When my mother is about to sob in the middle of a sentence, she has a tic where she punctuates the last thing she’s saying by sternly pointing her finger—at your chest, almost as if to ascribe blame—before putting the finger to her mouth and turning away. She’ll excuse herself to the other room to fight tears back, sometimes unsuccessfully. The last time I saw it was when we packed the kids in the car after our weekly Sunday dinner in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood around the second week of March. I don’t recall the exact sentence that set her off, but it was something about her knowing she’d see her grandkids again. She didn’t sound confident.
I’d seen the tic many times during the year prior, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently agonized over every test and appointment, certain that it would be the one where she got the bad news she felt was inevitable. It never came, and the prognosis turned out to be a positive one. She was able to avoid chemotherapy, and her cancer went into remission after a few months and a major surgery. Still, cancer diagnoses have a way of reminding you of your mortality even when the outlook is good.
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