The Way We Were
When I was a kid, I used to pretend I was an agent, on a top-secret quest to stop the mal-intentioned leader of a powerful nation from detonating a bomb or winning a war, completing the final step in a somehow lethal trade agreement. In my imagination, there was no evil too big overcome, no plot too complex to be thwarted, no genius too clever to be out-smarted. And I was always the one to stop him, to figure everything out at the last minute and save the world. As an eight-year-old, I saw the world in them and us, bad and good, black and white.
The first time my mom got a diagnosis, I was eleven. Cancer was something to be defeated, and to be defeated together. When she lost her hair, I viewed it as a setback. It was winning this …show more content…
That she’d be able to walk, laugh and love like before. But like grains of sand, I watched my faith in the doctors and the medicine, and even in her, fall through my fingers.
The cancer attacked her breasts, her lymph nodes, her lungs, her brain. It waged its war in intangible ways too, claiming her her desire to get out of bed in the morning, her ability to drive, patience, sense of humor, self-control, and certain memories, here and there. These were its prisoners. And then my mom became one of them, another thing we’d lost to the cancer.
The dinner table became a minefield. The war was no longer us against the cancer, a team. It was me, alone, against my mom and the cancer, who had at some point become the same thing and stronger than me, and my dad next to me fighting the same fight, but separately. Knowing logically the cancer wasn’t her fault didn’t make anything better. The foolishly human half of me believed if she loved me enough she’d make it go away. That if she cared enough about me, she’d wake up one day and the cancer would be
When I was a kid, I used to pretend I was an agent, on a top-secret quest to stop the mal-intentioned leader of a powerful nation from detonating a bomb or winning a war, completing the final step in a somehow lethal trade agreement. In my imagination, there was no evil too big overcome, no plot too complex to be thwarted, no genius too clever to be out-smarted. And I was always the one to stop him, to figure everything out at the last minute and save the world. As an eight-year-old, I saw the world in them and us, bad and good, black and white.
The first time my mom got a diagnosis, I was eleven. Cancer was something to be defeated, and to be defeated together. When she lost her hair, I viewed it as a setback. It was winning this …show more content…
That she’d be able to walk, laugh and love like before. But like grains of sand, I watched my faith in the doctors and the medicine, and even in her, fall through my fingers.
The cancer attacked her breasts, her lymph nodes, her lungs, her brain. It waged its war in intangible ways too, claiming her her desire to get out of bed in the morning, her ability to drive, patience, sense of humor, self-control, and certain memories, here and there. These were its prisoners. And then my mom became one of them, another thing we’d lost to the cancer.
The dinner table became a minefield. The war was no longer us against the cancer, a team. It was me, alone, against my mom and the cancer, who had at some point become the same thing and stronger than me, and my dad next to me fighting the same fight, but separately. Knowing logically the cancer wasn’t her fault didn’t make anything better. The foolishly human half of me believed if she loved me enough she’d make it go away. That if she cared enough about me, she’d wake up one day and the cancer would be