About Here As One

There is a particular kind of silence after you hear the word "cancer." It is not the absence of sound — the doctors keep talking, the hallway keeps moving, the world keeps spinning. But something inside you goes completely still. We know that silence. We have lived inside it.

Our mother was diagnosed first. She was the kind of woman who held entire worlds together — who remembered everyone's birthdays, who knew the exact way each child took their coffee, who showed up with food when anyone was struggling. When she got sick, we realized for the first time how much of the foundation beneath us was her. And we had no idea how to help. We wanted so desperately to fix it, to find the right words, to be enough — and nothing felt like enough.

We sat beside her through chemotherapy. We drove her to appointments and watched her lose her hair and listened to her say "I'm fine" when she clearly wasn't, because she was still trying to protect us, even then. We learned things about love that we never could have learned any other way. We learned that being present is sometimes more important than knowing what to say. We learned that you can be absolutely terrified and still show up. We learned that some kinds of strength are invisible until they are the only thing left.

There were nights when we sat in hospital waiting rooms and searched the internet for something — anything — that would help us understand what we were feeling. We found medical articles. We found statistics. We found forums full of strangers trading information about treatment side effects. But we could not find the thing we were actually looking for: a voice that said "yes, this is terrifying, and you are not alone in being terrified, and here is how you get through tonight."

Some families are touched by cancer once. We were not that fortunate. While we were still learning to breathe again after our mother's death, we watched our sister-in-law receive her diagnosis. She was young and full of life — someone who laughed easily and loved fiercely, someone whose children still needed her in ways that only a mother understands. The unfairness of it was something we could not make sense of, and still cannot.

Watching her fight was different from watching our mother. By then, we knew more about what cancer does to a family. We knew the particular exhaustion of caregiving — the kind that does not end when the patient sleeps, the kind that follows you into your own bed at night and sits there beside you. We knew the guilt of needing a break from all of it, and the shame that follows when you finally get one. We knew how isolating it can be to carry something this heavy while the rest of the world keeps asking "how is she doing?" without thinking to ask how you are doing.

We watched her face the fear that every cancer patient knows but rarely speaks aloud — not just the fear of dying, but the fear of what gets left behind. The fear of missing birthdays and graduations and ordinary Tuesday evenings. The fear that the people you love will eventually stop missing you, or worse, that they will miss you so much they cannot get back to living. She worried about all of it, and we worried alongside her, and there was nowhere to put any of it.

When she died, we were left holding two losses at once — and a quiet, growing conviction that no family should have to navigate this path so completely alone. That somewhere, somehow, the people who have been through this should be able to reach backward in time and help the ones who are just beginning.