Aliveness at the Edge

I recognized myself in this film. Not in diagnosis, but the slightly longer blink, the careful adjustment before standing. The breath held a fraction too long before speaking.

I live in that micro-language, most people don't. They'll feel it, Rob Shaver doesn't hide it, and it's one of the most honest things I've seen on screen.

The Life We Have follows Rob through two decades of stage four cancer recurrences and a three-year daily running streak. Most films about illness focus on survival, this is about presence — choosing aliveness in a body that’s breaking.

Then There's the Trail

Sometimes it's hauling a 35-lb pack over rough terrain, smoking trail runners half my age up steep inclines. Not trying. Not noticing they were chasing me, until I stop at the top.

Other times it's a slow walk with a camera. Sometimes just getting out the door. Sometimes pressing upload when my nervous system would rather shut down.

Every step is a negotiation. Every breath a reminder of the body I carry. I push past where it should feel like enough. Past a decade of pain in perpetuity, fatigue that never lifts. And past the quiet fear of what the next biopsy, scan, or lab will find.

The cost is never abstract.

Poly-Autoimmunity and the Edge

In 2019, threat of cancer entered the room. I was already negotiating a fragile body: poly-autoimmunity, neurological pressure, cardiac strain, autonomic instability, endocrine chaos. A system always recalibrating and compensating.

Cancer doesn't replace what's there, it overshadows it.

Endoscopic surveillance every six months. The edge is calendared and procedural. Mortality on a schedule.

Last two years, I've found myself in a familiar pattern: sitting in the car, engine off, hands on the wheel, not moving.The trailhead ten feet away. Measuring the cost before I agree to pay it.

The moment, the pause, that's the real endurance sport. Not the miles or totals. The decision to step out knowing exactly what it takes.

In 2020, I could barely manage a flight of stairs. I was considering permanent disability. I was wrecked, had nothing left. So I started with three things: sleep, food, movement.

By 2022, I walked 900 miles around my neighborhood. 2023: 1,200 miles.

2024, I returned to hiking — 2,400 miles, despite two months lost to flare. It held.

2025, 1,800 miles — just over four months of flare. Then it didn’t.

2026 started with a month-and-half-long flare already. I'm barely walking at all.

Every mile sits on top of the memory of incapacity. That's the part people don't see.

Movement isn't progress. It's negotiation, more bargaining, and then beginning again.

What the Film Held

That ending rearranges you: black screen, update, hospice.

People see inspiration, courage, gratitude. I saw micro-language first. The slightly longer blink. The careful weight shift before standing. The breath held a beat too long before speaking. Pain threads through posture even when the face softens into a smile.

On the trail it looks like this: pack shift, micro-pause, jaw unclenched, vision steadied when pressure spikes, heart rate negotiated, step placed carefully, shoulders tightening with autoimmune ache. If you don't live in this, you'd call it a hike. If you do, you know it's entropy. Rob moves that way. I saw it. It felt like being seen in return.

And his mother. Her shoulders. Her jaw. The way her hands fold and unfold. Decades of loving someone at the edge, grief built into muscle memory, vigilance that never turns off. She carries him with a tenderness that's steady and visible.

Watching her sustain her son illuminated an absence in my history. Not jealousy. Recognition and ache. I spent six years as primary caregiver to one of my childhood abusers. Every meal, every appointment, every night awake. I was holding the collapse: no witness, no shared grief, just responsibility and silence.

Rob talks about his voice still being there when everything else is stripped away. How identities fall off: athlete, patient, person with a plan — and there's still a stubborn, quiet me refusing to disappear. I have vocal cord damage. I can talk maybe ten minutes if I'm lucky, before I'll have to push through or stop. When Rob talks about his voice persisting, I felt it in a particular way.

Mine is still here too. It just has a price now.

Everything at Once

It happens right at the edge of collapse — too tired to filter, too honest to pretend.

Seven days a week, most weeks. Sometimes grinding. Sometimes crawling. No goal or destination. Just the body, the miles and whatever the day allows.

Somewhere in that, the nervous system stops bracing. Something releases that I didn’t know I was holding. And then there’s clarity. Not insight exactly. More like the noise drops out and what’s left is just what’s true.

Sometimes I’d call it bliss. Other times a mash-up of every emotional state, pleasant or not. Grief and gratitude together. Joy next to mourning. Not peace or resolution. Everything, unfiltered and simultaneous.

That’s what the edge gives. No transcendence — nothing woo. Just what’s left when you run out of fuel for performance.

What opens isn’t earned. It arrives because there was nothing left to hold it closed.

In that space is choice. Not reaction or survival. Ways of being only visible when you’ve stopped performing your way through the day.

That’s the richness and the gift... Many of us stop before the grind gets honest.

The Spark Flickers

Without witness or reciprocal love. In a body that breaks. Under cancer's long shadow, it is still there.

It is not heroism or performance. It is a small, unreasonable promise to keep participating in being alive.

I keep going because I’ve seen the opposite.
I don’t push for triumph. I push because I’ve learned what it means not to.

On trail, the world narrows: body, breath, pack, ground.
Pain constant.
Every step measured against years of pressure and flare.
Against the knowledge that the next scan or biopsy could change everything.Yet even there, it flickers.

Every morning I wake, mostly smiling now, it's there again. A steady insistence that this life, this body, this moment is enough to show up for.

I recognize that spark in Rob and in his mother. In myself, when I’m sitting at the trailhead, engine off, knowing the cost and stepping out anyway.

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→ Watch: The Life We Have – presented by REI Co-op Studios, produced in partnership with Wondercamp.

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*Peer reflection, not therapy advice. Your healing journey is uniquely yours.*