We don’t always know what is going to be a trigger for us, do we? It could be something we hear or see or even something unrelated that causes us to react or remember. Sometimes it takes a moment to define that trigger, sometimes it is almost startling its clarity.

The trigger for me this week was a conversation about someone facing breast cancer and the treatment options they had chosen. It was not their choice that affected me but rather the memory that it triggered, the way it took me back to my mother’s breast cancer so many years ago.

My mother was 50 when she was diagnosed, with a lump she’d found herself. The mastectomy she had was, as they did in those days, radical, removing both the breast and the lymph nodes. A large breasted woman, the area of the breast removal was extensive, so extensive, in fact, that three months later she had another surgery. The doctors took a skin graft from her upper thigh to cover the area of her chest, as it would not heal otherwise.

Mom and I had always shared dressing rooms when we shopped, had changed clothes easily in front of one another. But, the surgery changed that and I did not see the surgical site for years. I suspect she was protecting the 14-year-old old me and I also imagine she was uncomfortable in this new version of herself.

As I think about it now, I remember understanding, and not understanding, what had happened to her. Cancer was relatively clear to me but the extent of what had taken place was not. I don’t remember being afraid for her. I don’t remember being sad or concerned. What I remember most were the questions that I had and did not ask.

My father stopped sleeping in their bedroom after she came home from the hospital, ostensibly to give her a chance to rest but it was an arrangement that never changed. He slept on the sofa for awhile and then I moved to the finished room in the attic and he moved into my former bedroom. Again, I didn’t understand, I didn’t question, I just accepted.

I think of my own children at 14, far more aware and far more open than I ever was. The era in which they were raised was quite different from mine, the expectations of behavior not the same. As children, my brother and I were not included in many of the “adult” conversations between our parents and, truth to be told, I am not sure my parents ever talked about things that were difficult, even privately. My dad was often a closed book and Mom could not, or would not, try to open the covers of that book.

I’ve been sitting with these memories for days, thinking about how my mother must have felt when she confronted both the disease and the massive physical changes it brought. I think about the courage it took for her to go through this experience, essentially alone, and my heart aches for her. None of us can turn back the clock, to do what we wish we could have done so many years ago. But I hope that my life, my interactions with others, my efforts at awareness are a tribute to to her and that I move forward, for her and for me, with a full heart.