This story is about what it’s been like for one family --- mine --- to live with risk. 

It isn’t really a cancer story, or a survivor story, though it has cancer and surviving in it. Instead, it’s a previvor’s story. A previvor is someone who doesn’t have cancer, but has a known (elevated) risk for it, discovered through family history or through diagnosis with a genetic mutation. That’s good news. If you’re a previvor, you don’t have anything --- at least, not yet. 

The bad news is, that means you don’t have anything to fix or get better from. You can diagnose being a previvor, but you can’t treat it. There are things you can do, protocols to follow. But the previvor part doesn’t go away. It just becomes part of who you are. 

Previvors are a new group --- the word hasn’t been around for long --- but we’re growing in number every day. By the time this book is finished, there’ll be thousands more of us. It’s peculiar and compelling, this glimpse ahead --- in some ways a curse, in others, a gift. 

I used to think all my favorite words began with pre. Preface. Prepare. Prevaricate. Pregnancy (that one doesn’t belong etymologically, but still.) Pre for “prior to; earlier than.” Ahead of. I’ve always loved being early: the first to board the plane; the first to get a new piece of technology. The first to plan. Preview. Premonition. Prevent. Would I have chosen this kind of preview on purpose? 

I go back and forth. I talk about it with my sisters. Some days, the answer, emphatically, is no. Who wants to know his or her genetic destiny and have to live with the consequences? Who wants to sit down and tell her daughters about this? Girls, guess what? We have this gene --- 

Other days, I’m more upbeat. I tell myself having to live with consequences isn’t the point. It’s getting to live. Maybe even choosing to live. For that, seeing ahead is worth it. 

Two different points of view, and I have both. 

There’s a shaped poem I’ve always liked by George Herbert which modern editors call “Easter Wings.” Most editors lay it out vertically, so the two stanzas (shaped like triangles) stand, inverted, on a single page. Set like that, it looks like an hourglass. But if you turn the poem sideways, it looks like wings. 

That’s how it is for me, thinking about the future. Two different shapes. One holding time, the other escaping it. One suggesting fragility, confinement; the other, something transcendent. Turn it one way, you see an hourglass. Turn it the other way, and you see wings.

Excerpted from What We Have © Copyright 2012 by Amy Boesky. Reprinted with permission by Gotham. All rights reserved.