Some questions don’t have answers. At least not really. They have about as much of an answer as orange has words that rhyme with it. “Doorhinge” might be good enough, but it doesn’t rhyme. Not really.
My four questions are in that category. I have googled them at midnight, pasted them into ChatGPT at 2am, turned them over in the shower, on planes, over coffee that went cold while I was still sitting there. Nothing has ever come back with an answer that stuck.
A few years ago my sister was accidentally tested for a genetic mutation. The result changed everything for our family. We carry BRCA2 - a gene variant that puts me in the 90th percentile for lifetime risk of breast cancer. I wasn’t sick. I hadn’t asked the question. But suddenly I had an answer that rearranged the furniture of my entire life.
Nobody warns you about the questions that come after.
Not the medical ones - those I could google. I mean the ones that show up at dinner, mid-date, when everything is fine and suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely. The ones that are embarrassing to say out loud because they sound either too dark or too pre-emptive - the particular awkwardness of grieving something that hasn’t happened yet, and may never.
Here are four of mine.
Would I want my husband to remarry if I died?
The obvious answer is yes. I have never loved someone outside my own DNA as much as I love my partner. And because I love him that way, I want nothing but a lifetime of happiness for him, with or without me.
We aren’t married yet, and I’m not yet sick. Pre-emptive seems to be a theme with me. But I am as sure about him as a life partner as I am unsure that I won’t get cancer. So I’ve thought about this. More than once.
It’s a strange thing, to be alive and already carrying anticipatory grief. To move through ordinary days while somewhere underneath them runs a quiet current of: what if I don’t get to see all of it. My children finding their people. The careers they’ll stumble into. The versions of themselves they’ll grow into when I’m not looking.
And it’s stranger still to sit with this particular asymmetry - that if he endures the grief of losing me, he still gets a second chance. I don’t.
Would she be a better match? Would she notice the way his eyes smile when he’s feeling extra lovey dovey? Would she appreciate the gentle hand on the small of her back when he guides her through an open door? The way his smile meets his eyes when he’s not just happy, but totally enveloped by joy?
All rhetorical. All unanswerable. The experiences would be too different to compare side by side anyway.
Would I want my husband to remarry? Of course I would. If it means he’s happy and loved and cherished - of course I would.
Do I want this drink more than I want peace of mind?
The question that presents like a simple choice but is more of an onion.
My doctors are clear about two things: don’t smoke, don’t drink. I’ve never been a smoker - the reasons feel obvious, a one-way ticket somewhere I’m not trying to go. But alcohol is different. Alcohol is social. Alcohol is the wine glass already on the table when you sit down, the toast at the wedding, the reason a great night becomes a story. That’s where it gets complicated.
I don’t drink a lot, sometimes almost never. I’ll go months without a thought about it. But when I do, it’s always with people I love, for the specific purpose of making an already good night feel golden. And every single time, somewhere between the pour and the first sip, I ask myself if it’s worth it.
I have no way of quantifying exactly how much one drink moves the needle. But I know that it does. And at the 90th percentile for breast cancer, the gravity of that small decision never feels small.
When I first got my results and learned the habit of asking this question, it spiraled fast. I don’t drink a lot - a few glasses of wine a month, maybe. So why did I suddenly feel like an alcoholic for choosing to have one? How do you go from occasional to irresponsible simply by learning a number?
And then there’s the other direction, which is equally true: I could live a perfect existence by every doctor’s order and still get cancer. Because it’s in my DNA and my DNA doesn’t care how virtuous I’ve been. So why would I deprive myself of simple joys in the healthy years I have?
I still don’t have an answer. I change my mind frequently, sometimes mid-glass. What I keep coming back to is this: I can always choose to say no. But I’m starting to believe that releasing the guilt of sometimes saying yes might matter just as much. Stress kills too. And there’s a version of hypervigilance that stops feeling like self-preservation and starts feeling like punishment.
What does it mean to be a woman when you're contemplating the reality of losing your breasts?
My risk of breast cancer drops from 90% to less than 5% with a prophylactic double mastectomy. That’s not a typo. Ninety percent to less than five - the width of an operating table between those two numbers.
I haven’t scheduled the surgery. I may never. The reasons are practical ones: surgical complications, the loss of sensation, the recovery. But underneath the practical reasons lives a question I can’t fully justify and can’t fully dismiss.
What does it mean to be a woman?
I think about this when I envision standing in front of a mirror for the first time after surgery. I am, like most women, a reliable critic of my own body. I have catalogued its imperfections with the kind of dedication usually reserved for more useful pursuits. But my breasts have never been on that list. They are one of the few parts of myself I have simply, quietly liked.
And so the question has teeth.
Which embarrasses me, a little. I have friends who identify as female and were assigned male at birth, and every part of me recognizes them as women - completely, without asterisk. Womanhood is not a body part. I know this. I believe it without reservation.
So why does the question still snag when it’s my own body on the table?
I’ve been sitting with that contradiction long enough to have a working theory. I think I blame society less for telling me what a woman looks like and more for what it decided beauty was for. Beauty is one of the only vehicles of power women have ever been allowed to wield without judgment. Not money, that makes us calculating. Not sexuality, that makes us dangerous. Beauty. The female form. Soft and specific and ours.
To voluntarily alter it feels, in some pre-rational place I’m not proud of, like handing something back.
I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I actually believe it. But the question asks itself anyway, in the quiet, in the mirror, in the space between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your body.
I haven’t answered it yet. I’m not sure I’m supposed to.
How comfortable am I with not knowing?
When I tell people I carry BRCA2, the most common response is “well, at least you know.”
And to that I always say: I agree. You should get tested too.
That’s usually where the conversation ends. Which is interesting, because we live in an era where people are searching ChatGPT for their own expiration dates, and yet as a collective we remain deeply allergic to the responsibility of knowing things about ourselves that might contradict the ways we want to keep living.
I’m no different - see question two, and the wine glass.
But I am so glad I know. I am grateful for the power, the choice, the time I’ve been given alongside that 30 page document outlining my genetic results. Gifts that active cancer patients never received. I don’t take that lightly, not even for a second.
The uncertainty doesn’t end though. It just changes shape.
It becomes: do I have prophylactic surgery? Do I freeze my eggs now, before the window closes, since I’m also high risk for ovarian cancer? I know I want children. But what if wanting them isn’t enough - what if I have to act now, on a timeline I didn’t choose, for a future I can’t yet see?
I weigh these things daily. Every morning I commute to work in a healthy body, wondering if I’m trading a regular Tuesday for a vacation day I might not get if I become too sick to travel. I choose to live in New York - the city I love, the city of my actual dreams - knowing it’s one of the most environmentally polluted places I could be, which does not exactly help my case.
And still I stay. And still I order the wine sometimes. And still I ask the questions, knowing most of them will never answer themselves.
That’s what it means to live inside uncertainty rather than waiting for it to resolve. You just keep going. You notice the days that feel like enough. You write them down so you don’t forget.
I started doing that literally. Writing things down, putting them in envelopes, mailing them to people who needed a reminder that ordinary days are worth saving. That became the Strawberry Afternoon Postcards - one vintage postcard per month + a stamp, straight to your mailbox.
If that’s something you need right now, we're open.
Until the next Strawberry Afternoon,
Tori