I don't know how to talk about the things that are really happening, the things that are bigger and deeper, the things rooted to deep lines of blood and family, and the ways we've loved each other all our lives.

I found words—What if we do nothing and then she's just gone?—tumbling from my mouth, into the phone receiver, falling through the ether and backhanding my mother's soft open face. The words as I type them bring instantly to mind that terrible time I slammed the door to my bedroom in a dramatic teenage fight with her, how she was in the doorway, how the door hit her head, how her glasses hit her nose, her wince and gasp of pain. Nothing is worse than injuring my mother; nothing is worse than my mother injured. But this is what is true. My mother is injured, and I cannot fix it. She is in pain, and I cannot fix it. Her little sister is sick. My aunt is sick. Saying it, even here, sours something deep in my gut. a little stone turns over, disrupts some peace. It feels like I am betraying a secret. Why is illness a darkness, a hidden secret thing? Cancer. The word is ugly. We don't like it. My mouth has said it too many times. And I am not yet old. My mouth is not done saying it while formed into shapes of shock and sadness. There will be more. Cancer. Words like metastasize fall easily from my tongue now. It is in her stomach, her spine. It has metastasized. This is what we know. Metastasize is a bad word; it is a worse word than recurrence; I know that now too. 5 years ago she had aggressive breast cancer. After a litany of surgery and poisons and radiation, she came through still on this side. And now it is back. She told us she thought of it as a bird, a bird she had to get out of the house. I liked that. I liked it because I always hated the war and battle metaphors. This is a body, a person. Soothe and tend always seeming more appealing to me than wage, attack and fight.

But now I understand the urgency to fight. I want to fight to make my mother ask the questions none of us want answers to. I want to fight to protect her from those answers. I want to fight to make everything ok for everybody.

I want to fight for my aunt, fight to always be able to hear that belly laugh coming from the woman brushing my hair with her hairbrush—the one that was SO much better than the one my mom had at home—on the couch at the beachhouse. I always took pride in the way family thought that I looked like her, was like her. You have your aunt's hair, and I puffed up just a little. 6-year-old me just wanted to be her. I remember visiting her once, in Seattle, before she was married. I think she married the summer I turned three, so I must have been very young. She was a single woman, living in an apartment (in a city!)—so exotic. There was a mystery and some secretiveness surrounding it, something I can't quite place now.

Cancer. It is such an ugly and plain word. It doesn't suit the woman I looked up at wide-eyed as a child, the woman of cities and world travels, the woman of opinions and convictions as brash and unabashed as my own.

She was tough. She was tough, and she was like me.

And I don't want to soothe and tend. I want to be—and I want her to be—the woman that 6-year-old me saw in both of us; I want us to be tough, and I want us to fight.

This morning I went out into the warm blustery day, rain and wind, and that deep grey of autumn. Fall's first real rain. I remember that rain years ago, arms slung over the railing on my patio. We had waited all day for it to come, Michelle and I, and then we watched the sky open up, felt that rush of release as the crackle in the air broke, the warm smell of summer dust rising up damp from the pavement. I don't remember what we did that day—some 8, 10 years ago—but that moment is burned into my memory. Elbows slung, sense of possibility, that feeling of coming alive. Yes, I think I remember now. Harvest, et al. There is different and richer kind of magic to fall. Yes. Everything is going to be just fine.