Opinion: Surviving an often-fatal illness let me see my life with clarity

After years of living under the shadow of a fatal leukemia diagnosis, remission arrives not with relief, but with weight. My most recent test results show no sign of disease — an improbable result, yet one that offers no promise of permanence or cure. They do not erase what came before. But they do offer something rarer than relief: a return — a reentry into time itself.

Even so, the best outcomes still leave certain risks intact. The uncomfortable truth is that remission does not mean safety. Relapse risk, while highest in the first year after transplant, never entirely disappears. Given my medical history, doctors estimate my lifetime relapse risk at roughly one in three, a figure neither comforting nor dismissible.

At 14 months post-transplant, my odds now tilt toward remission. Moreover, if current trends hold, the picture should continue to improve. Still, living with those numbers has taught me something more durable than optimism.

I have found that living through a serious, typically fatal illness has a way of recalibrating one’s sense of proportion. It strips away the illusion that history — or health — moves in straight lines. You learn quickly that certainty, in medicine as in politics, is mostly a rhetorical device.

Living with uncertainty, medical or otherwise, has shown me how fragile stability is once it’s been disrupted. Even for those spared personal catastrophe, the broader atmosphere has been wearying; institutions strained, norms eroded, tempers short. The relentless noise of grievance and division has made it harder to imagine progress, or even to agree on what progress means. Here in San Diego — where seaside calm and crowded boardwalks conceal deeper civic fatigue — the same national weariness swirls beneath daily life. An untrustworthy future tempts us to either disengage, retreat into cynicism, or live angry.

Serious illness forecloses all of these options. When time becomes visibly finite, disengagement loses its appeal. Cynicism turns out to be a kind of luxury — one that quietly assumes tomorrow is guaranteed. Anger, too, is stripped to its essence and revealed as wasted energy. What replaces them is something quieter and more demanding: attention — to physical limits, to meaningful relationships, to the small, unremarkable markers of continuity and community that signal you are still, improbably, in the game.

That is where remission enters — not as triumph, but as reprieve. Remission does not resolve uncertainty; it merely shifts its terms. The scans look better. The labs stabilize. The clock, which had seemed to accelerate ominously, resumes something closer to a human pace. What returns is not invulnerability, but possibility.

What has surprised me most about remission is not the relief, but the responsibility. Being given time back — an outcome that once seemed impossible — creates an obligation to use it with some measure of care. Not heroically. Not performatively. Just honestly.

I now find it essential to maintain two truths at once. The first is humility: remission is conditional, and none of us is owed duration. The second is gratitude — not simply for survival, but for the rare clarity that comes from standing on the far side of an almost closed door. Few experiences strip life down to its essentials as efficiently as nearly losing it.

Rebirth, it turns out, is less reinvention than reentry — not starting over, but starting again: older, chastened, and more forgiving. Rebirth shows up not in grand resolutions, but in ordinary mornings, familiar streets, and conversations once taken for granted. In a moment that has left many people exhausted and discouraged, that feels like no small thing. A reminder that futures sometimes reopen, even when evidence suggests otherwise.

For now, I remain in remission. That status comes without guarantees, but it comes with responsibility: to pay attention, to stay engaged, and to use the time that has reopened with care. Despite everything, the story continues.

Halpern served as an assistant U.S. attorney for 36 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego. He lives in Mission Hills.