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She vanished just as the year ended. Stolen by the suffocating stillness that only strangulation can bring. The morning of her death, we talked of plum puddings steeped in brandy and the silk ribbons she used to tie around the gossamer wrapping paper she always saved for last. By evening, she was gone.&nbsp; My mother, my rock, the axis of my world had killed herself on December 20th, 2017, the day before the winter solstice. Fitting, I suppose. When the year ends, that’s when studies show the majority of us who die vanish in the winter months as if even the warmth of life knows when to pack up and leave. Why she chose to kill herself five days before Christmas was a mystery to me, until I learned it was the shortest day on the calendar, the day when the sun barely drags itself over the horizon before giving up entirely, surrendering to the night. She hung herself from my ceiling fan, quite literally sending my apartment and my whole world into the blackness that she felt the day before light was meant to return. As though even the promise of brighter days wasn’t enough to keep her here. Growing up, my mother was not someone who I believed would be subcomb by darkness. Not someone I imagined would take her life by suicide. She was so vibrant. So full of life. She had been a saint once—a beacon of faith, steadfast in her belief that God would make the crooked places straight. She wasn’t always hollow. I remember her hands once smelled of flour and soap, her laugh filling the cracks of our home. She’d hum hymns under her breath as if they could hold the walls together. I believed she could hold anything together—until she couldn’t.&nbsp; Somewhere along the way, my mother began vanishing right before my eyes. Somewhere that faith of hers turned sour, into straight vodka, curdled into bitterness and despair. She went from God-fearing to godless, from hopeful to hollow in the last year of her life.&nbsp; Her disillusionment wasn’t just with religion but with institutions that demanded faith and offered nothing in return. The church she had tithed to for years was silent when our family couldn’t pay our bills in the wake of the housing crash that was 2008. The systems meant to protect our family crumbled when we needed them most. It was a slow descent into madness, it wasn’t one thing really but a series of events that led my mother to hopelessness, leaving her with nothing to sing about, nothing to keep her going. And when she hung herself in my brownstone apartment, she didn’t just leave me alone. She left me with questions that had no answers, and silence so loud it drowned out everything else. In the months that followed my mother’s death, the very air seemed suffused with a weight that blurred the edges of light and dark, as if the space itself couldn’t decide whether to mourn or move forward. And in the aftermath, I prayed for death. I wanted to follow her. I didn’t want to exist in the shadow of her absence. So I turned to passive suicidality. I left my doors unlocked, hoping some thief of life would come in and take mine. I drove without a seatbelt, courting the split-second crash that might set me free. And I drank—God, did I drink. Bottle after bottle, just like she had done when she was alive, hoping the poison would finish what I couldn’t. For a time after her suicide, I didn’t see it as selfish; I thought of her as brave, as though surrendering to the void demanded a courage that I lacked. But darkness doesn’t let go that easily. It doesn’t grant us mercy when we beg for it. It just waits. And then, six years later, an angel heard my prayer, and I got the diagnosis.The doctor didn’t bother sitting down. “We’ve got your results. It’s metastatic colorectal cancer.” He paused for half a beat, then moved on like nothing about my life had just irreversibly changed. This I would come to learn was bedside manner.&nbsp; In the moments that followed the news, my world collapsed in on itself for a second time. The room closed in, the walls tightened, and all I could hear was the ceiling fan overhead, its blades slicing the air like a metronome counting down my life. His voice dissolved into the rhythm—details, prognosis—all swallowed by the certainty that the end had already begun. The words landed like a verdict, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.“How did this happen?” He would ask. And I knew exactly how I had gotten cancer but didn’t respond. My diagnosis felt like an answered prayer like the universe had finally granted me the escape I’d begged for all these years.