My daughter is extremely sensitive. I don’t mean sensitive in the pejorative sense as in overly emotional like when I was dubbed Sarah Bernhardt for apparently “making mountains out of molehills.” I mean gifted or intuitive or psychically sensitive, like most children are to varying degrees. Acadia, my daughter, is so sensitive that she senses other peoples’ feelings before they walk into the room. It is a real disservice to her to try to hide concerns because she, like most children, I believe, feels her parents’ tension, and then attributes the cause to herself if the tension is not explained.
No one told me that my father was sick. He returned home from what I thought was a business trip with a thick scar slithering down his neck into his shirt collar and so I assumed that something was terribly wrong with him. Prior to that, I felt that the tremors in my home and the grimace on my mother’s face were all my fault. I’m sure the adults believed they were protecting the children; but, their secrecy made me hyper-alert to negative vibes, and I became a terribly anxious Sarah Bernhardt little girl with an overload of unexplained feelings that made molehills feel like mountains to me.
I was very clear that I needed to tell my daughter about my breast cancer diagnosis, and that I needed to tell her before I told anyone else. I didn’t want her to hear whispers or to intercept an odd voice mail message or to sense weird vibes. Acadia needed to hear this story straight from the source. However, I didn’t rush to tell her just so that I could clear a path to spread the news and gather my posse. I waited until the weekend so that she would have time to process at home rather than in school.
On Saturday morning after her breakfast while she lounged around watching cartoons, I walked down the stairs into her playroom, sat on the edge of her futon couch and said, “Honey, I need to talk to you.”
“K. What?”
“Turn off the TV a minute, would you please?”
She powered off with the remote and sat staring at the screen.
“Acadia, I found a little lump in my breast and…”
She looked at me. Her blue eyes seemed to flash freeze. “You have cancer.” Her cherubic face fractured and she cried, “I DON’T WANT YOU TO DIE,” then she threw herself back on the couch and writhed and wept and howled.
A strength greater than my own kept me from consoling her. Actually, Acadia taught me many years ago. She was merely five or six years old and crying as we departed from a visit to grandma’s house when she paused to scold me for trying to comfort her: “Mom, if you just let me cry all the tears, they’ll be gone.”
Perhaps, I remembered. Perhaps, I just knew that in this moment there was no consolation just the pure, raw, terror of potential loss. She was crying for me too. So, I let her cry without interruption for a minute, maybe two, and then I called to her, “Acadia.” She whimpered and I pulled her to me, hugged her to help calm the sniffles and aftershocks; then I gripped her shoulders and said, “Listen to me. Really hear me.” She became calm and steady and held my gaze. “I’m not telling you that I’m going to die. What I am saying is that I have to tend to my health. I want you to know that I will be going to doctors and healers, eating right, exercising, exploring different ways to heal and to stay healthy… I’m telling you that your mom is on a healing journey.”
how old were you when your dad got sick??? feels like the end of that healing journey too.
My father was diagnosed with multiple melanoma in 1964 when I was six. He died when I was eight. Your sense is keen, so I hope you’re right that the long season of grief is at end. Thank you.
BIG HUG, elle.