strong and was the last person I ever would have imagined to have this happen to her.
The timing was awful. It was summer. Festival season. Time for river tubing and butterfly catching. She was supposed to start middle school in just a few weeks. She was not supposed to have cancer. Not this. Not her. Not now.
But there’s no good timing for a child, or anyone, to be diagnosed with cancer. No matter when this kind of news hits, the whole world crashes to a halt and everything that seemed important only moments ago becomes trivial. The future you had imagined dissolves in an instant. Everything falls apart, and your system goes into both overdrive and paralysis at the same time.
This cannot be happening. This isn’t real. There’s no way. Zaya?
According to some therapeutic models, denial is the first stage of grief, and for the first 20 minutes after that text message came across my phone, my baffled brain simply couldn’t process the news. It just didn’t seem possible. It couldn’t be right. I read the message again and again, thinking I must be hallucinating.
The denial quickly morphed into disorientation and numbness. Over the next few hours, I stumbled through the motions of my day disoriented and confused. The world was different now. It would never be the same. The sounds of people going on with their lives around me disappeared beneath the dizzying woosh of fear in my ears. The empty sky that hung heavily overhead was a gaping, heartless blue. The sunshine glared, burned, bled, too bright for the blur of tears in my eyes. The taste of the air had even changed, the birds seemed to have fallen silent, and everything that had been so loud and urgent in my mind moments before now mattered so very little. So, so very little.
Even though part of me knew better, it didn’t take long to spiral down the Google rabbit hole searching for answers. My craving for information overrode the voice in my head telling me to put my phone down and stop letting myself spiral. Doom scrolling and desperation plunged me into waves of panic. The path ahead would be very uncertain and filled with high-risk surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation. The internet told me she would lose her hair. That even if she beat it, the cancer was likely to come back, to spread, to weaken her immune system. Her chances of survival... terrifyingly low.
My anxiety rose as I searched survival stories and medical sites for every hint that Zaya would be okay, that it would only be a matter of months and she’d be back on her feet, that miraculous advances in medicine were making cancer treatment more effective than ever before. The kind of good news I needed was hard to find.
The internet is full of misinformation and fear mongering, I reminded myself, throwing my phone into the backseat of my car where I could not reach it, and taking a few belly breaths. Don’t make it worse. Stop fueling the fear. Breathe. Focus on the positive. Energy follows thought. Visualize her thriving. Graduating. Climbing mountains. Marrying. Scuba diving. Making a family. Traveling the world. Growing old.
I took three more deep breaths all the way into the bottom of my lungs and felt the sensations of my feet pressing against the floor. We do have to stay positive, I told myself. Zaya is a warrior. If anyone can beat this, it’s Zaya. She is strong and wise and fierce and she will fight this with furious determination and grit.
If I believed hard enough, I could will her into kicking cancer’s ass with the power of positive thinking, couldn’t I? For God’s sake, at the very least I had to try.
For a few years now, the message behind all the work I’ve done in trauma-impacted systems has been built around the belief that healing is possible when we are willing to come home to ourselves and honor our humanness. But now, a hot prickle of doubt crept up my neck because, shit, Zaya has cancer. I had been so focused on my small corner of education and my own divorce that I wasn’t thinking about cancer when I wrote those things. Demon cancer. Soul-sucking, life-stealing, childhood-stopping cancer. Fucking cancer. Fuck cancer. Fuck. Cancer.
Within a few hours, women started to gather at Zaya’s house to strategize and cry. Before long, there were messenger groups, a Caring Bridge page, and a website in the works. There was a schedule for feeding the cats and walking the dogs, and donations already starting to come in. We sat in a circle and cried and planned and dedicated ourselves to Zaya’s fight. We were still stunned. We were devastated. We were outraged. And we were in this fight for the long haul. Zaya’s Army was gathering and growing and amassing our forces for the battle of a lifetime.
For many of us, denial and disbelief had already started to morph into anger, the next of Kubler Ross’s stages of grief. This kind of anger gets messy when it spills into your life, because it’s untamed and volcanic and splits you open like lightning. You cannot contain it in your body or it will poison you and burn anyone unlucky enough to be in the fallout zone. You cannot lock it up inside you. You have to feel it and move it and let it roar out of you. This anger serves a purpose. It is fire for right action and can fuel us if we don’t let it consume us.
And so, banding together, we fired ourselves up, channeled our fury, and got to work, doing everything we could think to do to support Zaya’s family and shower her with the warmth of our immense love.
Two days later, the news was out, the website was up, fundraising benefit plans were in the works, and gifts for Zaya were pouring in. The army was on the move.
