Diagnosis
Cancer Summer I
cw: This piece is about my mother being diagnosed with breast cancer ten years ago. She’s fine now, but you might want to skip this one if that’s upsetting for you. There is also frank discussion of depression and despair.
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Ten years ago this week, my mother’s radiologist called her and told her that she’d better come in to the office following a mammogram and a few biopsies. And that my father should go with her. The doctor did not want to tell her the results over the phone.
I leaned against the kitchen counter to the left of the refrigerator during that phone call, listening as hard as I could to a conversation I knew she didn’t want me to hear. The black granite floors in the kitchen of our apartment on 108th Street were icy cold—they always were—and the familiar feeling of them warming up under my soles kept me upright.
Six weeks away from finishing college, a grim, tear-stained marathon of roughly 1400 sprints. My mental health was abysmal, courtesy of depression, an emotionally abusive shit of a “boyfriend” in my first and second years, and a social group that had done its best to comprehensively define the terms “dysfunctional” and “toxic.”
The entire focus of my life had been getting to the end. Relationships, friendships good and bad, assignments, missed opportunities, all came and went and helped and hurt, but they all blew by me with the same wistful regret that I hadn’t acted better, done better, been stronger, been more alone. I just had to do this, you see. I just had to finish college, get that degree, prove whatever it is I had been so desperate to prove. The work itself wasn’t difficult. My professors loved me, my work was very good. They wanted it to be better, but it’s hard to improve as a writer when you’re writing every sentence through wracking sobs or with Apollo 13 and Rocky I, II, IV, and VI on in the background. Sometimes both.
I dosed myself with interpersonal drama—didn’t like the taste of alcohol and had other reasons for avoiding drugs—and rode the highs and crashes out while sobbing over papers about Russian novels and lyric poetry and theory. Four years of work and tears and falling apart and not giving myself a second to breathe and calling my mother four, five, six times a day to cry and cry and be talked through every feeling I had, because every feeling was the only feeling I had ever had, all the while refusing—refusing!—to consider therapy or any change in my living situation or relationships or to talk to my professors, or, really, any kind of help at all. Because I had to do it. And while no one ever said it would be easy, I had no way of really knowing that it didn’t have to be that hard. I felt so guilty for so long, I felt like it was a waste—the entire endeavor, to cost so much for me to be so relentlessly unhappy. But I was going to do the important part. I was going to finish.
The roller coaster had leveled out somewhat. I had a loving, supportive boyfriend and I had moved in with my parents to that beautiful, sunny apartment. I still cried most days, but that was my normal. While other students in my cohort worried about internships and jobs and grad school, I walked around with the singular, obsessive focus just to finish. With my shield or on it. I was so close to the end. I had no plans for after graduation. I thought once in a while about a vacation. Maybe to a beach somewhere. Where I could stick my feet in the hot sand and cry it out for good.
Instead, I curled my toes on the cold, cold floor, and waited. My knuckles were white where I gripped the counter’s edge.
All that work. All that focus. With my shield or on it. And none of it mattered anymore.
The first thing my mother said to me, after getting off the phone and walking out of her sunny, beautiful little office in the sunny, beautiful apartment she loved so much after living for twenty-five years in the Jersey suburbs, was, “This is not going to interfere with you finishing school.”
Six weeks left. A senior thesis to write. Final papers to write. Books to read. And now none of it mattered anymore.
The diagnosis was cancer. The prognosis was very positive. The interventions necessary were extensive surgery followed by chemotherapy, and more than that is not mine to tell. She was in New York City, and the health insurance provided by my father’s job in finance was comprehensive. Her doctors and nurses were decisive, experienced, empathetic professionals. She had the care that everyone should.
I don’t remember the last six weeks of my college years being measurably different in terms of emotional agony as the previous one hundred and ninety-eight. I had hit some sort of wall, and all the agony had to organize itself to my specifications instead of the other way around. In the run-up to surgery, Mom sat with me while I wrote my senior thesis on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a thesis that got me a tentative, probing conversation about plagiarism with my thesis advisor, and an A after it became clear that I hadn’t stolen my analysis from anywhere else. I wrote a final paper for my favorite professor that netted a compliment I still remember by heart. “This is the writing sample to use when you apply to grad school.” When. Not that I was applying to grad school. Maybe I would have, before that day in the kitchen. I don’t know if it would have been right for that twenty-two-year-old five minutes before her mother’s radiologist called. Maybe. Another student in my Jane Austen class overheard me telling our professor about my mother’s surgery the following week, and she touched my arm. “My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer last year,” she said. “Is she okay?” I asked, like that would make any difference. “She’s okay,” Natasha Grace Martin told me. She smiled at me and I think I smiled at her, but I’m not totally sure. “I don’t expect you in class on Tuesday,” that professor said.
My mother made sure, as much as she could, that I could finish college while all of that was going on. She scheduled her surgery so that she would be recovered enough to come to my graduation ceremony. I mostly wanted to skip it, but she wouldn’t let me. I’m glad I went. It’s how I discovered I was graduating with honors, one of fewer than a dozen people in my class to do so.
Even then, I buried any earned pride in offhand irritation that they hadn’t notified me somehow. Maybe they did. I don’t know.
These six weeks, from the last week of March to the second week in May, are a time my body remembers better than my conscious mind. My relationship with my mother changed so fast. My relationship with everything changed so fast. I can still feel it, that chill coming up through my feet, that rusted portcullis over my heart shrieking and grinding helplessly open, letting the fear in. And immediately in its wake, the ironclad determination, delivered from my mother, that cancer, even before she knew it wasn’t going to beat her, was not going to beat me.
She came through it. The surgery, the course of chemo worked; she’s never had a recurrence. She is not unscathed by the ordeal—no one ever is—but that isn’t mine to tell either. What is mine is my part of how we got through it. I never had to figure out what I was doing the summer after graduation. I took care of her, we took care of each other, and that is still the single most transformative experience of my life. That’s when I grew up. That’s when I figured out who I was, and what my priorities were. It’s been ten years and I think I finally have a handle on how to live in who I am and what my priorities are.
Every year my reaction to this time is different, but this year—whether it’s because of the decade of it all, or because of the pandemic remaking the entire concept of fear in its own image for everyone—I’m finally ready to write about it.
Again, I find myself in a time of great uncertainty and fear, much of it swirling around my mother. Again, I have a big project due in a few weeks. My body is telling me, Yes, you see? We have been right to feel afraid.
But my body remembers the determination, too.
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The next part in this series is called The Great Hill. I hope you’re safe. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re being gentle with yourself and others.