Nurturing Loss
By Cat Nou
I laid on my side in the small, darkened room as muffled sounds of rushing water echoed. Instead of water, however, it was the sound of my blood flowing, amplified by the medical technician’s computer as she moved a tool around the area where my heart lived.
As I listened, my thoughts wandered to my mom. It was the eve of my birthday, and I imagined her listening to my heart beating inside the safety of her body exactly 40 years before. I wondered what her prayers and wishes were as she was getting me ready for this world. A world that had forced her to say so many premature goodbyes — to two children, her home, and all the physical pieces of her life before it was covered by the ashes of war and genocide. She could not have known that I would be in this room getting an echocardiogram after surviving the same cancer that she had lost her life to 20 years earlier.
Losing my mom to breast cancer significantly altered my life. I was 19 and just coming into adulthood. Until I moved out to college at 18, my everyday life featured my mom’s nourishment in the form of home-cooked meals, late-night browsing at the 24-hour WalMart, a vibrant and flourishing garden, and one of the most memorable demonstrations of her love: haircuts.
Cat, the author of Nurturing Loss. (Photo courtesy of Cat)
She sat me on a stool that we thrifted, wrapped a white bed sheet that was stained from my dad’s hair dye around my neck, then closed it using a large silver and yellow safety pin shaped like a duck. Sometimes I would feel the cool, sharp pin poke the back of my neck as she secured it tightly, careful not to leave any gaps for stray strands to find their way onto my clothes. I watched as pieces of my hair fell onto the cement, tickling my nose on the way down as she worked on my bangs. I was devastated when one day she told me that her days as my hairstylist were over and that I would be going to our local Cambodian-owned hair salon. As I was losing my hair as a result of my chemotherapy treatments and my brother-in-law was preparing to shave my head, my dad suggested using a bed sheet to cover me instead of the towel I grabbed. This instantly transported me to these previously buried memories of my mom. During one of the most significant parts of my journey, she showed me that she was still here.
My mom’s passing filled our family with grief that felt insurmountable. Nearly everything in the 20 years between her diagnosis and mine seemed stagnant. My primary worry when I was diagnosed with breast cancer was about their lives and not about my own. As Cambodian genocide survivors, my family had already experienced so much loss and tragedy. I was very concerned that having breast cancer, like my mom, would bring up all of the unresolved trauma from my mom’s diagnosis. The trauma materialized in ways that felt familiar because it was in the same ways that the trauma of war also showed itself; it was obscured in the care and cautious messages in stories of my mom, food loaded with nutrients that I had no appetite for, and discussions about my cancer, except for how it made us feel.
Twenty years ago, as I was healing from my mom’s death just a year before, I wrote an essay for the 30th commemoration of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement in the United States to share how my mom made this our home. On this 50th commemoration, I am reaching my one-year anniversary of the end of my cancer treatment. As my hair growth begins to cover my bare scalp again, I am processing all of the trauma and reflecting deeply on survivor’s guilt. I am left wondering how to honor the fact that I am surviving when others like my mom did not. I have come to realize that this feeling is not unlike those who survived Cambodia’s genocide.
As we approach this moment in our community’s history, the feeling of loss or being lost may be magnified, but I know that we are never alone and that there is strength in finding connection. My mom’s life has been a reference point for my own. I use it as a blueprint and in moments where I am lost, I remember how my heart was held inside of her and how I once knew the rhythm of her heart, too. I will never know what she wished for me when I was born, but I know that she is always with me and that living a life that is meaningful honors hers. The spirits of our ancestors live within us and guide us as we move through our grief to continue carrying their legacy forward.
Catherina “Cat” Nou is dedicated to ensuring community representation in public policymaking and her career spans nearly 20 years of government and nonprofit service. Born and raised in the Central Valley of California, she is a cancer survivor and daughter and sister of Cambodian refugees.