It starts with a phone call, doesn’t it? Most nightmares do. My mother, my beautiful, vibrant mother, diagnosed. Aggressive. Rapid. I remember the doctor’s words blurring, my world tilting on its axis. Every fiber of my being screamed. Cancer.
I was her rock, her everything. From that moment, my life became hers. Doctors’ appointments, endless medications, hospital stays that stretched into weeks. I slept on uncomfortable chairs, spoon-fed her pureed food, held her hand through the worst pain imaginable. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. She was my anchor, my first love, the only person who truly understood me. But I was buckling under the weight. The emotional toll was immense, the physical exhaustion crushing. And the financial strain? It was bleeding me dry.
I had a sister. She lived states away, always had. Our relationship was… distant. Obligatory holiday calls, polite small talk. But now, I thought, surely, surely she would understand. This was our mother. Our shared history. Our blood. I swallowed my pride, pushed down the decades of quiet resentment about her general absence. I called her.
An older woman | Source: Pexels
My voice cracked as I explained the full horror of it. The constant care, the looming medical bills, the sheer, utter loneliness of it all. I asked for help. Not just money, though that would have been a godsend. I asked for her presence, for a few days of respite, for someone to sit with Mom so I could just breathe. I begged.
Her response was a clinical, cold cut that echoed in the silence of my tiny apartment. “It’s not my problem.”
I stood there, the phone heavy in my hand, the dial tone a buzzing accusation. Not her problem? OUR mother, dying, in agony, and it wasn’t her problem? My breath caught in my throat. A cold, hard knot formed in my stomach, twisting everything good inside me into something ugly and bitter. How could she? HOW COULD SHE SAY THAT?
The rage was a physical thing. It burned, a hot, searing flame that kept me going through the darkest days. It fueled me when I felt I couldn’t take another step, when Mom cried out in pain and I was all she had. I pushed away the image of my sister’s face, her indifference. I clung to my mother, to her fading light, and nurtured the seed of resentment that grew into an oak tree inside me. My mother deserved better. I deserved better.
A man talking to a woman | Source: Midjourney
She passed in my arms, a whisper of a breath escaping her lips. Just me. Alone. My sister didn’t come to the funeral. No card, no call, no flowers. Nothing. The void she left in my heart wasn’t just grief for my mother, it was a gaping wound of betrayal from the one person who should have shared that burden with me.
Ten years. Ten long years since I last heard her voice. The bitterness softened with time, buried under layers of rebuilding my life, but it never truly went away. It became a quiet hum, a reminder of who she was, of what she was capable of. I moved on, I healed, I built my own success, a life where I was responsible for myself and no one else could hurt me like that again. I never spoke her name. I never looked her up. She was a ghost, a bad memory.
Then, the email came. Unrecognized address. I almost deleted it. But something, a morbid curiosity, made me open it. It was from her. Short, desperate, formal. It laid out a crisis, a situation so dire it made my blood run cold. She had nowhere else to turn. She needed a substantial sum of money, more than I’d ever seen in one place. It wasn’t for her, she wrote. It was for her child. Her daughter, a child I didn’t even know existed, was gravely ill, in need of a cutting-edge treatment only available abroad. She was bankrupt, broken, alone.
A woman talking | Source: Pexels
My heart hammered against my ribs. The decade-old wound ripped open, fresh and bleeding. This was it. The universe, it seemed, had delivered the perfect opportunity for me to settle the score. To finally, irrevocably, tell her exactly what she told me. To make her feel that same crushing, desperate hopelessness.
I typed out a reply, my fingers trembling, but not from fear. From a grim satisfaction. I knew the words I needed to write. I closed my eyes, picturing her face, picturing my dying mother’s face. The words formed on the screen. “It’s not my problem.” I didn’t even wait for her reply. I just pressed send and leaned back, a strange, hollow victory settling over me. It felt powerful. It felt… empty.
Days later, another email, a single paragraph, not a plea, but a confession. It was from her, still. She had tried to call, but my number was long changed. She just needed me to know, she said. Now, finally, after all these years, she was ready to tell me why.
I read the words, my eyes scanning, then re-scanning, and then my vision swam.
She had cancer too.
A man with his hand on his face | Source: Pexels
Not then, not ten years ago, not when Mom was dying, but at the exact same time. Hers was a rare, aggressive form. She had been diagnosed mere weeks before Mom. She’d started an experimental, brutal treatment regimen that left her barely functional, constantly sick, fighting for her own life in secret. She couldn’t tell Mom; Mom was too frail. She couldn’t tell me; I was already drowning. She’d needed every ounce of her limited energy just to survive. “I was dying,” she wrote. “And I said it wasn’t my problem because I knew I was too weak, too sick, too terrified to help anyone else, even if it broke me.” She’d been in remission for years, a terrifying silence she’d carried, convinced I would never forgive her anyway.
MY GOD.
I stared at the screen, the words searing themselves into my brain. The hot rage that had been my companion for a decade evaporated, replaced by a cold, crushing wave of realization. My throat tightened. My stomach lurched. The vindication I’d felt, the satisfaction of my revenge, shattered into a million pieces.
I hadn’t avenged my mother. I had just condemned her. My sister. My sick, terrified, secretly dying sister. I had left her alone, just as she had, in her own desperate agony, done to me. Only now, I knew. I knew her hell. And I had still sent her the same chilling words.
A close-up shot of a man’s eyes | Source: Pexels
I scrambled for my phone, my hands shaking so violently I could barely dial. I had to fix this. I HAD TO. I called the number in the email, the one she’d used to reach out. It rang once. Twice. Then a flat, monotone voice answered. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
NO. NO, NO, NO.
The empty victory I’d felt just days ago turned into a cold, suffocating terror. The words echoed in my head, not hers, not mine from a decade ago, but the ones I had just sent to her, the final, unforgiving blow.
“It’s not my problem.”
And now, perhaps, it was too late to ever make it mine.
