A number of years ago my mum was discharged from oncology.

Everyone told her it was wonderful news, and they were right, because it was. I want to say that plainly before anything else, because nothing in what follows takes any of it away.

She came home with a clear diary and no idea what to put in it. For a long time her weeks had been built around appointments, and then one day they simply stopped.

What was holding the week together

Here's what I noticed watching her, and I'm only describing what I saw.

Everything had been organised around the treatment. The appointments gave the week a shape, so there was a Tuesday and there was a Thursday and there was something to get ready for. The people around her checked in constantly. There was a plan, and the plan always had a next step in it.

That's a lot of structure. Nobody calls it structure, because everybody is looking at the medicine, but it's doing an enormous amount of work in the background.

The scaffolding comes down

Then it ends, and all of that ends with it.

The people who were closest during it quietly return to their own lives, because from the outside the hard part is over, and there's nothing unkind in that at all. It's what everybody does, and it's what she'd have done for them.

The scaffolding comes down at exactly the moment she's expected to feel relieved.

Congratulated on an ending, managing a beginning

For everyone else it's an ending, and endings are clean. For her it's a beginning, and beginnings aren't clean at all.

So she's being congratulated on an ending while privately managing a beginning, and there's no obvious moment to say so. Saying it out loud is almost impossible when everyone around you is so pleased.

Discharge is a transition dressed as an ending. She's being asked to return to a life that no longer exists, as a person she hasn't met yet.

This is where the usual language gives out, because we tell people to bounce back and there's nothing to bounce back to. Resilience has nowhere to point.

What I see across a lot of women

I want to widen this out, and what follows is a composite rather than anyone in particular, so nobody needs to scan it for themselves.

There's the woman who can describe her diagnosis with complete precision and her future not at all.

There's the one whose diary refilled within a fortnight, because empty was unbearable and something had to go in it.

There's the one everyone keeps calling brave, who is quietly exhausted by having to keep being it.

And there's the one who can't say out loud that she doesn't want her old job back.

Every one of them is being congratulated on an ending while privately managing a beginning that nobody has acknowledged.

There's no leaving do, and no welcome either

When someone leaves a job, we mark it. There's a leaving do, people say things out loud, and everybody understands that something is ending.

Nobody thinks to do this at discharge. There's no leaving do, and there's no welcome either.

But the goodbye is happening whether it's named or not. Something did end, and it deserves to be acknowledged as an ending rather than skipped over because the news was good.

And then the hello has to be designed rather than waited for, because an empty diary doesn't fill itself with anything you chose. It fills itself with whatever asks first.

What ended for you

This is the question I'd sit with, and it isn't only for women who have been through treatment.

What ended for you that everyone else treated as good news?

The promotion. The move. The last child leaving school. The thing you worked towards for years and then arrived at.

Something ended there, and you may never have said so.

I've written a page for women navigating exactly this, the season after the thing that structured everything comes to an end. You'll find it at theleaptolead.com/beyond.