I’m out on the bike — legs strong, lungs open, the kind of morning that still surprises me a little, even after all these years of mornings like this.
Competitive cycling returned to my life in earnest after I survived stage 3 cancer at 45. It became part of my recovery — not just physically, but emotionally too. Getting back on the bike was how I began to trust my body again. Admittedly, I will be okay after all. With time, it helped me understand that I was still here.
Today, I’m slower than I was 20 years ago, and I have aches I didn’t have then, but I can still ride my way to a 100 km Granfondo at the ripe age of 69. On mornings like this, I notice what it means to feel this well. I notice it the way you might notice something you almost lost.
And then, almost at the same moment, in the same breath, another thought arrives unbidden. Someone I care about is undergoing chemotherapy right now. A friend my age recently had a heart attack and can barely walk to the bathroom. Another is losing ground to something slow and relentless, and there is nothing I can do about any of it. And here I am — almost 70, still riding, still strong — feeling good.
It’s not exactly guilt. That’s the word we reach for because it’s the closest we have. But guilt implies a transgression, a failure. What this feels like is more elusive — a quiet friction between your own well-being and someone else’s suffering, with no clean way to resolve it. I’ve felt that friction for a long time, since before I had language for it, since 2003, when I became someone who had survived something others hadn’t.
Surviving stage 3 cancer changes your relationship with your health in ways that are difficult to articulate to someone who hasn’t been through it.
It’s not that you become more grateful, though gratitude is part of it. It’s something more complicated — a permanent awareness of the gap between how things are and how they could have been. Every good health report carries the shadow of the one that never happened. Every strong ride holds the memory of when riding was impossible, when the body felt like enemy territory rather than home.
Every life or experience I’ve had is a reminder of what I would have missed out on. That makes you very aware of how things could have been.
I didn’t do anything heroic to survive. I had good doctors, some fortunate timing, and whatever combination of biology and luck tips a stage 3 diagnosis towards recovery rather than the other way. I know people who did everything right and still didn’t make it. I met other patients, sitting next to me in the ‘chemo-chair’, who just weren’t there one day. I know people are still managing the aftermath of illnesses far less severe than mine. The arbitrariness of it — who gets to recover fully and who doesn’t — is something I have never been able to accept fully.
Cancer instilled that particular awareness in me at 45. Life can be fragile. Aging in your late 60’ keeps watering it, as the health divergence among people my age grows more visible and starker every year. The feeling doesn’t diminish with time. It sharpens.
Psychologists have studied survivor’s guilt extensively in the context of major trauma — combat, disaster, and serious illness. But researchers at the University of Oxford have identified a quieter form that exists in ordinary life, which they call an “inequity appraisal.” In plain language, the feeling is this:
“I have unfairly benefited, while others have not. I don’t deserve this asymmetry.”
You don’t need to have survived a catastrophe to feel it. Psychology Today has described it as the kind of feeling that arises when someone is laid off while a colleague keeps their job, or when someone goes for a run while a close friend can no longer exercise. The trigger is simply the gap — you on one side, someone you love on the other. At 70, that gap is harder to ignore with each passing year.
Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and built an entire school of psychology around the search for meaning, wrote something that has anchored my thinking. He argued that the antidote to undeserved privilege is not to diminish your own life but to find meaning in it — to live in a way that honours the asymmetry rather than apologizing for it.
The question he’d put to someone thriving is not “do you deserve this?” — that’s the wrong question, because nobody deserves or fails to deserve the randomness of health. The right question, according to Frankl, is:
“What are you doing with it?”
That reframe changed things for me. It shifted the conversation from the passive arithmetic of luck — unresolvable, circular — to the active question of how you live with what you’ve been given. It gave my unease a useful outlet.
Research offers another useful counterargument to the instinct to go quiet. A study cited in Psychology Today found that suppressing your well-being — holding back good news, going silent about the strong ride, and muting the clean health report out of sensitivity — damages both your mental health and your close relationships.
The people who love you generally want to know you’re well. Silence doesn’t honour their struggle. It quietly widens the distance between you.
