Content Warning: Depiction of death or mental illness
Schrodinger’s Cancer
When you are 25 your mother may have cancer.
She will ask you if she can talk to you and half of you knows it can’t be anything good. But half of you think’s it’s something small, like I just wanted to catch up with you, or your Dad and I just got into a fight.
You will be bartending when your mother tells you about the growth in her thyroid. You will call her after the happy hour rush has peeled out. You will update her on how your move to North Carolina is going. You just got approved for your apartment. You’re going to start packing on Monday. Then you’ll ask her what is going on with her. She’ll tell you she wants to talk to you but it’s probably best if you’re not working. You’ll tell her to just spit it out.
It will remind you of when you came out to her on a phone call in December. How you sat at a red light that refused to change colors. How the sudden fear of holding that secret from your mother overwhelmed you and you said, “I think I should tell you something but-“
“Just spit it out Kellie.”
“I like girls.”
She will be quiet. And then she will be shocked, which is funny to you now because you were so convinced she already knew. She will ask you how you know, and you will say it’s because you’ve slept with girls before. You’ll hold your breath because you’ve never talked about the fact you’ve had sex with your mother. And then she’ll surprise you.
She will go on a ten-minute long rant about how it doesn’t really matter who you sleep with, but you shouldn’t just be sleeping around. It does not matter to her that you fucked a girl, only that the girl wasn’t your wife. Later, you’ll laugh about this. It will make you wish you had told her sooner.
Now the tables will be turned. You will be on the phone telling her to just say it.
She will tell you she has a growth in her thyroid.
They took a biopsy of it, but it came back inconclusive. The doctors are now confident that it will be cancer. She will tell you she is going to have surgery in a couple weeks to get it removed and then they will run more tests and figure it out.
You will tell her you love her.
She will tell you she knows.
You will ask her if she is scared.
She will say yes.
This will be the fifth time you have ever cried at a restaurant.
When you are 25 you will think about the first time you told your mother you hated her. You don’t remember what it was about, but you remember being in the laundry room and knowing the power of that word. You remember the first time your sister said it to her, and how ten minutes later while it was only you and your mom in the car, she cried. You know you could break her with that word. So, you say it, even though you don’t mean it, because you want it to hurt.
But it doesn’t. She will look at you, cold, unwavering and say, “You don’t even fucking know what that word means.” And she will leave you there, dumbfounded next to the dryer and the cat’s litter box.
You will never tell your mother that you hate her and mean it, but you will find other ways to hurt her still. The last time you really hurt her, you were in Paris. You will go with your college marching band for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and your family will come as well. You will ignore them the whole trip to spend time with your friends, and on the final dinner you will not even save them a seat at your table and your mother will come up to you, not knowing where to sit, and say, “You have never hurt me like this before.”
You will block out most of your memories of Paris. It does not matter how good the food was. It does not matter how beautiful the city was. It does not matter that you just spent five days with your best friends in an entirely different country. You will black it all out, so you don’t have to remember the sound of her voice cracking when she told you that.
When you are 25, ice cream will be on sale when you’re grocery shopping. Your favorite flavor is caramel, but you will buy mint chocolate chip because that is your mother’s favorite, and you haven’t stopped thinking about her since she told you she might have cancer. She’s loved mint chip ever since she was a teenager and worked at the Denville Dairy. When you wake up at three am, unable to sleep because all you will be able to think about is what if your mother has cancer, you will eat that ice cream. Will your mother need her thyroid removed? Will she gain weight because of it? Will she remember to take the medicine she needs to take every day? Is she awake right now? Is the same fear keeping her up?
The ice cream will be freezer burned; it will remind you of nights alone with your mother. The two of you will be watching some show on tv, laughing over your ice cream until she tells you to go to bed.
“But Mom there’s still time of the episode left,” you said.
“I guess you can stay up, but only this one time,” she replied.
When you are 25 you will buy tickets to go see the Jonas Brothers in concert. You will be so excited to see Kevin, he’s your favorite. For a while your favorite was Joe, but then Kevin got married to a girl from New Jersey, and your mom is from New Jersey, so the two of you decided that he was your new favorite.
