Sometimes You Will Forget Your Mom Has Cancer
Sometimes you will forget your mom has cancer.
Not at first—like, the day you hear the news, your world will pause; your thoughts will stop streaming; news and ideas and feelings won’t buffer unless they relate to your mom, and her breasts, and what it means, and why it’s happened.
And straightaway, your language will shift. Instead of responding with fine or great when asked how you are, you’ll reply to almost all questions with, “I just found out my mom has cancer,” and then, “they caught it right away,” and then, “but still.” And people will get it. You will be surprised by how people understand, how many have been there, by how many say, let me know how I can help.
You wish you knew how to help. But you are here, and your mom is there—two dots on a map that require more than a leap of faith. Airplanes, days off work, long and longer recovery times. You book a future flight and in the meantime, you worry. You schedule tentative BRC1 tests with your friends, tests that will confirm or deny that you’re next in cancer’s path of destruction. Your grandma was first, and now your mom, and suddenly breast cancer is a fucked-up family tradition everyone participates in against her own will.
You will love your breasts a little more, fret over them, double-check and triple-check that everything is…
