Last December my family and I went to London. And on a dark and stormy night as those cliched stories often go, we went to the Palace Theater to watch the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. But this is not one of those ‘dark and stormy night’ stories.
This is a story of remembrance, of love, of change. It’s a story about Harry Potter’s child grappling with how his entire life has been muddled by his father’s intense battle with Voldemort, this evil, a cancer. And it gets to a point where he uses quite literally a time turner to go back in time and undo this past and create a better future. I was absolutely engrossed in that, this idea you could change time and your past and all the mistakes and all the hardships.
But as I’d soon learn from the play, time ticks and ticks and ticks. It passes away so ceaselessly and it’s as if not even for a moment I could stop time to breathe… not even for a second. My heart racing, my palms sweating, my eyes unable to grapple with the words my mother said to me during the play’s intermission. Lymphoma, Darshita, I might have cancer again.
This idea of cancer again and even just cancer itself is interesting because there’s not necessarily a clear stop or a start to it. My mom was first diagnosed nearly 7 years ago. She never had a genetic predisposition to cancer, her family didn’t, she never smoked or drank, she was young, and you know it was shocking. It was disheartening. Especially to hear that the tumor was nearly 2 years old when it was actually detected. I mean my sister was born when my mom had cancer… and none of us knew it.
But, my mom tells me that it wasn’t even the treatment that was the most difficult for her; it was, one, getting diagnosed, but the trying to get by living a normal life. Her treatment consisted of regularly taking this estrogen modulator drug and was a root cause in excessive tiredness and depression. And this is often the reality for some if not many cancer survivors, that even when radiation or chemo or immunotherapy is over, its impact isn’t. And from my mom’s perspective, it’s difficult to talk about it when you just feel so unable to work and when you feel fatigued, it’s a different lifestyle. She currently lives with a scar on her chest because of the surgery and she also currently lives with the mental scars of the toll that cancer has taken on her.
And so back to winter break I’m still sitting in the theater in this sort of state of shock, but a surge of reality took me over, in the realization that while we may not be able to stop or go back in time, we can change the future moments to come, building new ideas in our present and taking a forward approach to our goals.
Yes, time ticks away, but its persistence strikes a sense of urgency within us- the very core of Elysian Smiles- it has enabled us to take a stride in contributing to a cancer free world. Seeing all my friends and teammates work together and seeing all of you– look at the beauty in that. We are part of Elysian Smiles and that is beautiful. Each of us have our own stories and whether we know each other or not, we are all connected by that one common goal–. Just as Harry Potter and his friends and his son found their home at Hogwarts, we can find our home and help others find theirs at Elysian Smiles.