Mama, Young and Beautiful: Celebrating Another Year of Ferocity
by Emily Rose Herzlin
- USA -
I’ve never been able to remember my parents’ ages. I wrote my dad a birthday poem one year that began:
Dear Dad, don’t be blue,
Just because you’re 53 or maybe 52.
He taped it to his fridge next to my crayon scrawled sketches of Pocahontas. My father is having another birthday this year. So is my mother.
Everyone in my family except for me has had cancer. Even as I say this I worry that I am tempting the fates. Father: skin cancer. Sister: non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Mother: breast cancer. I wonder when it will be my turn, and what kind it will be, and what part of my life I will have to put on hold when it happens.
