A Quiet Kind of Guts

I sat in the back of the chapel and shrank.

At the funeral of a friend who had lived with cancer for eleven years, the words rose around her like banners: fighter, warrior, fierce, relentless. She was a mother of three. She never gave up, they said. Their praise was full of steel.

I have stage IV cancer. I go looking for treatments that might hold it at bay. Not cure—just delay. Just slow the animal down. Let me keep my place here a little longer. Let me wake again to sunlight on the kitchen floor. Let me have one more ordinary Wednesday.

I have never known what to do with the language of war. I do not want my body turned into a battlefield, a Cormac McCarthy landscape, all Blood Meridian and scorched earth. No guts, no glory. Fight to the death. I do not want to be measured by how convincingly I can become a weapon against myself.

Does that mean I lack courage?

If I am not a warrior, then what am I? What if I don’t want war?

Maybe guts are not always made of iron. Maybe they are softer than that, and stranger. Maybe guts are what it takes to live without the shield of metaphor. To be afraid and still show up. To let the needle in. To sign the consent form. To know the truth and keep loving the world anyway.

Maybe my guts do not live in conquest. Maybe they live in tenderness, in endurance, in the unglamorous ache of wanting more time. Not glory. Not victory. Just the stubborn, beating wish to remain.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Dennis Freire
Cedar City, Utah

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