This is the 10th in an ongoing series of posts bringing a critical sociological and feminist lens to my own experiences with endometrial cancer.

Six months ago, when I was still a newcomer to Cancer Land, I was handed a lesson in honoring each other’s worries. Here’s what happened.

I had perched at the edge of a small group of mostly middle-aged and elderly women brought together by cancer diagnoses. Most were veteran cancer patients who had been through the treatment mills and amassed a great deal of knowledge both about cancer and about Cancer Land culture. I listened eagerly as they shared examples of advocating for themselves with their medical team(s), the importance of doing one’s own research regarding cancer treatment and diet regimes, and committing to self-care practices such as eating lots of fiber and keeping a gratitude journal. Likely due to my own steep learning curve at that point, I didn’t at first notice the one young-ish woman who seemed to be sitting even further towards the edge of the group than I. After a time, one of the veteran women saw her wiping tears away from her eyes and asked what was wrong. In a soft voice, she explained that she worries about missing her children’s milestones – and especially seeing them dress up for their proms. In an even softer voice, she whispered, “And I worry about them growing up without a mother.” I vividly recall the beseeching look in the young mother’s eyes. I believe she was looking to this group of Elders to guide her through the suffering ahead of her, to help her make sense of her family’s situation, to reassure her that she was not alone.

And we utterly failed.

Rather than honoring her concerns, the small group of senior women dismissed her worries and urged her to stop thinking about the future and focus on what she could do in the present. One woman advised her to wake up each morning feeling joy and gratitude for being alive.  A second gave a mini lecture on self-care, focused mainly on preparing a high fiber diet with plenty of homemade fermented foods. A third told her not to worry, that cancer treatments had come a long way since she herself was diagnosed five years ago. I now understand that they were reciting dominant American narratives about individual responsibility for health and the cancer culture imperative to be optimistic and brave.

Today, not quite a veteran but no longer an immigrant to Cancer Land, I’m haunted by this conversation. Why didn’t I speak up? I may have kept silent feeling that as a cancer newbie I didn’t quite know the rules of engagement. But I’ve never been one to shy away from expressing (expounding!) my opinions. I’ve even been praised by a former student for being a “total badass” for publicly challenging medical and criminal-legal institutions through my research and activism.

I now think that I was struggling with how to honor other people’s worries – both those of the young mother and those of the veteran cancer patients.

Worries are a mixed bag. Some are shaped by childhood memories of things that can go very wrong:  a classmate whose legs were crushed when he walked between two parked cars and never returned to school; a friend whose mother developed a tremor that turned into what we now know is Parkinson’s disease; a television show about a kid who had to live with a grouchy old uncle because her parents died in a car crash. Some worries are shared across whole communities where people are being menaced by state violence or war. Some, as hinted at by the young mother, reflect contemporary nuclear family structures that rely almost entirely on a mother to raise children and keep a household running. And on some level, all worries echo the existential reality that nothing is permanent no matter how much we love and try to hold on.

Worries are both naggingly present and hard to own up to. I recall a conversation I was party to some twenty years ago. A young real estate agent whom I knew slightly was dying of lung cancer (no, she was not a smoker.) The younger me didn’t know what to say when, from her bed, she whispered, “I’m scared.” Fortunately, a more confident, older friend asked her, “What are you scared of?” She replied, “I’m worried about not following up with my clients.”

Now, I must believe that this young woman feared pain, dying alone, the unknown-ness of death, being buried in the ground, or being forgotten by those fortunate ones who would still live after she was gone. But that’s not what she told us. Maybe she truly was most worried – at least at that moment – about the clients she was letting down by dying. Taking responsibility and working hard are core values in our culture. It’s also possible that she was focusing her greater fears on something concrete and manageable. Indeed, when the more confident friend responded, “Don’t worry. I have the key to your file cabinet, and I’ll get in touch with your clients and make sure they are referred to a good real estate agent,” my dying friend seemed soothed and drifted into a comfortable sleep. She died a few days later.

And here I was, twenty years later, not speaking up when a group of Elders dismissed the worries of a young mother recently diagnosed with terminal cancer.

What could I have said, what could all of us have said?

Your worries are legitimate. We all worry about illness and death. We know that each of us worries differently. Some of us are most worried about painful and humiliating medical treatments and being kept alive incontinent and hooked up to machines. Some of us are worried that our adult children won’t have time to sit with us during our last weeks of life. Some are worried that our partners are showing signs of dementia and without our presence, may forget to turn off the stove or pay the electric bill. Nearly all of us are worried that our money will run out before we die and that we won’t be able to keep up rent payments or afford a dignified funeral. Some of us focus our worries on a houseplant that needs to be watered precisely once a month, on a doctor who might be angry at us because we sought a second opinion, on the diarrhea caused by our current treatment. Some of us continue to worry about the same things that worried us pre-cancer: A child’s rocky marriage, a neighbor’s annoying habit of allowing their dog to dig up plants from our lawn, the state of the world that we are leaving to our grandchildren. Some of us worry about different things on different days, while some of us have a single worry that accompanies us day and night.

 Most of us have had more time to work through these worries, share them with friends both in and out of Cancer Land, and find practical as well as emotional ways to live with these worries. That doesn’t mean the worries go away or that they are simply something to “manage” with the help of a therapist, a mantra, a gratitude journal, or a “good” attitude. These worries are real. As fellow residents of Cancer Land we affirm that your worries deserve to be honored by us, by your family, friends, communities, and medical teams. You deserve social and economic policies that guarantee adequate health care for all and that provide the kinds of home assistance that you likely will need. Yes, we are older, and for many of us making homemade pomegranate juice, high fiber muffins, and fermented vegetables is empowering, even though our doctors and families may be dismissive of these practices that give our day-to-day lives meaning and value.

Yes, your immediate worries are different from mine, but we will help you as best as we can to locate the material resources that you need. We will lobby for more research on women’s cancers and better funding for support services for people who are ill. If you like, we will provide shoulders for you to cry on — and we will honor each tear as a precious offering.

I thank my friends Margalit Jakob and Debra Cash for helping turn my confusing musings into coherent ideas.