What We Add
A patient recently reminded me of the familiar saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
Then he added something I had never considered.
“What makes it lemonade is what you add to the lemon.”
I had always understood the saying as an invitation to make the best of something difficult. But his words suggested a different way of looking at it.
Consider what happens when we make lemonade. Adding sweetness doesn’t erase the lemon’s tartness, and water doesn’t ask the lemon to become something else. Each ingredient joins what is already there, and together they create a different experience of the whole.
Cancer can enter a life in a similar way. It arrives unexpectedly, bringing a tartness we didn’t ask for and would never have chosen. A diagnosis, treatment, uncertainty, changes to the body, disruptions to the future we had been imagining. Each can become so powerful that it seems to overwhelm every other flavor in our lives.
Our attention understandably turns toward what has arrived. We become aware of what has changed, what may be lost, and what might happen next. It becomes difficult to taste beyond the tartness because an unexpected ingredient has become so strong that, for a while, it’s all we can taste.
Maybe this is where what we add begins to matter.
Not as an attempt to make cancer sweeter than it is. Nor as a pressured effort to find something positive in an experience that has brought pain, fear, or loss. What we choose to add may just be our return to the beauty, joy, connection, and support that remain accessible to us.
These ingredients were always there before cancer came along. Now, we may need to turn to them even more.
The tartness remains. We simply remember that it’s not the only thing available to taste.
Recently, another patient spoke about the loss cancer had brought into her life. She named the loss of certainty, the loss of energy, the loss of her hair, and the unfamiliarity of seeing a body she no longer recognized in the same way.
We stayed with those losses for a while. They deserved to be acknowledged and mourned. Some losses cannot be replaced. They become part of the life we are learning to live.
And they don’t have to become its only ingredient.
I invited her to consider what she might want to add to the life that was now being rearranged around her. Not because an empty space always has to be filled, but because cancer doesn’t get to make every choice about what her life will contain.
What we add will look different for each of us. We might choose to add the presence of someone who can sit beside us without trying to make everything better, or add moments of beauty that ask nothing from us. We may return to music, laughter, creativity, faith, nature, or the people whose love we once counted on without having to think about it.
Sometimes what we add is nothing new. It’s something meaningful that has always been part of our lives, now chosen with greater intention.
Before the lemon arrived, we may not have thought about these ingredients. They were just always part of the mixture. Cancer changes that. When its tartness begins to dominate our experience, we may need to reach deliberately for the other flavors that once found their way in without effort.
We add them not to disguise what has happened, but to keep what has happened from becoming the only thing our lives hold.
Reflections on the inner psychological experience of living alongside cancer.
Jae L. Ross, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist who works with individuals and families whose lives have been reshaped by cancer, helping them navigate the emotional challenges of diagnosis, treatment, and beyond.
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