The living room was filled with stacks of cardboard boxes that represented the basic outline of the life that Dan and I were meant to begin. A lakeside house with a wraparound porch and soil that promised a bountiful vegetable garden was our ideal home, and we were just a few days away from moving in. However, a sudden, persistent tug in my right side caused me double over as I wrapped up the remaining utensils. Dan, ever the optimist, argued that the hefty lifting had simply pulled a muscle. By the third day, the dull aching had turned into a scorching, rhythmic pulse, and I wanted to believe him.
I drove to urgent care against my own resistance. Although the CT scan revealed a different picture, the doctors used terms like “appendicitis” and “strain.” At first, the nurse refrained from using the word “tumor.” She used clinical terms like “masses” and “further investigation,” but her refusal to look me in the eye told it all. The world I had been so meticulously packed away seemed to be crumbling in that sterile chamber.
A few days later, early-stage cancer was the diagnosis. I recall feeling the weight of the silence as I sat on the kitchen floor of our partially furnished flat, holding a bundle of tea towels. Dan didn’t use platitudes when he discovered me there. His presence was a silent anchor in a tempest I hadn’t anticipated; he just sat on the linoleum and held me. We postponed the move. Like gravestone monuments of our derailed plans, the boxes remained stacked. With the exception of my cells and the horrifying speed of the medical device, everything was on hold.
The course of treatment was exhausting. Chemo took my hair and subsequently my appetite. Dan didn’t wait for me to lament when the first clumps started to clog the shower drain. After shaving his own head with a set of clippers, he carefully finished mine. In that moment, he seemed like the most beautiful man on the planet, even though he was ridiculously bald and his ears protruded more than I had ever noticed. He muttered, “We go through this together,” which helped me stay upright when I felt like I was about to pass out from nausea.
I strolled into the guest room one particularly sleepless night, fueled by a combination of deep, gnawing anxiety and insomnia brought on by steroids. It had turned into a cemetery for “miscellaneous” boxes, or things we weren’t sure we wanted but couldn’t discard. I drew a dusty bin close to me and started searching through it for something to divert my attention. A bundle of letters knotted with a piece of tattered twine was nestled inside a faded manila folder near the bottom.
The return address was a little town in Minnesota, where I was born, but the handwriting seemed strange. One year before to my birth, in 1987, the first letter was sent. It was addressed to my mother, Anne. Reading what a man named Frank had to say made me feel like a voyeur. He wrote of weekends spent by a lake and the sound of my mother’s laughter with an agonizing, desperate compassion. The words “I wish I could see our daughter just once” struck me like a physical blow in a letter written just months before I was born. Do you think she has your eyes?
My mother had always told me that when I was a baby, my father perished in an automobile accident. Her stories didn’t contain any Frank. No cabin from Minnesota was present. All that remained was a neat, terrible falsehood that had persisted for thirty years. I realized that there was more that had been concealed from view than the cancer in my body as I sat in the dark for hours with the letter quivering in my lap.
Two weeks later, I approached my mother, and she didn’t dispute it. Her hands shook so hard at the sight of the letters that she had to put down her tea. A ragged river of reality emerged. Frank came from a background her family hated, was older, and was divorced. In order to “protect” me from the chaos of a complex family, she had left Minnesota, altered her story, and cut him out of our life under tremendous pressure from her aunt. Unaware that secrets tend to come to light when you least expect them, she had exchanged the truth for security.
The ensuing months were a struggle for both the body and the psyche. I penned a letter to the address on the envelope as the chemotherapy soaked into my veins. I had no idea whether Frank was still living or if he would even be interested in hearing from the daughter he had never met. A response came three weeks later. His sentences were firm, but his penmanship was unsteady as he grew older. He had always wondered and had never remarried. A hazy, light-leaked photo of a younger version of himself with a bundled baby was the one he sent. Me. It was the final component of a jigsaw that I was unaware was lacking.
The miracle occurred by fall. The results of my scans were clear. The relief was more draining than the sickness. When Dan and I eventually moved into the lake cottage, I started planting a garden by digging my fingers into the ground. I was starting over, but this time it was a different life than I had imagined.
In the end, we drove to Minnesota. Meeting Frank was more like staring into a mirror I had been avoiding than it was like meeting a complete stranger. He had the same shade of hazel eyes that looked back at me every morning, and he was quiet and kind. He told me tales about my mother as a young lady as we were sitting by the water; she wasn’t the wary, overly guarded person I knew, but rather a wild, energetic, and profoundly in love girl. I was eventually able to forgive her after hearing those stories. She had lied out of fear, which I now all too well understood, rather than out of malice.
But the cosmos was about to make one last, astounding disclosure. In our chats, Frank revealed that he had a son from his first marriage, Allen, a half-brother I was unaware of. Allen was a physician in the city where I had been treated.
I felt the breath leave my lungs as I searched for his name. Allen was the radiologist who had examined my first CT scan, so he wasn’t just any doctor. I recalled the notes on my chart, where a doctor had circled a small, unclear shadow and demanded a biopsy even though the urgent care physician believed it to be a straightforward rupture in the muscle. My cancer was discovered at stage one rather than stage four because of that “extra mile.”
There was a long, shocked quiet on the other end of the line when I called Allen and introduced myself. He informed me that he was really covering a colleague’s shift at the last minute and wasn’t even scheduled to work that day. He had glanced at my scan, noticed the name of a stranger, and had the instinct to investigate further. Before he even realized I was descended from him, he had saved my life.
I remember that packing day, the day the agony began. I once believed it to be the start of the end. I now see that it was the start of the truth. Pain is frequently seen as an intrusion that should be ignored or suppressed. Pain, however, can be a messenger at times. It compels us to slow down, examine the shadows we’ve been trained to ignore, and open the boxes we’ve kept closed. Healing meant that my entire story was integrated, not only that the cancer was gone. I finally found a respectable version of my mother, a brother, and my father. Your greatest blessings may occasionally be concealed amid your darkest hours. All you need to do is have the courage to continue unpacking.