Amelia Clare Wright

In Which My Mom Asks Me How I Was Told of Her Diagnosis

April 13, 2021

This sentence keeps looping through my head: “I was twenty-three when my mom died of cancer.”

I really do not want my mom to die of cancer.

I am scared. I am scared to admit I’m scared. 

No. It was a voicemail. I can hear my dad’s voice shaking. While I fixate on my mental echo of his quiver, it occurs to me that I don’t know what my dad’s voice sounds like in voicemails. Something doesn’t feel right about this memory. Falsetto and unsound.

No. It must have been a phone call. I must have left it ringing for three times. I closed my eyes and hoped for good news. It would not be good news. 

She’s knitting baby hats for my sibling’s and my imaginary children now; “Just in case.”

The day of her surgery: walking down the street from the gym to my apartment, I remember Tati saying, “It’s probably a good thing they’re taking so long. It just means they’re making sure they check everything.” It was hour five of her two-hour surgery. I pretended to believe her. 

No. He called me and I didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a message because he wanted me to find out directly from him; he wanted to hear my voice break in unison with his heart. I did not want to live in a world that has experienced that kind of break. 

Writing “Mom’s Birthday!” in a planner reaching ahead a year from now felt like a gamble.

No, no, no. Look here: in my own manuscript, what is written? “My dad told me over text because I don’t ever pick up my phone and because, I think, he wasn’t in the right headspace to talk to his daughters about his wife’s prognosis. What they had thought would be a benign tumor turned out to be cancer that had spread from her ovaries to her uterus, her stomach, her colon, pretty much everywhere. The doctors scraped her clean, or as clean as they possibly could, and they stitched her up from pelvis to navel. My mom kept trying to show everyone her scar. I’ll admit, it was pretty cool. Red and swollen all the way from her belly button down to below where she pulled the top of her pants down.”

“One day you’ll read about it in one of my books, don’t worry,”—but I wonder if she will. 

No. That can’t be right. It was a knock on my apartment door. It was my right hand turning a cheap golden knob in my tiny Brooklyn kitchen; my chin tilting upwards as the door shifts out of my sightline and my tall father materializes before me. Unable to enter the hospital due to Covid protocol, he had driven three and a half hours north to tell me in person. Now this is getting out of hand. I don’t have the answers.

Every time I picture someday walking down the aisle, I pause. My right arm is empty. My mom isn’t here.

No. I don’t remember. Can’t you tell I don’t remember? 

Who is going to cook for us on Christmas when she’s gone?

I don’t remember the words “your mom has cancer,” but I do remember the way it took hold in my body: like some electric eel in my veins, shocking me into numbness or else socking me into emotions of words that are too lofty and ambiguous and artificially abstract to even be used to describe emotions, but here they are in my beating heart, things like despair and desperation and despondency. Here they all are, slithering through my insides, like some sort of infection of dread. I fall apart inside when I’m confronted with everything I need her for: I need her for everything, for soothing some sort of unimaginable tenderness; everything, including every mundanity of life. 

Whose phone will buzz with the one-time code for me to sign into our Amazon account when I get locked out? It’s dumb, you think, but really, who? 

I don’t remember. 

And I don’t know if I want to. 

April 22, 2021

My mom is alive.

(My mom has cancer.)