This summer, towards the end of my twenties, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She had a colonoscopy in June, a procedure she found torturous, and they found a malignant tumor. She told me over the phone that she had said before being sedated how proud she was of herself for doing it at all, and how supportive the medical team had been. When they told her her results, it seemed like bad karma. All that wishful thinking.
I started having phantom stomach pains over the coming weeks, cramps that were so bad I could barely stand up sometimes. I decided it was probably stress. I reread The Undying by Anne Boyer, lying on my bedroom floor, and felt unbearably sad. Death is sad. The prospect of suffering, in some ways, is worse. My best friend’s mother had died of cancer while we were living together a few years before and I felt like I had by osmosis absorbed a filtered version of her grief. I kind of knew what to expect.