&nbsp; The thing about a tumor in your asshole is that it doesn’t feel like much at first. For me, it felt like nothing. The symptoms of cancer and the symptoms of grief had blended so seamlessly that I couldn’t tell one from the other. Exhaustion, a change in bowel movements, an ache in my stomach I couldn’t name—weren’t these just the side effects of losing her? How was I supposed to know that my body had been quietly betraying me, growing something dark and insidious in the very place I was least likely to look? Maybe I ignored it because it felt too fitting—a tumor in my rectum. The part of me meant to expel the waste of sorrow’s choices, now consumed by rot. All the anger I had swallowed—not at my mother, but at the world, at myself, at the apathy we shared—the questions I had refused to face, the shame I had buried. They had taken root in the darkest part of me, growing into something I could no longer ignore. Trauma has a way of finding a home in the body. My mother’s found its way into her psyche, mine found its home in my asshole.Was this my fault? Had I done this to myself? Did the drinking, the reckless living, the years of supplicating for an end—did they somehow call this into being? And if I had willed it into existence, was it any different from what my mother had done? Her suicide felt like a betrayal, a deliberate abandonment, and now here I was, staring at my own reflection, wondering if my body was betraying me the same way. Did other cancer patients feel this shame? This gnawing sense that they were complicit in their own undoing? Or was it just me, cursed by my inheritance to see everything through a lens of guilt and self-recrimination? Reality and supposition blurred together until I couldn't tell the difference anymore. Was the cancer a punishment, a consequence, or just an inevitability? I wondered if it mattered. Cancer isn’t just an illness—it’s suicide from the inside out—a mirrored death, hers reversed. It eats away at you cell by cell, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. It’s a parasitic existence—cancer thrives by consuming the host it was meant to preserve.&nbsp; Suicide, it seemed, was as much a part of me as my blood, my bones, my name. I wasn’t tightening a noose like my mother, but my body kept the score—each cell a ledger of inherited despair. In my family, darkness passed like an heirloom, embedding itself in marrow, woven into the fabric of our DNA. I had inherited this, just as I had inherited my mother’s disarming smile, her pensive eyes, and the darkness that lingered between them. The women in my family carried it like a curse, passed down through generations—a thread of despair stitched into our bloodline. Darkness wasn’t just in us; it was us. My mother had succumbed to it, and now, piece by piece, it was coming for me. I wondered if I would make it past the winter solstice this year. Would I see the light again, or would the darkness that is cancer swallow me the way darkness swallowed her? Would we both suffer the same fate of suffocation? In a way, cancer was a gift. An answered prayer. It took the burden of wanting to die off my plate and put the fear of God back into me so i could focus on living instead of a life spent wanting fervently to vanish the same way my mother did. Perhaps the fear of meeting my own maker disappointed and the fear of dying have an odd way of making you cling to life, even if you’ve done things to destroy it previously. You can’t split yourself between wanting to live and wanting to die. Not when you have cancer. You exist in the penumbra—neither fully claimed by darkness nor embraced by light. It’s a liminal state, a kind of purgatory, much like the one they damned my mother to for playing God and ending her own life. I stood on the edge of that same abyss, waiting to see if the darkness would claim me too. Only this time, I was praying that I’d make it through the turning point of the sun’s return. The solstice is a hinge. The darkest day, yes, but also the beginning of something else—something brighter, if only just barely. Light doesn’t rush in after the solstice. It creeps, slow and tentative as if it’s afraid to disturb the shadows. But it comes. That’s the thing about the solstice. It doesn’t promise salvation, but it promises a chance. A chance to step out of the dark, one fraction of a second at a time. I didn’t know if I’d claw my way back to the light. I didn’t know if I even could. But the thought haunted me less than it used to. Somewhere deep inside, beneath the fear, beneath the shame, I felt the faintest flicker of something unfamiliar—a warmth, faint and trembling, like the faint glow of a hearth in a house too cold to warm, but trying. It wasn’t peace, but it wasn’t despair, either. It hovered there, delicate and uncertain, like a single bulb on a strand of lights strung around the neck of a Christmas tree. I wondered if she’d felt this same fragile pull in those final days, the same season, the same shadows pressing in. Perhaps it was the solstice itself, a quiet whisper that I could still choose to turn with it or stay. Would I vanish like my mother—a life snuffed out by darkness—or would I step toward the faint, trembling light that had finally begun to return? I didn’t know. But for the first time, I wasn’t certain I wanted to disappear. I wasn’t sure I deserved the light but I hoped I could endure long enough to see the days grow longer. To witness the light linger just a little more. And maybe—just maybe—that was enough.

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The Inheritance of Shadows

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The Inheritance of Shadows

rsmak

R. Smak

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The Inheritance of Shadows

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