Here's an entry I never wanted to write.

1, 3 and 5, I believe.

I was going to write about Dan and the superhuman that he is for spending an entire week with his mom as she recovered from gall bladder surgery, cooking her meals, doing the laundry, cleaning her bathroom, etc. (She seems to be doing better now, by the way.)

I was going to write about roasting a chicken.

I was going to dedicate an entire pictorial post to the massive hair wad---the Red Whale--- that Dan fished out of our tub drain last weekend.

I was going to write about watching Julie and Julia again and what Nora Ephron had to say about housework and blogs.

There were lots of things I was going to write about these past few days, but none of them was going to speak to the most significant and jarring aspect of recent life which is the fact that my mom has cancer.

Lung cancer that has metastasized to her adrenal gland, we learned this week.

My mom has cancer.

This is a very difficult sentence to write.

And it’s a line I wouldn’t have written here had she not given me express permission to do so. Though this blog may seem a contradiction to what I am about to say, I do understand a lot about privacy.

And I understood this long before I heard Nora Ephron say (in reference to the movie which is based, in part, on a beginning writer’s blog), “...There’s no question that people who are involved with people who blog every day often feel as if their privacy is totally invaded by this process, which starts out as a kind of harmless, charming thing and then feels very different after a while.”

I work very hard to avoid crossing the lines of others’ privacy (sometimes at the cost of my own truth, even) so I was certainly not going to discuss on here my mom’s cancer diagnosis in real time, as it was unfolding this past week; at least not right from the start when even broaching the topic of her comfort level on my writing about this in a public way felt premature and even wrong.

But she brought it up.

On Tuesday morning, as we waited for her 8:30 appointment with a Thoracic Surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, my mom brought up the subject of her grandfather’s death. In his mid-seventies he was diagnosed with liver cancer, given a year to live and met his deadline. (That could have been the most terrible pun I’ve ever made and was so not intended.) At the time, my mom, who had long-since finished nursing school, was taking classes towards her bachelor’s degree (and was also managing the minor workload of being a mother of two children under the age of four and pregnant with a third; a feat I truly can’t even fathom). As part of her course-work, she explained to me, she interviewed her grandfather regularly throughout that year and wrote all about his illness. She said how helpful and interesting it was for her to look at his death through that lens. Though my mom and her grandfather were very close (it was, in fact, my father whom my great-grandfather chose to be his bedside physician), as a nurse, she sees death differently than most; she understands its inevitability and thus is able to see it with the same sense of eager observation and curiosity that prompted her to enter the medical field in the first place.

“It was such a learning experience,” she said. “I was documenting the dying process.”

(Let me be very clear: I am not documenting my mom’s “dying process.” I have no such intention and, in fact, refuse to do so. I am writing about how my mom has cancer and her road to wellness. That’s how I’ve decided this story will end.)

Hearing my mom explain this about her grandfather though, realizing how writing had served her, it seemed only natural that I ask about writing about her illness. So I did.

My dad, who brought my mom to Boston for the appointment (I met my parents there), at first said that he did not want me to do it.

“Why not?” my mom said. “I did it.”

(For the record, I understand my dad’s hesitancy on every level. Who wants to read about how the person he loves most in this world is very sick? Who, while living through something such as this, wants to also hear the narration?)

But my mom got it. She got it from the perspective of the writer who often processes life through ink on a page and she got it from the perspective of the reader who so often is looking to see his/her pain reflected in someone’s else’s story-telling.

“It helps people to overcome fear,” she said of stories of sorrow and hardship. “It gives people hope. It educates.”

My mom reminded me then about how it had been the “Little House” books that had inspired such hope in her as a child. (It is after Laura Ingalls Wilder, incidentally, that I am named. However, it is the long red braids and freckles of a young Melissa Gilbert who often comes to mind when I am imagining my mom as a child, seeking refuge in these books.)

I cannot adequately express my relief and the gratitude I feel toward my mom for understanding this and granting me permission to write what I need to. Leave it to a mother to facilitate, during her own time of hardship, her child’s journey through it. Writing will keep me well during this time. I would have documented things privately in my journals (and will probably write more than what I will feel able to post here; though I will always strive for as much honesty as possible) but had I not been able to write about this---at least to some extent--- here, I think I would have had to quit blogging completely. How could I have possibly kept up a day-to-day account without mentioning the only thing I can think about? (This is, of course, why I couldn’t write all week.)

But then, it is more than my mom’s unceasing mothering that made her understand this; it is that she is a writer, herself. Like the long red braids she had as a kid, she passed this other thing on to me as well. My mom could never allow herself (or maybe endure) the sense of indulgence (or even the freedom) that choosing a life of writing sometimes evokes but, make no mistake, she is a writer. It’s why her letters to me have always been so lovely. It’s why she notices the Catbird that follows her around her yard as she digs holes and plants her bulbs and flowers; and why she has her own story surrounding it: that this bird is in some way the reincarnation of the man who taught her how to garden---her grandfather---overseeing her work. It’s why she understands that the emotional complexities that have already surfaced surrounding her cancer---the nature of a family coping, the bonds between mothers and daughters and husbands and wives, the sharp focus into which all of our lives have been thrust---is the stuff of the richest writing material.

It feels terrible and disgustingly opportunistic to even apply the term “material” to my mother being diagnosed with cancer, but I am comforted by the fact that she understands it more than anyone. In fact, she was the one who first used this word when telling me that I should write about. And while I can only wish that my mom’s sentiments that the dissolution of fear, illumination of some unknown, and the uncovering of a sense of hope will come of this for those who read it, I can’t honestly say that this is my intention in writing it. I am mostly just hoping for these things for myself.

In short, from here on out, sometimes this blog is going to be about cancer. I figured I should let you know before I got right into it. (Though right into it we are. Tomorrow, I will be heading to Boston again where my mom will be undergoing a cervical mediastinoscopy---a biopsy of the lymph nodes around the lung.) I’m sure some days will feel light enough that I will be able to continue to write about masseuses copping a feel and plenty of that’s what she said...but other days I simply won’t.

I already feel different now about things than when I started this entry. Hope fades into fear so fast.

Still, I can guarantee you this: There will be an entry on the Red Whale. Ahab is way too proud of that thing for me to not write about it.