A few words on cancer, or, "Tell me where'd you get that body from?"

Cancer is destructive in every sense of the word, but no amount of radiation therapy can undo the damage it does to a conversation. Nothing makes both speakers more frantically uncomfortable than the C-word.
Case-in-point: today, I was talking to this very old friend, who doesn't really know anything about me. And we were discussing the tastlessness of cancer jokes--which already felt risky, like I might suddenly lose the capacity to filter myself-- when he said that his grandmother had died of cancer.
"Yeah, my mom died of cancer."
What? Why did that come out of my mouth? Why did I turn it up at the end with a strange, sideways little laugh?
"Oh, I'm so sorry," he says, his voice dropping an octave.
Shit. Shit. Now it's out there, floating like something heavy and dead in the air between us. There is nowhere good for the conversation to go after that somehow escapes from your throat. All I can do is try to make it normal as quickly as possible.
"Oh, it's okay. I was really little."
Wait-- so now I'm just lying? Sure, I was really little, if by really little you mean less than a year shy of legal adulthood. My younger sisters and I were all old enough to spell out and google heptocellular carcinoma. In my head I try to rationalize the blatant fib-- "little" isn't really a specific adjective, I was little then, I'm big now-- when I realize the jeans I'm currently wearing were purchased a solid year before my mom died. What a mindfuck.

For a long time, my mother's death felt like the core of my identity. Who knows, maybe I still feel that way. Alexandra Hart is 19 years old. She has blonde hair, blue eyes, she's wearing a blue scarf and her mother died suddenly from brain tumors when she was 17. Defining, identifying, as if anyone who saw me on a subway or in a restaurant would know it about me; it was written all over my skin. I thought, when people looked at me, I must look inexplicably sad, indescribably longing. I'm white and upper-middle class and have nearly every socially constructed privilege of demographic granted to me, but I do not have a mom. And I am sick of pretending that I do in friendly conversation with strangers-- "It's Mother's Day, sweetie, did you remember to call your mom this morning?," "your mom must be real proud of you," "is your momma as pretty as you are?"-- because it is too awkward and too unnecessary to correct their usage of the present tense.
"I was little then, I'm big now." Sure, why the hell not. I carry it around in my belly like bricks all day and sometimes it comes out, backwards and never the way I want it to. What an incredible buzzkill.