Bozoma Saint John - The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival

I woke up with a start.

Typically, I take my time getting up. The alarm rings, I hit the snooze button, and then I lay back down for a few minutes, curling into the quiet before shaking off the last vestiges of sleep and stepping into the fevered rush of my day.

But that morning, I sat up abruptly, my heart heavy, my stomach queasy. I wanted to cry and vomit at the same time. It felt like something was coming.

I tried to remember what I had forgotten that was so terrible. You know how you go to bed reeling from something awful, and when you wake up, for a split second youve forgotten what filled you with such dread? I searched my mind for what that could be, for that horrible thing my memory had briefly hidden in my sleep.

But there was nothing. Everything was fine, all things considered.

Fine was a relative term at that moment in my life, because both my husband and my mother were battling cancer.

My mothers diagnosis had come first, in January 2013. The doctors had run their tests and determined that after surviving breast cancer two years before, she would now have to fight another form of the awful disease, this time in her uterus.

When Mom moved from Colorado to New Jersey to receive chemotherapy, I squeezed my suitcases into her small spare room. Shed emerge from her treatments tired to the bone, so I was there to pick her up, to coax her to eat, to help her to her bed to lie down. But we took comfort on the days in between chemo, knowing that she was getting better.

We found out that my husband, Peter, was ill in late May. It was Burkitts lymphoma, a form of cancer so rare that the specialist consulting with his primary oncologist was based all the way in Texas. But his physicians said it was curable. The medical team was flooding his system with a cocktail of medications, and it was working. Each time the doctors took a scan to check the cancerous growths in his throat and neck, they had shrunken a tiny bit more.

Peter had always been fiercely healthy. Hed walk around Manhattan with a light coat in the middle of winter and never even catch a cold. The cancer diagnosis jolted us, but we were confident he would survive.

So as strange as it might have seemed that I felt good while two of the people I loved most were ill, I was actually in a strong place emotionally.

Until that Wednesday morning.

I wanted to call my sisters or one of my best friends, Leander, but what would I say? And would giving voice to the fear manifest something awful that hadnt yet happened? Could silence short-circuit it, prevent whatever it was from coming into existence?

I reached for my phone. I needed to know if anyone else was feeling the same sense of doom, that something awful was imminent. But instead of making a call, I reached out to the void.

I was fluent in social media, but I wasnt one of those people who shared her most intimate thoughts there. I didnt vent about politics on Facebook or do Instagram videos on climate change when I spotted litter in Morningside Park.

But now, I was going to try to express my feelings of foreboding in 140 characters or fewer. My tweet was simple and vague.

I feel uneasy, I wrote. Does anybody else?

I got one response back from someone I barely knew. Yes, she said. I feel it too.

I got out of bed and prepared to go to work, figuring my early-morning angst would fade. But I couldnt shake it. Not when I dressed, not during my fifty-minute drive to my office in Westchester County, not as I sat at my desk looking at marketing strategy decks and going through the other motions of my day.

Id checked on my mom before I left the house. Shed rested well the night before and was eating breakfast and reading. And when I called Peter at the hospital, he was in a good mood too. His oncologist would be in later that morning to go over his latest scans.

I grabbed some lunch and was sitting at my desk when my phone began to buzz. It was my mother-in-law.

Can you come to the hospital?

She and Peters sister, Debra, had come from Massachusetts when Peter first got sick and were staying at my apartment in New York City. They went to the hospital every day, and there was nothing unusual about my mother-in-law calling me at work and asking me to stop by. Shed phone because Peter was asking for me or to see if I could bring something random, like one of his sweatshirts or the rosary beads of hers that shed forgotten at the house.

But when I asked her why I needed to come to the hospital now, in the middle of the workday, she wouldnt say.

I just need you to come, she said again. Right away.

I couldnt avoid it anymore. The feeling Id been trying to bury with phone calls and spreadsheets and storyboards began to bubble up and overflow. My mind began to get fuzzy. I couldnt catch my breath. Panic was smothering me. I wanted to run, but I couldnt move.

I dont know what I said to my mother-in-law before I hung up the phone. But I knew I did not want to go to the hospital. I couldnt.