The Life Waiting After Survival
Matt Mosley and Kade hang loose at Fort Morgan, AL.
by Matt Mosley
Four years ago, I didn’t know what my future would look like—or how much life was still waiting for me. I was diagnosed with stage III colorectal cancer.
What followed included emergency surgery and approximately two weeks in a coma. There were moments when simply surviving was the only goal. Against the odds, I did.
Every cancer survivor knows, though, that surviving doesn’t mean you simply close that chapter and return to the person you were before. Cancer changes you.
Follow-up appointments still come. There are reminders of what happened. And there are moments when you realize just how differently your story could have ended.
What I couldn’t have known during those darkest days was what was waiting for me several years down the road. Her name was Chryston.
We had known each other casually through social media for years, but in 2025, we began talking more seriously. We weren’t even a couple yet when her house caught fire.
Something terrible became an unexpected turning point. During that crisis, I stepped into Chryston’s everyday life—and met her son, Kade, for the first time.
By May 2025, Chryston and I were together. She had spent nearly a decade raising Kade as a single mother. She has since told me there were times she had almost stopped believing she would ever have the complete family she had prayed for.
Neither of us could have known that while she was wondering whether that family would ever come, I had already been fighting just to remain here long enough to become part of it.
Life after cancer hasn’t meant a life without hardship. Between October and December after Chryston and I got together, I lost three beloved grandparents.
There are still cancer checkups and uncertainties. But there has also been life—so much of it.
When I learned that Kade had never been to the coast, I decided he needed to. We took him to Fort Morgan, AL, and I got to watch him experience the Gulf Coast for the first time. That’s the kind of moment I think about now.
Today, Chryston and I are engaged. We’re making our home with Kade in the old house that belonged to my great-grandparents. We’re repairing it, updating it and filling it with a new generation of family memories.
What was once my bachelor home is now filled with a woman I’m preparing to marry, a teenage boy I’ve grown to love, dogs, cats, laughter, projects and plans for a future I once couldn’t be certain I’d have.
Chryston often tells me that I’m the answer to prayers she thought had gone unanswered.
Cancer taught me something different about time. It’s easy to imagine that the important part of surviving cancer is simply getting more days, but I’ve learned that the real gift is what those days may eventually contain.
When I was fighting to survive, I couldn’t see Chryston. I hadn’t met Kade. I didn’t know there would be a boy whose first glimpse of the coast I would get to witness. I didn’t know I’d be planning a wedding or restoring my great-grandparents’ home for another generation.
None of those chapters had happened yet. They were simply waiting.
Cancer changed my life forever, but it didn’t get to write the ending. Four years later, I’m still writing it, and there is so much life left to live.
Matt Mosley is a four-year stage III colorectal cancer survivor living in Boaz, AL.