There will be a lot of things that happen like that, facets of yourself that only exist because you inherited them from your mother. You wanted to like what she liked, you wanted to act in the same way she acted, so you adopted her mannerisms as your own, and now you can’t decide whether or not you do them because of yourself or her anymore.
Your mom always waited and watched the credits roll at the end of a movie, she told you it was because a lot of people worked on it, and they deserve to have their name read. Now, when you go watch a new movie you’ll sit after everyone has left, after the cleaning guys have begun to sweep up and down the aisle, just so that you can look at all the names.
When you’re the designated driver on a night out with your friends you’ll wait to leave their driveway until you watch them enter the house, because that’s what your mom would do when she dropped your friends off. When you wait until the end of the house party to help clean up, you’ll think about how your mother showed her love by helping clean and tidy homes up after events. On your friend Allison’s wedding, you’ll stay until the end, helping put aluminum foil over all the food and packing up cars with belongings. She’ll look at you and smile, and you’ll say, “Why are you looking at me like that?” She’ll hug you as you walk out of the venue and say, “You’re just being you, thanks.” And you’ll think to yourself, you’re not being you, you’re being your mom.
When you are 25, you will have so much anxiety you will not be able to function like a regular human being. You will call your mother. You will tell her this, but she will not understand. So, you will give her the laundry list of things you are trying to do. It’ll come out of you like word vomit, because even though you’re trying to parse through all your thoughts, they keep ricocheting off every surface inside of your mind.
If you want to be a writer, which you do, you must read, you must write. Often. To get your pilot’s license you must pass a big test that you just do not have the time to study for. When you do study, nothing sticks in your brain. This doesn’t make sense to you because you have always been good at school. You graduated in the top two percent of your high school, and Magna Cum Laude in college. Why can’t you study for a damn test?
You are so incredibly broke and trying to budget yourself is nearly impossible. You want to go to the movies. You want to go out with your friends. You want to try the new restaurant that’s opening down the street. You want to travel and see the world. How are you supposed to do all of that without spending money?
You’ve had a pile of laundry to put away for over a month. You’re putting on so much weight you have to buy new clothes, so you should really start going back to the gym. You are trying to move to a totally different state because Tallahassee is sapping every last ounce of your happiness and determination away from you. Now you are spending hours looking at apartment complexes and reviews and making calls and going on virtual tours only for it to be too expensive or overrun. You want to stop bartending, so you need to look for new jobs, but how do you market yourself after being in the service industry for the last five years? What job will pay enough? You don’t go to bed until four in the morning because of your job, so after you get your recommended seven to eight hours of sleep to function like a normal human being you only have four or five hours of your day to get all of these things done. There just isn’t enough time. Your anxiety over how much you have to get done cripples you, so you sleep too late. You watch tv. You take a nap. Your mother begins to understand. The tone of her voice changes, the pace of her words seems more deliberate and for a moment you will think to yourself, she finally understands, she finally sees me.
She will suggest that you stop going to flight school.
Your heart will drop. For a brief moment all of the anxiety will leave you because the only thought in your brain is that your mother just told you to give up on your dream.
Your mother just told you to throw away all the money and hours you’ve spent on this.
Your mother doesn’t get you.
Maybe she never did.
When you are 25 your mom will call you out of the blue. She wants to make sure you’re still alive because you’re bad at talking to her.
“Hey, I was just checking in with you.”
“Yeah, what’s up, I don’t have a lot of time, I’m getting ready for work.”
“Ladybird was on the tv yesterday, don’t you like that movie?”
“Yeah, I love that movie. The director also did the adaptation of Little Women a couple years ago.”
“Yeah, that was really good.”
“I thought about you the first time I saw Ladybird. I always thought that shopping scene where they’re arguing and then find the perfect dress was like us.”
“Yeah, you were no fun to shop with growing up.”
“I like it a little more now.”
She’ll pause for a moment before she continues. You’ll have already put her on speaker phone as you frantically pull fresh clothes over your body for work.