There is a particular moment I know well. I experienced it very recently:
I finish a strong ride — a good time on a climb I’ve been working on, or simply a morning when everything felt easy and right. I reach for my phone, wanting to share it the way you share a good moment with someone who understands what it means. And then I hesitate. I cancel the upload to my Strava account - no one will ever know.
Because I know who is on the other end of that message or that post. I know what their morning looked like. And something in me pulls back — uncertain whether sharing is a connection or an inadvertent contrast.
I’ve sat with that hesitation long enough to understand what it contains. There is genuine care in it. But there is also something else — a self-consciousness about my own thriving that doesn’t serve either of us. Going quiet doesn’t make my friend’s morning better. It just makes mine lonelier.
The discomfort, I’ve come to think, is not a problem to solve. It’s a signal to read. It means I’m paying attention to someone else’s reality — that their suffering hasn’t become invisible to me. That matters. The question is what I do with it.
For me, the answer increasingly is to make the call anyway. Not to say good morning to someone who is struggling, but because staying connected — bringing your real self into contact with their real self, even across a gap — is more honest than going quiet. The ride happened. The friendship is also real. Both belong in the conversation.
Here is what I’ve learned, the hard way, in the years since cancer taught me to notice the gap and aging has kept refreshing that lesson:
Don’t shrink your life to fit someone else’s loss. The instinct is generous, but it doesn’t help the person who is struggling. Your thriving isn’t a rebuke of their hardship. The people who love you want to know you’re well. Going quiet doesn’t close the gap — it only makes you lonelier on your side of it.
Show up differently, not less. The unease points to something real — a call to be present with people who are struggling, not to perform wellness for them. There is a version of thriving that turns inward and loses its connection to others. The antidote isn’t to stop thriving. It’s to stay connected.
Let the discomfort teach you. The low hum of unease when you are well and someone you love is not — that’s empathy doing its job. Let it guide you toward generosity rather than paralysis. Use it as a reminder to reach out, show up, ask how someone is, and actually wait for the answer.
Ask Frankl’s question. Not “do I deserve this?” but “what am I doing with it?” Good health is a resource. So is the energy to ride, to write, and to be present. The question worth sitting with is whether you are spending them in ways that reflect what you truly value — including the people who have less of them right now.
Name the feeling, at least to yourself. The unease of thriving when others can’t doesn’t have a clear cultural label, so most of us carry it without examining it. Giving it words — even privately, even imperfectly — is the first step toward understanding what it’s asking of you.
I am almost 70 years old and still riding competitively. There are days when that fact strikes me as almost implausible — not because of age, but because of what intervened at 45. I know the road this body has been on. I know what it came back from.
And I know, just as clearly, that the people I used to ride with are not all still riding. Some have been stopped by bodies that made different decisions. Some are managing things I can’t fully imagine from where I stand. The gap between us is real. It is not something I caused, and it is not something I can close.
What I can do is refuse to let it make me smaller. I can ride hard and call afterward. I can share a good morning and ask about theirs. I can live in a way that reflects what I know about luck, fragility, and the randomness of who gets to recover — not by apologizing for being on the right side of it, but by taking it seriously.
That, I’ve decided, is the better answer to the guilt of feeling good. Not guilt. Not performance. Just the conscious, grateful, and somewhat awed decision to keep going — and to bring as many people along for the ride as possible. The long ride.
Next in The Long Losses: “The Person I Used to Be — Grief Over Lost Identity and Roles”
Have you felt this — the unease of thriving when someone you love is not? I’d love to hear how you’ve navigated it.
I received quite a few DMs on this piece. I wasn't expecting that. Combined with the fact that we will at some point in time, be the next in line, there is little pleasure in being the 'last man (or woman) standing..."
Many of us have had life challenges that alter our perspective. I am grateful for my encounter almost 15 years ago as it introduced me to my heart. Now when assessing life situations I spend much more time with my heart rather than my analytical mind which I relied on for so many years.
Sounds like you’re making a similar transition and the world is in a better place for it.