My Commitment

310 arrived in July. With it came a wall of heat that muddled the air and goggled my vision through the lens of “she’s dying.”

I was in the backseat of a car, squished between one too many bodies. Arms and legs, tanned from half a summer in the sun. Flesh that fit like water in a vase, morphing to fit the space. Music was playing. Disco, I remember. 

We were driving home from an overcrowded bar in Southampton, squashed bodies moving west down the Island. I untangled my right hand and opened the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center app on my phone. It was an action reminiscent of college, of being out at a party, wearing neon spandex in a North Carolina field, and being struck by the need to check an exam grade. 

“Cancer AntiGEN 125 (CA125): 310 U/mL. High. Normal Range: <=35 U/mL.” 

My grandparents lived in Southampton, in a house on Peconic Bay perched precariously over waves of blue. My mama spent her summers there growing up and so did we. Each summer hydrangeas lined the horizon in lavender. From the back porch of the house, which by the time I came around was undeniably sinking into the ocean, we’d watch sunsets made of sorbet. Being in Southampton smelled like sunburnt shoulders from a day spent clamming and my grandma’s “famous Mac and cheese” which we later learned came from a recipe on the back of the Kraft box.  

With my mama’s rising CA125, the antigen that reveals tumor growth in ovarian cancer patients, the smell of Southampton changed for me. The new smell was one of impending loss, of grief hidden behind the next bend in the road. I began to change too, in anticipation. 

416 arrived with a plate of sashimi. 

At the bar of a new Japanese restaurant my eyes glazed over watching kernels of rice sink into a ceramic dish of soy sauce. Outside, the sounds of Chinatown clinked and blared, horns and voices blended, muffled by the matte grey walls. Inside, waiters and waitresses who seemed as a rule to be tall and skeletal wore white ribbed tank tops that revealed the pointed outlines of their nipples. 

My boyfriend, Loren, was next to me, sipping a Matcha Martini, a gimmicky cocktail at odds with the too cool to need nutrients aesthetic of the staff. He was talking, smiling, offering me a sip. I think. I shook my head no, lifted my phone, and opened the Memorial Sloan Kettering app on my phone. Her test results should’ve been in by then.

“Cancer AntiGEN 125 (CA125): 416 U/mL. High. Normal Range: <=35 U/mL.” 

Thinly sliced cucumber bathed in a sesame dressing and thick cut mackerel sat untouched in front of me. I stuffed myself with silence instead. “You sure you don’t want to eat, Jess?” No answer. A loss spiral bloomed in my mind, without the words to converse with Loren over sushi, I felt sure I’d lose him too. 

479 arrived on the toilet. 

It was the early morning, an hour that should really still be counted towards night, and I’d left the lights off in the bathroom. Sealed in almost sleep my fingers moved on autopilot. 

Habits are most obvious in the half way point of consciousness. What the body does without explicit instruction from the mind is a revealing and personal fact. There’s a nakedness to being slightly asleep. Perhaps this is why intimacy forms when sharing a bed with someone. Less from the act of sleeping close and more from the moments of observation just before and just after. 

My half consciousness typed my mama’s username and password into the Memorial Sloan Kettering app on my phone. 

“Cancer AntiGEN 125 (CA125): 479 U/mL. High. Normal Range: <=35 U/mL.” 

It was September and tracking my mama’s CA125 had become my most deeply ingrained habit. My body’s response to a middle of the night pee in the dark. I was unable to fall back asleep and instead, watched Williamsburg grow light and loud. 

554 arrived during an episode of Sex and the City. 

Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte were dressed fashionably in black. The heals of Carrie’s strappy sandals sank into a grass lawn as the foursome made their way towards the entrance of a church. They dabbed tissues to their eyes, in mourning at a minor character’s funeral. I stared at the screen and was transported, for the first time, to my mama’s funeral. 

There are so many people here. They wait in line to offer condolences and the line never ends. I see my outfit, black satin. It looks like fall. Clear day, orange leaves, a crunch to the sky. I am stoic. No, sobbing. Stoic again. I am braided into the arms of my friends. I am broken. In half. Apart. In pieces. How did all of these people know to come? Did I invite them? How will I invite people to my mama’s funeral? And who will handle the flowers? 

I got stuck on the flowers. I saw lavender hydrangeas, clipped in vases, the lining of our Southampton summers. I saw Lillies exploding in a saturation of pink, stark against the sea of black. The flowers looked abundant, lavish, alive. My mama’s spirit personified. But I couldn’t work out how they got there. It has always been my mama who handles the flowers. 

I picked up my phone and opened the Memorial Sloan Kettering app. 

“Cancer AntiGEN 125 (CA125): 554 U/mL. High. Normal Range: <=35 U/mL.” 

It was a Saturday night and a friend’s 27th birthday party. I was sitting in bed, willing myself to rise and dress in the tacky prom themed attire required for the event. Nausea spit bile into my throat. 554 clawed my insides. I called my friend and told her I was too sick to come. It was the truth, I think. 

1871 arrived in November. It was a sledgehammer. It cleaved the world. 

1871 made death imminent, its stench so strong it suffocated me. 

1871 exploded off of the Memorial Sloan Kettering app on the screen of my phone. 

“Cancer AntiGEN 125 (CA125): 1871 U/mL. High. Normal Range: <=35 U/mL.” 

The day after 1871 arrived, I decided to sign up for a support group. It wasn’t until I came to the final question on the group’s intake form, which read “What age were you when your parent died?” that I realized I was registering for a grief group. A support group for young adults whose parents had already passed. 

My tracking of my mama’s rising CA125 from July to November wrote me into a world where she was already gone. Where my grief for her controlled my consciousness. Silenced me. Isolated me. My recall of her rising numbers, and my location and sensation upon discovering each, is exact. I spent months obsessively pattern hunting, trying to predict the future. I failed at this miserably. 

A few unpredictable things happened after 1871. The first is that my mama stabilized. Her CA125 leveled and then dropped precipitously for the first time in eight months. The second is that she began to see a new oncologist, an oncologist with no app. 

My mama came back to life in my mind. Number resistant and resilient. Unburdened by the ever present promise of test results, measurements of proximity to death, I came back to life alongside her. I began to lavish in long car rides, seep into the intimacy of early mornings, luxuriate in thick cut mackerel. I began to write and laugh and listen in ways that I’d lost access to during my months of number tracking. I danced, really danced, with my head thrown back and my friends by my side, for the first time in a long time. To disco, no less. 

It has been some time since we’ve gotten a read on my mama’s CA125. I don’t remember exactly what it last was but it was somewhere close to a thousand. Revel in that imprecision! The freedom! I could sing!

This Tuesday, we’ll get a new set of test results. My mama will receive a scan and an updated CA125. She’ll also return to her previous oncologist, who will post her test results, making them once again viewable by app. 

My commitment is this: Before Tuesday, I will delete the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center app from my phone.