My mother’s sister Mary Jane died six weeks before my sister Pam and I were born.  Mary Jane had turn forty just two months earlier.  Mom, very pregnant with us, went to spend her final days with her.

Mom had many suspicious lumps checked out before they finally found cancer in in June 1974.  Her other breast was removed in August 1975, with precancerous cells.  Pam and I were 22 for the first operation.

After Mom’s radical mastectomy at the age of 63, I stopped using birth control pills because the mixed message of their link to breast cancer confused me.  I visited a breast surgeon every six months.  Each visit caused great fear in me for I knew that I would die without my breasts.

I moved from Cleveland to Chicago in 1977 and stopped the six month breast surgeon torture.  I continued seeing my gynecologist every year with an annual mammogram.  I continued to believe that I would eventually lose both my breasts to breast cancer. After all that was the experience of all the women in Mom’s side of the family.

Her youngest sister Alice died in 1980 at the age of 55.  Her middle sister Margaret died in 1986 at the age of 68.   Mom made it the longest at 78, dying in 1993.

Mom eventually moved to Chicago after Dad died and experiencing some depression.  She moved in with Pam and her family.

Mom had attempted suicide when the family suggested that she needed to meet with a psychiatrist.  Her desire to “not be a bother” included taking a bottle of Tylenol.

The tests showed no physical cause of her problems with her thinking.  She had electroshock therapy to remove the memories that caused her depression.

Eighteen months later she went into a nursing home, contracted pneumonia, and died within the month in January 1993 from a brain tumor, a metastasis from her breast cancer eighteen years earlier.

At some point, I came to understand that my belief that I would die without my breasts no longer was true.  Pam had not.  I stopped my annual mammogram.

Pam was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 2008.  She chose to have both breasts removed with reconstruction to follow.  A series of major fiascoes conspired to make that not possible.

Her doctor had told her to insist that I have a mammogram, but I declined to do so.

She appeared to be in remission and had her knee replaced.  In that process, she was diagnosed with bone cancer.  She died in July 2013 at the of 61.