“I don’t think I can tell the boys until I can get my head around it myself,” I say to my mom the day after the diagnosis. Freddy has just turned eight, and Benny is five.
“Okay,” she says, “but just know that no time is going to be the perfect time.”
Eight years earlier, when my mom called me from the doctor’s office after her diagnosis of multiple myeloma, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, nursing the baby. He was two weeks old.
“Goddammit, I am so furious that this is happening,” I remember her saying.
I didn’t cry. I told her not to worry, to focus on driving home safely, and that I would call my brother, Charlie, who was away at college. But when it was time for me to be the bearer of the news, I could hardly speak.
“What are you trying to say?” Charlie kept asking.
“Nothing good,” was the best I could do.
Thankfully, he got it with only a few questions. I didn’t move from the edge of the bed for a long time. My baby was milk-drunk in my lap, and his onesie was soaked through.