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If you’re going to give me bad news, do it over the phone. I’m a cool customer on the phone. I can immediately compartmentalize the information I receive and form a modulated response. Once the phone conversation ends I typically have a more emotional response, but my initial reaction, my phone reaction, has always led me to believe that I could handle any bad news with composure.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about myself.

At the end of our first evening in Michigan, as my mom finished cleaning the kitchen, she haltingly began to tell me she has breast cancer. Before she could even get the words out, my mind began to race, struggling to find ways to steel itself. I was sure she was going to tell me that my grandmother had passed, but when words failed her, and my dad had to finish delivering her news, I crumbled. Whatever internal strength I had summoned in those short minutes disappeared. As it turns out, difficult news, delivered in person, with eye contact and the subtleties of body language, doesn’t elicit my phone response at all.

It’s funny how my brain works. Within minutes I was denying the possibility and constructing alternate scenarios. If only we had arrived a day earlier, as I had planned, she wouldn’t have cancer if we had come on Saturday. If only we would have left earlier on Sunday, as I had also planned, then she wouldn’t have this news to share. She couldn’t possibly have cancer. She already suffers with COPD and heart disease. Surely these conditions get her off the hook. Doesn’t she deserve a get out of life cancer free card?

In the days that followed I stumbled around in my disbelief. Life took on a dull quality, as though I was looking at things through a window caked with debris. My last thought each night and my first thought in the morning was selfish: “I don’t want this to be happening.” I suppose I can’t expect more of myself. She’s my mother, and her mortality makes me feel like a child. Of course I don’t want this to be happening to me, but really, it’s happening to her, and whatever grief I may experience, pales in comparison to the enormity of what she faces.

It’s been a little over a week since I first heard the words breast cancer. Since then we’ve tried to concentrate on the girls and having fun. We’ve picked sweet cherries, visited Dutch Village, gone swimming in Lake Michigan, and added many miles on our bikes. In the coming weeks, after we’re gone, my mom will have surgery and radiation and more pieces of the puzzle will fall into place. I won’t be here in person to share that weight. Instead I will wait for daily phone updates. I suspect that the person I thought I was, the person who received difficult news on the phone with equanimity, won’t be there. She’s my mom after all, and I don’t want this to be happening.