The first time I heard it, I was eight years old. Sitting red-eyed and confused in one of the twenty or so pews of a small church in Oakboro, North Carolina, I listened as the preacher explained to the rest of the church family that my Aunt Cheryl and her family gravely needed their prayers. Some terrible thing called cancer was growing inside her, and she wasn’t going to win the fight.

Later, I listened in the backyard of my grandmother’s house. I sat on the swing between two dogwood trees and, pretending to be occupied with the squirrels trying to invade the birdfeeder, eavesdropped on the adults’ conversation, filled with foreign words like “chemotherapy” and “hospice.”

Well, therapy is talking like Momma does when she’s sad. Is “hospice” like “hospital”? I mulled the words over in my head and tried to shape the syllables with my mouth. I was too young to understand, but considering the amount of food everyone was bringing over, it couldn’t be good.

“She been fightin’ this since she was twenty, poor thing,” said a large lady, cradling a glass of water between fingers hidden beneath stacked gold rings. “It seems to follow your family, don’t it?”

I dragged my feet beneath the swing and ground the dirt into my sandals, ruining the white leather. What does that mean?

I counted up from my eight to twenty. Twelve. Twelve, and then I’ll have to go too?

Panicked, I tried to pick up the adults’ exchange and connect the dots, but they had fallen silent and my sister was tugging me toward the sandbox.

I heard it again five years later, holding my mother’s hand in the oncology office. The oncologist explained that what we had hoped was a harmless lump was actually a cancerous tumor.

Her blunt-cut brown hair and glasses made her look doctorly, so I trusted her as she told me that the small, malignant lump wasn’t anything I needed to worry about. She explained that my mother had already had three melanomas removed since the age of twenty, so her screenings had helped catch it at an early stage.

Surprised, I removed my hand from my mother’s and shot her a look. Three tumors in twenty years? Why didn’t she tell me?

“It can run in some families,” the doctor explained. “Sometimes there’s a mutation that can be identified. In some cases, there are tests that can be run, but by looking at the family history, I ….”

My mother cut her short with a sharp glance.

My mother had it at twenty, too.

A few months later, I spotted an envelope on my mother’s desk. It showed a black and white logo that looked like the pictures of DNA from textbooks. I sat on her bed and tried to decipher what the doctor had sent. Gibberish. There were so many words: white blood cells, hemoglobin, malignant, surgery, genetic, chemotherapy, mutations. But I found that the words fit in my mouth better than before. I didn’t choke on them, just stumbled.

My mother walked in and found me staring at the packet. She told me that she and my grandmother had been tested and were positive for a mutation in their BRCA1 gene. There were genes that helped suppress tumors, but theirs were damaged, which meant that cells had a higher chance of growing uncontrollably. It meant cancer, and it was hereditary.

“We’re not sure what’s going to happen in the future, sweetheart,” she said, sliding the papers through my fingers. “We can talk about getting you tested when you’re older, but it doesn’t mean anything just yet.”

It means we have the Cancer Curse. These things only happen in Lifetime movies, right?

It didn’t hit every one of us, and it didn’t always mean the end, but the results came with their own timer. The women in my family who had developed cancer had all discovered a malignant tumor by the age of twenty.

For weeks I lost sleep and hours reading everything about cancer, but it was too much information for me to integrate. Everything from the sun to water seemed to carry some cancer-causing danger. I pushed it to the back of my mind. It didn’t hit everyone, so I was fine, right?

It had been five years since it had been made real to me, five years since cancer had been close enough to touch me. But there I sat again, red-eyed and confused, in one of the twenty or so pews of a small church. It wasn’t North Carolina this time, and there was no preacher asking for prayers. I was sitting one pew behind my cousin John, who was staring with glazed eyes at the black casket holding his brother, David.

Only a few weeks earlier, I had seen David alive for the last time. John and I had spent an hour in his car as he explained how different David was going to look when I saw him. I halfway listened, but it was hard to imagine with David’s photo hanging from the rearview mirror. He had his arm slung around John’s shoulders, and they were smiling, dirty from tackling each other in a game that had started as soccer.

Once we worked up the nerve to go up to David’s hospital room, I stood outside his door, the mantra Be happy running through my head. Taking a deep breath, I walked in to find someone I didn’t recognize in that hospital bed. He was swallowed in a robe and covered by a web of wires connected to noisy machines. I felt a hand on my back guiding me to the chair next to the bed. I tried to sit, hoping no one would notice that John’s presence was the only thing keeping my hands from shaking.

The man who had seemed to hold more happiness and life in one body than I had seen in any crowd had shrunk down to little more than bones. The beanie he had on to keep himself warm swallowed his head, and blue-gray skin stretched over his protruding cheekbones.

I stayed by his bed holding his limp hand. He was too weak to respond, but I saw tears leak from closed eyes, letting me know that he heard me begging him to hold on and fight. It terrified me just as much as it broke my heart to see him. Maybe it was selfish – as a matter of fact, I know it was – but I didn’t see just him in that bed.

Suddenly I snapped back to the funeral because of the sudden silence. I reached over and gently squeezed John’s shoulder, in part to let him know that I was there, but it wasn’t selfless. I needed to know he was there to feel grounded.

My hand slipped off his shoulder as he stood to walk past the casket; he and his mother led the procession to the parking lot. One by one, people rose to follow them and say their final good-byes to my cousin. I sat, detached, as the pews emptied. Autopilot took over, and my legs lifted me and carried me forward.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to the burial, so I found John, promised to stop by later with food, and hurried to my car. I made it all of about three miles before I pulled off to the side of the road and let out the sob that had been building in my chest since I had parked at the funeral home earlier that morning.

Cancer was real again. It had taken my cousin, and I could very easily be next. I had just started my second semester at college. I had a job and new friends, and with my nineteenth birthday just a month away, the dreaded twenty loomed just around the corner. Weren’t birthdays supposed to be exciting?

Taking a shaky breath, I wiped my eyes and pulled down the visor to fix whatever makeup might miraculously be left.

You could always get that test.

It had been a long time since I had thought about that. It had crossed my mind, sure, but not in a way that made me pick up the phone to call my mother for the first time in months. Not in a way that made me tell her to set an appointment in June, that I’d be coming home to find out if I carried the Cancer Curse and see if I had an expiration date.

And that was exactly what it felt like – an expiration date. Like I had it stamped on the bottom of my foot, like a milk carton. The date might not be clearly written yet, but the lines were slowly starting to form, and I wanted to know how to erase them before they were permanent.

Putting my car into drive, I pulled back onto the road and turned on the radio. An upbeat melody filled the car as I merged into traffic. I had set the appointment, and now the waiting game began.