Moms with Cancer

It is the season of moms with cancer. My college roommate's best friend from college is heading into hospice after seven years fighting a brain tumor (it's hard to avoid that heroic cancer language). Kids are 17, 15, and 13. A friend from Red State Capital City Suburb was just diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Kids are 13 and 9 and hate each other. Dad has zero emotional intelligence. (These are not close friends, but we overlapped in so many areas--school, afterschool, swim team, pool--that we saw quite a lot of them.) Now my neighbor, the mother of M's first friend in Town, with whom I have gingerly been becoming friends, has breast cancer. Kids are 13 and 8.

I tell M, because she has to know. Not about A's college best friend, but about S's mom, because she plays with S every weekend, and how can she not know? And S's mom has already lost her hair, so she needs to know why that's happened. She doesn't want to talk about it. She says she's scared I'll get cancer. I say I hope I won't. She asks if cancer is contagious. I say no, and I give her the briefest sketch of cancer. She says she feels better, then, about going to S's house to play.

I talk about it with A, with E whose mother died of cancer when she was ten, with L's mother J who told me about our friend in Red State Capital City Suburb. We are all mothers too, and we watch with horror, trying to do whatever we can for our friends, doing everything we can to push away the thought that it could be us.