“Did you feel like her growing up? She reminded me of you, Ladybird. Did you want to change yourself from who we had raised you to be?” There will be a sensitivity in your mom’s voice you only hear a couple times a year.
“You know when I grew up and you started calling me Kellie Belly and Kell Bell in public.”
“Yeah.”
“I really hated it. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stand those nicknames. I think I wanted to be taken seriously or something as a seven year old, and I didn’t think people calling me names would let me do that. But now, whenever anyone calls me that, I get to think of you.”
You will wait in the silence, letting her decide how she wants to respond. You know it won’t be this big emotional response because that’s just not your mom. But these are the moments the two of you are honest with each other.
“That’s nice.” Silence again. This is all you’ll get. You will go back to getting dressed.
“Also Mom, when I come home next week can I bring this white blouse and see if you can get a stain out of it? I’ve tried everything and it’s still got this spill I got on it.”
“Yeah, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks mom. I gotta go to work okay. I love you.”
“Love you. Have a good shift.”
When you are 25, being single will be very hard. You will go a whole week without seeing your roommate because of your schedules. You only know she is alive because sometimes her car is in the driveway, and sometimes it isn’t. Your friends will be in relationships that somehow you have not been able to find. They will always be busy. You will be busy. Nobody has time to see each other. You don’t even have time for a relationship but going to bed alone keeps getting harder.
You’ll go on dating apps occasionally. But you won’t even want to entertain these people, you just like the attention they give you. But during your last month in Tallahassee, you will indulge a boy desperate to be with you. You’ll get his address. You’ll drive halfway there. It’ll be late, you’ll have already had a couple drinks, and then you’ll think about the rant your mom went on about how you shouldn’t just sleep with anybody. You’ll brush off the thought, but the alcohol doesn’t help and suddenly you’re in the McDonald’s parking lot, sobbing onto your steering wheel, thinking about the fact your mom may or may not have cancer. Your phone finally pings, and you’ll see a, “still coming?” text.
You won’t respond.
When you are 25 your mother may have cancer. You won’t talk about it. Talking about it will make it real, like you’re manifesting the outcome that she has cancer. But how do you describe this fear? How do you describe the dread of the limbo you and your family are sitting in? On your day off you will go to the bar you work at. You will get shit faced drunk, and after not talking about it, you will tell everyone. You will tell every regular, you will tell every worker, you will stay after close when you are not supposed to, drinking Michelob Ultras and old fashions.
You won’t remember much of the night, but you will remember telling your friends about your mother. You will tell them how much you love your mother. You will also tell them how much she has enraged you. How right now, as her future hangs in the balance you cannot stop going through this photo album of memories of every time you wronged her and every time she has wronged you.
You will discuss the parallels between the two of your lives, which you have seen for ages. There is a sense of pride you will have in following in her footsteps, in becoming an English major, in becoming of a reader and consumer of books. That one of the definitive traits you have is being a writer. But there has been a sense of dread ever since you decided that decision, and as the alcohol is absorbed into your bloodstream that dread will come to the forefront.
Your mother didn’t do anything with her English degree. She wasn’t a successful writer, or editor. Her degree got her jobs, but she became a stay at home mom. And you have never wanted that. When you are 25 you will have the same desires and you did when you were seven, and that is to be one of the best, and to be recognized as such. And you will be willing to do just about anything to ensure that.
But maybe your mother learned something by not achieving your idea of success. She didn’t put her ambitions in front of being a good person. You think about how you have treated your friends, your family, and yourself, all in the sake of ambition. Your mother never told someone she loved that she didn’t have time for them because studying to be an airline pilot or working on another edit of her short story was more important than the friend crying on the other side of the phone. Sure, she didn’t achieve her wildest dreams, but maybe the trade she made for that was that she held onto her humanity.
How is she better than you and worse than you at the same time? How is she holding you back and encouraging you?
Aren’t you more successful?
Aren’t you more lonely?
