What We Talk About When We Talk About Cancer

Author's summary: Reflections on cancer and its impact.

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Fishy, my mother calls her lymph nodes. She tells me her voice box is a box full of cancer. She says once a doctor spilled my brother’s tumor trying to take it out.

I search “cancer images” and my screen tiles and fills with splattered burrs leaking radiance from under their hems. Each has landed on the surface of a moon.

I think of the man who took the wasps’ nests down from our eaves. I think of the two-sided utensil with which my mom scooped cantaloupe into marbles— some taws, some peewees—to suspend in jello.

She says once a doctor spilled my brother’s tumor trying to take it out.

I do not know whether the surgeon will scoop or scrape my mother’s windpipe clean. But then, nothing rests on my knowing whether a tumor is more bowl or balloon, more shadow or lump.

For that, there is the Canadian doctor for whom my mom, at her second appointment, wore a sweater knit white around a Norwegian Maple leaf.

The Nation — 2025-10-14

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cancer

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