Generations

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T here’s a photograph taken just after my oldest daughter was born. My mother and grandmother had flown from New York to Ohio to visit us and we were standing in a local bagel store. I can still hear my mother’s voice catch as she said “We are four generations of Jewish women in our family.”

This picture was nothing to take for granted. My grandmother who married at the spinsterly age of 34 was 89 at the time and among the last of her friends still alive. My mother had already survived two cancers the first when I was a sophomore in high school the second during my senior year of college. She had worried that she would not see me graduate from high school. The fact that 13 years later she was cancer-free and holding her newborn granddaughter in her arms seemed unfathomable to her.

I was different. I liked the picture but didn’t understand its significance. My mother’s illnesses did nothing to connect me to the fragility of life. Instead they convinced me that my mother was invincible. I never saw her sick — she sent me to summer camp during her first treatment and I was on a semester abroad during her second treatment.

She didn’t like to talk about it. It came out more in a Jewish mother guilt-trip sort of way: “How could you do XY or Z?” she would say. “Don’t you know I had cancer? You should be happy I’m alive.” And I was. I just didn’t think she wouldn’t be so it didn’t really concern me — much like I don’t worry whether the sun will rise in the morning.