My Father And My Mother Died Within Months Of Each Other. Then I Found Out I Had Cancer.

We will all die soon, relatively speaking. It’s true. Perhaps you think of it often. Perhaps it rarely, if ever, crosses your mind.

The great tragedy of self-consciousness, that terrible and wonderful spark that makes us uniquely human, is the knowledge of our own mortality. That knowledge that one day, everything we have done, everything we are, and everything we love, will succumb to inevitable fading into nonexistence, is a curse, and it is our blessing.

I had assumed that my life would continue to improve. In July of 2019, I was on the road with my band, having the time of my life. We rented an RV and toured the southern United States, playing for crowded rooms on big stages every night. On my birthday, I sang my heart out for a crowd of over a thousand attendees who sang my own lyrics back to me into the night. I just knew that next year would be even better.

Only three months later, in October 2019, my dad called me in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday.

“Hey bub.”

His voice sounded labored and hoarse. He was not well. I knew right away.

“What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.

“It’s my liver, they are admitting me to the hospital. They don’t have a bed for me yet, but I’m on the waiting list.”

He was a strong man. He raised me on his own, and I was an only child. We were indescribably close. We had our difficulties and differences, of course, but my relationship with him was the connective tissue that grounded me and glued me to this earth.

His illness was very unexpected. He had no preexisting conditions and was not an alcoholic as many liver patients are. His hospitalization came as a shock, and I spent as much time with him as I could.

On Dec. 9, 2019, I listened to the distant echoes of the physician narrating his time of death to my family. He was gone, and so was I.

The following months were the most difficult I have faced. I saw his painful struggle in the throes of sickness, fighting against death, in my nightmares. He appeared before me as a specter of judgment and blame every time I closed my eyes. I fixated on ways in which I might have been able to save him had I done things differently. Had I asked the doctors the right questions? Was there something I missed that could have made a difference? In my waking hours, I was assaulted by his ghost, countless moving images of his dying agony ever present in my mind’s eye. I was stricken physically by memories, and I found it incredibly difficult to go on.

In the aftermath, I received a phone call. They had found my mom dead in her apartment. They thought she had been “down” for roughly two weeks based on the decomposition of her body. The cause of death was unknown, but she had a history of alcohol and drug abuse as well as hypertension. I had always assumed it would be an overdose.

Apparently, though, she had been battling some sort of respiratory flu. I received the call on a Tuesday. That Friday, the 13th, the United States national emergency was announced in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and the quarantines began.

Although I had family, friends, loved ones, and my amazing partner, who is now my wife, to console me, I still felt alone. As if in a state of shell shock. Ears ringing. Visions of my dad’s graphic battle with death flashing before my eyes in nightmares and in my waking life.

I read books about life after death. Near-death experiences. All manner of serious inquiries by scientists and philosophers into the question: “What happens to our consciousness when we die? What is the nature of consciousness?” The major paradigm shift that occurred for me was simple: I generated the belief that it was possible that his spirit could be somewhere, instead of nowhere. It helped somewhat.

I didn’t play music for a few months.  When I finally went into my music room, I felt timid. Somewhat afraid. As I began to play, I felt something moving inside me. I felt emotion swelling. I felt a small fire come back to life. In my devastation, music became, more than ever, my solace and my religion. I turned the lights down and I wrote. I sang and played my guitar. It felt bittersweet. I played for hours and I wept.

A couple of months later, in October 2020, I decided to have a biopsy performed on a lymph node in my neck that had been swollen since spring. I sat in a room with my wife, in the same hospital where I sat with my dad less than a year prior, and watched the doctor shift uneasily after observing the sample under a microscope.“This may come as a shock, but you have metastatic papillary thyroid carcinoma…thyroid cancer, and it’s in your lymph nodes on the right side of your neck.”

