Lauren Sabbagh’s paper, which described the impact of her mother’s experience with breast cancer three years ago, floored Liz with its emotional insight. High school freshmen aren’t supposed to be this wise. But, then again, cancer isn’t supposed to lay into a family like a hurricane on a sandcastle.
“I had no idea that she had written about the experience,” Liz says.
As Liz read her daughter’s words on that morning two weeks ago, tears began to blur her vision. But what became painfully clear with every sentence was that the emotional wounds of breast cancer don’t heal as easily as surgical incisions.
“It broke my heart,” Liz says. “But it also made me extremely proud.” In her paper, Lauren, now a freshman at Hough High School, recounted the day — Aug. 28, 2008 — that would forever tilt her family’s horizon.
“The second I walked through the door, I knew something was not right.” Lauren writes. “I guess you could call it a sixth sense, but whatever it was, I could feel it lingering in the room.”
Lauren’s mom, grandmother and dad, Michael, sat waiting in the living room. It was 2:30 p.m. They shouldn’t have been there.
“There was sort of a numb feeling in the room,” Lauren writes. Then came the news, which Lauren knew would be bad.
“Today I went to the doctor,” Liz announced to Lauren and her twin brother, Nick. “They told me that I have cancer.”
Tears began to flow, making Lauren’s vision as blurry as her family’s suddenly uncertain future.
“... all I could think about was losing the person who meant the most to me, my best friend, my mom,” Lauren writes.
Lauren melted into her father’s arms as her mother reassured her. The doctors had found the cancer early, Liz told her. She was going to beat it. Lauren wasn’t convinced.
“It seemed like at the time that if I kept crying, all this would go away, that I would drown this cancer in my tears,” she writes. “But, it was completely the opposite, really. What people don’t understand about cancer is that it is there constantly. Cancer is there when you go to school the next day and all of your peers ask you what is wrong. It is there every time you pick
up the phone and the first thing people ask, ‘How is your family? How is your mom?’”
And then came the line that hit Liz hardest, because it somehow described cancer’s irrepressible presence.
“Cancer,” Lauren writes, “is there when you are alone in the pitch blackness of your room,
when cancer consumes your thoughts.”
Consumes. That was the word.
In the black, still silence.
In the moments of nothingness.
In the tranquility of her aloneness.
Her mom’s cancer loomed like a an
airborne plague, mocking Lauren in its invincibility.
But every fighter needs a foe, and Liz had found hers. More than a year later, she finished her treatment and was declared cancer free.
“My mom and I became closer than I ever thought we would be,” Lauren writes. “Whether we were going for walks together, talking on the back porch, cooking together or watching a chick flick, our bond was sturdy. My friends and I grew closer, as well. I knew that they had my back, and I had theirs.”
Lauren’s assignment was to describe something she’d survived, but her paper’s closing makes clear that her family’s cancer saga isn’t over.
“My mom is 100 percent cancer free, but cancer is something much deeper than just an ending,” she concludes. “I wish my heart could say I survived my mom’s battle with cancer, but the truth is, we are all still just surviving. The ending ‘ed’ (in ‘survived’) is past tense. Cancer is never past tense. Cancer will live on forever in our lives.
“I haven’t survived my mom’s cancer. I’m simply surviving it.”