When you are 25 you will go to a Stevie Nicks concert. You’ll go by yourself because you couldn’t find any of your friends who wanted to go with you, and you’ll be one of the youngest people in your section. The women standing behind you will adopt you as their own and you will all dance to songs together. The whole time you’re there, you’ll think about your Mom, and how your love for Stevie and Fleetwood Mac started when you were fourteen, digging through her collection of vinyl, and finding her original prints of their albums.
Stevie will sing Stop Dragging My Heart Around with Billy Joel and you’ll be transported back to college. The women who adopted you are not there, the giant stadium no longer surrounds you, you’ll be in the comfort of your one bedroom apartment, listening to the Bella Dona album on your mother’s original vinyl. You’ll begin to jump up and down, head banging, and then just like your best friend who only lives a block down the street appears without notice, so will your mother. She’s young, probably in college too, because she’ll look older than she does in her high school photos but not that much.
You’ll marvel at how skinny she is, even skinnier than you from playing field hockey and fencing. You two will dance together and you will feel the sweat fly from her thick brown bob and you will laugh at the dance moves she uses because she still does the same twist of the hips and gospel mark time to this day. You’ll feel the tears fall down your face before you ever register you’re crying. She’s right there in front of you, young, perfect, poor and lost. And for the briefest of moments as you look through this portal into the past, the two of you will be the same. You and your mother in your early 20s, singing and dancing to your favorite artist.
Then, the track will change, and the mirage of her will disappear as quickly as it had manifested.
Back in the stadium, underneath the watchful gaze of your adopted concert moms, Stevie Nicks will close her show by performing Landslide in dedication to Christine McVie. Your mother will be on a cruise to Europe with your father, and yet, you will hear her singing with you along to the music. Her voice will never sound more beautiful.
When you turn 25 you will spend the weekend at your parent’s house. You will be awake and downstairs working on writing for a whole hour before your mother will gasp very loudly and in a shocked manner say, “Oh Kell Bell! Happy Birthday! I didn’t forget I just thought I had already said it.” And you will laugh, because you know she didn’t forget, in fact, she was currently baking you a cake.
When you are 25 you will go on a cruise to Mexico with your best friends. Your mother will ask you to text her whenever you have cell service or wifi and you will remind yourself that she is worried because she loves you. But as every anxious text comes in, you tell yourself you will not do this to your children when they grow up, you will give them the independence to go to Mexico and not be worried about their every move.
When you are 25, you’ll be blacked out, walking home from a party at four in the morning on the bad side of town. You’ll have no idea where you are, you’ll have no idea how to get home. A cop will stop you and tell you that he can drive you home or to the hospital, so you’ll let him drive you home. The whole ride home you will think about how one of the last conversation’s you had with your mother she asked you, “Do you drink too much?”
When you are 25 your mother will tell you she might have cancer.
You will say it in your head over and over and over again. Your mom may have cancer. Your mom may have cancer. Your mom may have cancer. But you will not be able to open your mouth and say it out loud. You will tell yourself it will be okay. And the only thing you can think of is all of the moments your mother tried to prepare you for this, all of the times she said, “this is valuable jewelry if you’re in a tough situation sell this first.” “This belonged to your grandmother, do not lose it.” “You know, it depends on what your dad would like, but when it’s time to be buried, I’m okay with going back to Jersey.”
You are not new to death. When you were five your grandfather died, and then just as the seasons changed, your family began to wilt the rest of your life. When your aunt and uncle died you were with your mother, going to the hospitals and the lawyers. You watched your grandparents die slowly, ER visit after ER visit. You were there with your mother picking out coffins and organizing what biblical texts were to be read at their funeral services. You can handle yourself. You know what to do. You know who to call. And yet every lesson she has tried to instill in you has escaped your mind. Every fiber in your being is completely and entirely unaware of what it is you are supposed to do next.
And what if she doesn’t have the cancer?
What is it exactly that you’re supposed to feel after feeling all of this?
About the Author
Kellie Fahy‘s short fiction has appeared in The Summerset Review and Etheria Magazine in the past. In 2019 she graduated from Florida State University with a degree in creative writing and classical civilizations. She recently moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to pursue her writing career and private pilot’s license.