In that very moment, I experienced a profound shift in consciousness. A revelation. I wanted to live. Life was worth living. In spite of the darkness and pain, the fear and the promise of devastation after devastation, I wanted to survive. I would need surgery to remove my thyroid, along with all of the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck, and it was likely that I would lose my singing voice, perhaps permanently.

I did lose my voice. Entirely. The cancer was wrapped around my right vocal nerve. It had to be scraped off, and the nerve could no longer stimulate my vocal cord. My surgeon basically told me that it was lucky he didn't have to actually remove the nerve. As far as singing goes, that would have been game over.

Additionally, there had been an unexpected and somewhat rare complication associated with the surgery that left my right shoulder extremely weak due to irritation to a nerve called the spinal accessory nerve which stimulates and controls the trapezius muscle. This meant that not only was I without my singing voice, but I lacked the strength to play my guitar.

After losing both of my parents, I had relied on music to help with my grief. My songwriting helped me to explore and try to rebuild myself in the aftermath of that trauma. During my recovery from surgery, I was now afraid of losing that relationship with music forever. These experiences tore me down to my core and exposed me in ways I could never have imagined. I've never felt more vulnerable.

As the months went by, I continued trying to sing. Little by little, I was able to force my vocal cord to move. The whisper became a croak. The croak became a quiet, hoarse note, and so on. Finally, I could sing for real. After physical therapy, my shoulder strength returned. I was able to play my guitar.

All this helped me to see life through new eyes. The sun felt warmer on my face. The taste of coffee, more enveloping and delightful. When I started to play my guitar again, it was for the sake of it. I wrote songs from a new place. I rediscovered the joy of playing and writing. Life is short and all things pass for better or worse. I delved back into the study of the guitar and developed my skills in ways that I hadn’t in a long time. Music was my therapy.

I wrote songs and formed a new group, Bastion Rose, in 2022. We worked out the songs live and started playing shows. It was amazing. I knew I was writing some of the best material of my career and that we had barely scratched the surface.

I sent a demo of one of our songs, “Coming for You,” to producer David Bottrill in hopes that he might be interested in producing our EP.  David is the three-time Grammy-winning producer responsible for producing records for bands like Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Godsmack, and Coheed and Cambria. He’s worked with Rush, Muse, Mastodon, Crown Lands, and Peter Gabriel. I love the sound of his records and he happened to work on some of my very favorite ones.

Several weeks passed and I thought I probably would never hear from him. Then, his manager reached out and said David had listened to the track and would be happy to do a record together. I was blown away. We went into the studio in November 2022 and made the Fade to Blue EP which led to a record label contract and a follow-up record with David Bottrill which is currently in production.

During that time, I came to the important realization that life is inherently valuable. It is worth living despite the darkness we face and even though ultimately, all lives end. Roses are worth planting and their blooms are beautiful, despite the inevitability of their decay. This is one of the most important realizations of my life, and I hope to build upon the bedrock of that epiphany for the rest of my days and let it be a bastion against fear and dread.

It is easy to feel singled out by the universe in times of great misfortune. To feel the crushing weight of circumstances outside of your control and suspect that this misery was designed uniquely for you by some cruel and intelligent thing.

In fact, it is an act of great courage and great creativity to view life as a gift. Life is a fleeting and mysterious thing. From the moment we are born, we march closer to the day of our death, enduring countless hardships along the way. But moments are worth having, and in each of them is the potential to feel deeply. To learn. To love. To inspire and to be inspired. My relationship with life, people, and with my work as an artist has never been more informed and authentic.

Yes, life is mysterious, and each day can be viewed as a curse or as a blessing. It so happens that we alone are the masters of meaning in our lives. The creative curators of light and shadows, of hopes and fears, of life and death.Austin Frink is the musician, songwriter, and recording artist behind Bastion Rose from Bloomington, Indiana. His literary focus centers on poetry and prose exploring the nature and meaning of human experience.

Do you have a personal story you’d like to see published on BuzzFeed? Send us a pitch at essay-pitch@buzzfeed.com.