Cancer, and cancer, and cancer

[breakinglight11]

It's growing back again. My mother's tumor's growing back. Always, she goes in, endures the treatments in all their hell, is all right for a while after, and then it grows back again. This is how it is.

We knew it would happen. It's always going to happen, from now until when she dies. All this awful chemo and radiation and drugs, and it's just going to keep coming back.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer, C.S. Lewis wrote. I think of it often now. Sometimes I want to dig the phrase into the wall with a pocket-knife. Cancer took his mother too, then his father, and finally his wife.

When I picture her, I still see her as she always was, blonde and lovely and perfect. When I see her in person it's always a surprise. She doesn't look sick, really, but so different... so much worse. When I was home, someone commented on the difference. She pulled out her driver's license, with its photo from before-- from when her face was still pretty and heart-shaped and she still had her long golden hair. Now she is puffy and though her hair has grown back it's so different now, short, darker, wiry. I knew how she had been dreading that moment. The only thing worse was the time that child who hadn't seen her in a while refused to believe it was her now, because "JoAnne is pretty, and has long blonde hair."

It's like a punch in the guts just thinking about it. She told me about it in rueful terms, as if it were just a little embarrassing. If I had been her then, I would have slit my wrists.

In and out. Back in, back out. Her hair will be gone again. She will be sick, weak, tired, and still the cancer will be there. I don't know how she does it. I would rather dig open both my wrists than get sick, get fat, lose my hair, and die anyway. But she does. Coughing up blood and pretending she's fine, that she doesn't get tired, that she isn't afraid. That's what we do in my family. We do not want pity. We do not want worry. We do not want you to see when we are weak.

I think of my grandmother with lung cancer before my mother. My grandmother, my mother, then me. Will we be cancer, and cancer, and cancer? I don't smoke. But Christopher Reeve's wife Dana never smoked a day in her life, and she got lung cancer and it ate her.

All the women in my family get cancer. Both my grandmothers died from it. At least they were old when it happened, and lived to see their grandchildren. Grandma Julia Leone was lucky, her tumor was in a place where she could just have part of her lung removed. She lived long enough to get another cancer, melanoma that time, to come along and kill her. And Gigi, too, Gertrude Roberts my other grandmother, who got breast cancer and pretended she was fine and pretended she was fine and kind of discouraged us from visiting to never let anyone see her sick. And both of them, it spread to their bones and then their bones consumed them from within, just like Lewis's wife Joy Gresham. And just like my mother does, both of them hid how bad it was.

I would do that too. If I got sick, or started hurting myself, or stopped eating, you would never know. You would never know in a million years. Because if I know anything, I know that pity is like knives, shame is worse than cancer, so I know that you can hide anything from anybody if you really want to. You can hide your smoking from your children who lived their whole lives in the same house with you for eighteen years, you can hide it from everyone else for thirty. You can hide your breast cancer from your whole family until you die from it. And why not, because there's nothing anyone else can do, the cancer's going to eat you anyway, so if you're going to have everything else taken from you, your health, your beauty, your family, your life, you might as well die with your pride.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer.