Iwoke up with a start.Typically, I take my time getting up. The alarm rings, I hit the snooze button, and then I lay back down for a few minutes, curling into the quiet before shaking off the last vestiges of sleep and stepping into the fevered rush of my day.But that morning, I sat up abruptly, my heart heavy, my stomach queasy. I wanted to cry and vomit at the same time. It felt like something was coming.I tried to remember what I had forgotten that was so terrible. You know how you go to bed reeling from something awful, and when you wake up, for a split second you’ve forgotten what filled you with such dread? I searched my mind for what that could be, for that horrible thing my memory had briefly hidden in my sleep.But there was nothing. Everything was fine, all things considered.Fine was a relative term at that moment in my life, because both my husband and my mother were battling cancer.My mother’s diagnosis had come first, in January 2013. The doctors had run their tests and determined that after surviving breast cancer two years before, she would now have to fight another form of the awful disease, this time in her uterus.