When My Mom Got Sick, This TV Show Kept Us Going

Every family has itsarchetypes, so here’s mine: My dad and my brother and I are all miserable. None of us are quick to experience joy, and all for different reasons — my dad is irritable, my brother is anxious and I’m bitter. The three of us combined could make one moderately unwell person. Instead, we are planets that orbit a sun more optimistic than we could ever be, and we hope that some of that shine rubs off on us periodically.

My mother believes in a positive ethos: that things invariably will improve, that everyone is trying their best, that it’s better to be surprised by harm than anticipating it all the time. In April 2023, I was laid off from my job, and she reassured me immediately. “Everything always works out,” she said. But for the first time, I noticed a slash of worry run across her face. It looked as if she was losing her radiance.

I later learned that my mother had been hiding something important from my brother and me for a month: She’d had a biopsy to determine if she had breast cancer. Within weeks of her 69th birthday, she had a lumpectomy. The doctors told her she would need an exhausting surgery, and then exhaustive radiation. For a little under a year, she went through treatment, and steadily she changed — she became sour, nihilistic and impenetrably dark, just like the rest of us. I had never seen it before, and I didn’t know what to do with it other than try to change her mind. Who was this woman? Every few weeks I’d fly home to find my mother again.

Cancer robbed my mom of most pleasures. Food was rendered tasteless at best and inedible at worst; she’d push a plate of cheese and crackers away like a child, pantomiming vomiting at every meal. Radiation gave her brain fog, so it was challenging