Bread and Bread

As soon as I saw Cathy step out of her car in a short aqua dress and tall gold heels, I remembered that this was the premiere, not just a screening, of Decoding Annie Parker . I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, utterly fried after four non-stop days that included a twenty-four hour trip to San Francisco. But Cathy was really excited about this, and about introducing me to some of her buddies from FORCE , the support group for BRCA-1 and -2 ladies, which was presenting the movie about the search for the breast cancer gene. ( And the Band Played On for cancer, was how I thought of it—except when I’d seen that movie, AIDS and disease of any kind seemed incredibly romantic and distant to my immortal high school self.)   AIDS movie! Cancer movie! My stance on FORCE was: Awesome that it exists, but it’s not my thing. First, because it’s Cathy’s thing. I wasn’t very supportive of her struggle with her fucked-up but undetonated genes, because I was busy picking shrapnel ...

1. you always hurt the ones you love Friday night my dad called to say hi, and I mentioned something in passing about fearing a recurrence of cancer. Although I’m prone to medical anxiety, I think it’s safe to say that every person who’s had cancer and who thinks about the future wonders if that future will include cancer. But my dad took this as his cue to launch into a pseudo-scientific list of reasons why I would live to be 112. It’s what he needs to tell himself—and I get it, because a lot of the time it’s what I need to tell myself too, and sometimes it’s what I need him to tell me—but I wish he would admit it’s part of assuaging his own worry. Instead, he says things like, “I’m concerned you don’t have a realistic picture of your prognosis.” We had a calm, if lengthy, conversation about managing anxiety; at one point I said, “I know you hate emotions,” and he was like, “I do! I do hate emotions!” And then I hung up and felt too tired to clean the house or pack for our tr...