Life sometimes feels like a bad show on the 1000 ways we die as black people. The below standard health system doesn’t help much if you are poor. In the villages people have community funeral policies just so they have dignified funerals because a funeral says a lot about the life someone lived. Black people fear sickness of its association with death and how it sucks the life out of you until everyone sees something is wrong. You know people will ask you what is wrong but still gossip and diagnose you again because your symptoms aren’t linked to what you believe you sick with. Cancer had always been a thing on TV, in the sad white people movies that made you cry. One or two relatives had it and passed on. When my mom was diagnosed it became more than a star sign, it became a real thing living and breathing in her blood. It became our reality and what we prayed about it the most. I’m not even that clued up on the reality of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants because I was numb throughout the whole thing. I know that she was seriously sick and in a lot of pain. Praying and believing my mother would make it because I wasn’t ready to lose her. Early diagnosis might have saved her and good free health care because she was transferred to a hospital that specialized in cancer treatments. Most of all the prayers must have reached the ears of life giving divinity. Maybe we relive some things so the gods can change the course of the story and give us faith again. For now, my mother is a cancer survivor and that is something worth life itself.
The other person I know who had cancer died after a long fight with the disease. She was a Christian and through her sickness she had prayer meetings. They diagnosed her late and back then the health system wasn’t as good. Black people also blame witchcraft when something isn’t normal, so she could only live out her last days in prayer with no hope of getting better. I remember when cancer revisited our household, the fear it caused because people with cancer die. Few survive and stay healthy, and it seems my mother is one of them.
When it seems your mother is dying you die a little with her. Emotionally I was numb and overwhelmed, and everything was demanding something from me. I didn’t want to give in because I was tired and on a slow pace to a nervous breakdown. I failed in relationships because I didn’t have the energy to even try and I think some people were selfish to demand so much out of me at that time. So we are now in the ‘we don’t really talk anymore’ phase, just mere acquaintances. Maybe that is okay because people who drain you at the hardest time in your life aren’t the best people to be around at any time. Sometimes you meet people and they ask: ‘What’s your life story?’ When everything is still raw you can’t tell it without bursting into tears. It dawns on you that you might be depressed. ‘What is depression?’ the women in your family ask. I came to see that depression is what we are not allowed to be as black women. When they see depressed women in the movies they say, ‘Our existence is hardship and we were never depressed a day in our lives because we simply had to go on with life’. Yet those women are shadows of who we are just that they are a little too honest with their pain.