Chapter 7
Nadine
A year and a half ago, my mom called me up on a random Wednesday and asked if I wanted to grab coffee.
It was a weird request. Not because I don’t like coffee, and not because I don’t love my mom. But not only do my parents live in the suburbs, but my mom works in the suburbs, too. She’s a high school science teacher.
So there was absolutely no reason she should be downtown on a random Wednesday, but somehow my brain didn’t register alarm bells.
It should have.
Cancer.
She and I sat in at the café for nearly two hours, but when I walked away, only that one word stuck with me.
Later, much later, I would bone up on the details.
Lump. Stage Three. Chemo. Radiation. Mastectomy. Prognosis.
All, terrible, terrible words, stemming from that one destructive c-word.
The months that followed were as horrible as you’d expect. I cried. A lot. Even worse, my dad cried. My mom never did, and that almost made the whole thing worse, because she was the one who was sick, and she was so much stronger than any of us.
She lost her hair. She was sick and frail, but never weak in spirit. I went over there at least three times a week to see her, usually more, and even on the worst days she never once failed to greet me with a smile.
I’d wanted to shave my head to be in solidarity with her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I’d gotten my thick, dark, wavy hair from her, and she’d insisted that I keep mine long so her own hair wouldn’t be a stranger when it came back.
So many evenings we’d sit quietly in the living room with a cup of tea, listening to her favorite female jazz musicians as she’d French braid my hair, me on the floor, her on the couch behind me, wearing one of her brightly colored scarves on her bare scalp.
It got worse before it got better. Grim doctors’ appointments where the prognosis would give us a thread of hope, and not much more. A double mastectomy where she bravely had her own breasts cut away and replaced by something that looked the same, but wasn’t.
And then…
And then my mom got better.
She’s been in remission for five months now, and as full of life as she is, it seems like it’s been years since we got the good news.
Her hair’s still short, but sassily so. Her body’s growing stronger every day. So much so that we’re running a 5K together next month—a breast cancer fundraiser, where she’ll proudly pin a survivor bib onto her shirt.
I couldn’t be more proud.
Anyway, during my mom’s sickness, I always knew that I wasn’t alone, but I tried really hard not to let her sickness be about me. When I cried, it was late at night, when nobody was around. Not Paulo, and not even James, although James knew that I was crying. I knew he knew, because some mornings I would find him asleep against my bedroom door, almost as though he’d set up camp there to guard me in my grief.
I don’t mean to sell Paulo short. He was there for me the entire time.
But it was James who really got me through that terrible time.
James who’d grieved with me, as though my mom and dad were his parents.
I’ve met James' actual parents a handful of times. At parent weekends, for graduation, and so forth. I even stayed at his dad and stepmom’s for a full week one summer when I went out to visit. They were nice.