Rallying to Support Zaya’s Healing Journey
That night, we held a gathering for all the kids in the community who are connected to Zaya with the intention of holding space for them to process their feelings, and to practice some mindfulness skills for navigating difficulty and working with challenging emotions. As wide-eyed adults and children began to arrive in various stages of distress, one thing became strikingly clear. Healing was already happening, just by our willingness to be here, in the muck, together.
At the scheduled time, all thirty of us gathered around an iPad and video-called Zaya at the hospital. We all held our breath as the phone rang. When her face appeared on the screen, everyone spontaneously shouted “Zaya!” and many started to cry. “We love you Zaya,” people shouted. After a few more choked hellos and I love yous, Zaya said she was happy to answer all her friends’ questions. So, we brought the iPad inside and set it up so the kids could take turns talking to her a few at a time.
Seeing her face on the screen gave me a chance to exhale for the first time in days. Zaya was strong. Zaya was brave. “If anyone can beat this, Zaya can,” someone said near me. “Cancer research is really advancing quickly,” someone else said. “Modern medicine is amazing.” For the first time since that text message shattered the world, I felt a bubble of hope rise in my heart.
Yes. This is the energy we need. We have to believe that she can beat it. We have to believe that healing is possible. We have to keep going. Keep playing. Keep loving. Keep believing.
Out in the yard, a little later, the group gathered in a circle and breathed together and shared stories of our love for Zaya. We rang a mindfulness bell and practiced grounding our attention with nature and the present moment. We decorated prayer flags and held each other and wept and sighed and felt our feelings and let our tears fall. We talked, and cleaned up the house, and the kids ate more pizza and bounced on the trampoline and caught snails and grasshoppers in the yard.
We Need Each Other More Than Ever Before
Since that night, there is no doubt in my mind that healing is possible. Coming together and being with each other in our care, love, and support for Zaya is healing in action. Our kids will be there for each other, through every stage of this journey. In this broken, disconnected world full of division and anxiety, Zaya’s Army will be a beacon of hope, possibility, and connection.
I wish these kids didn’t have to know about cancer at their tender young age. I wish they didn’t have to fear the worst for their friend. I wish Zaya didn’t have to fight this battle. But we all know a little more now about the power of love and kindness and the importance of being present for each other.
The people who Zaya has touched with her light will radiate that love and kindness into the world even more now, because of her cancer, because she is a love warrior who has taught us all to be fiercer and more loving, and because by banding together we are stronger, and more prepared to fight the good fight.
Even if you aren’t close to someone battling cancer, we all need each other more than ever before. In these divisive and uncertain times, connection and community matter more than wealth, status, or power. Love is everything. Showing up for each other when we are needed, is everything. Our hearts are made for each other. We are designed to feel each other and need each other.
Alicia, Michael, and Zaya, you are not alone. We are with you, all the way.
Mindfulness skills for navigating difficult emotions, grief, and fear
Stabilize Attention in the Present Moment
Grief and fear can quickly spiral us into anxiety and worry. You can resource yourself and regulate your nervous system by resting attention with the 5 senses and with your present-moment experience.
3-3-3 exercise (works well with a partner):
Identify 3 things you see, 3 things you can hear, and 3 things you can feel (physical sensations rather than emotions)
Belly breathing:
Place a hand on your belly and take some deep breaths. Notice the movement of your diaphragm and the rising and falling of your belly. Your belly should inflate like a balloon when you breathe in and deflate when you breathe out.
Grounding attention through your feet:
Feel the sensations of your feet making contact with the ground. Notice gravity in your body. Bring curiosity to the sensations, investigating them. If you’d like, you can even imagine that there are roots growing down from your feet into the earth.
Place your hands on the earth, or on a tree:
As you make contact with the earth or a nature being, consider that whatever you are holding, the earth is already holding you. Send whatever you don’t need to be carrying into the earth (or tree) as you feel the sensations of contact.
Externalize Anger
Feel your feelings rather than think your feelings. Move anger out of your body through intentional action towards positive change, movement, or vocalization.
Throw rocks in a river and scream
Punch or scream into a pillow
Hard exercise (enough to sweat) and drink lots of water to flush toxins
Singing, humming, Vagus Nerve exercises
Art, writing, creative expression
Mindful movement: Yoga, dance, 5Rhythms
Talk to a therapist
My book, Fierce Boundaries: Practical Skills and Somatic Exercises for Healing in a Traumatized World, and additional free guided mindfulness meditations are available at my website www.fierceboundaries.com.