From Sweet Tea to Shattered Innocence

My first experience with cancer wasn’t my own. It was my Avó’s.

I was young, still too small to understand the weight of the word cancer, but old enough to feel the fear that lived inside it. My grandparents lived upstairs from us in our duplex, and their home was always a place of comfort. The smell of Portuguese food drifting down the stairs, the sound of my Avo humming, and the simple rituals that made her who she was.

One of my clearest memories is her making tea. She’d add a couple of spoons of sugar — always a little extra sweetness — and stir it slowly, gently, like she had all the time in the world. To this day, I can still hear the soft clinking of her spoon against the cup. That sound is etched into me. It was the sound of safety, of love, of being cared for.

But the day I walked in and saw her fighting breast cancer… everything changed.

She was in a tough state, and the cancer had spread to her skin. I didn’t know what that meant at the time — not really — but I knew what I saw. I knew it wasn’t fair. I knew it wasn’t gentle. And I knew, even as a child, that something had taken hold of her body in a way that felt cruel and unrecognizable.

That moment was my first reality of cancer. Not the word. Not the stories. But the truth of what it can do to a body — and to the people who love that body.

It was devastating. It stayed with me. It shaped the way I understood illness, strength, and the quiet battles people fight behind closed doors.

I didn’t have the words back then, but I do now: Cancer is not just a diagnosis. It’s a storm that touches everyone in its path. And my Avó— even in her pain — showed a kind of courage that I didn’t fully understand until I faced my own diagnosis years later.

Her journey became one of the first pieces in my own stained‑glass window — a shard of memory, sharp and painful, but part of the mosaic that made me who I am.

And today, I honor her by telling this story. By remembering her strength. By acknowledging the moment that opened my eyes long before I knew I’d walk my own path through cancer.