The Body Keeps the Score: How My Mother’s Suicide Became My Cancer

I swear I woke up the day after picking up my mother’s ashes with stomach pain. A persistent ache in my lower gut that refused to be reasoned with. The kind of pain that doesn’t scream, but whispers like a curse. I thought it was anxiety—high-functioning, high-performing, high-achieving, high-out-of-my-mind. Or maybe just another hangover in the long list of ways I tried to outrun the grief with a bottle in my hand and my foot on the gas.

But the pain stayed. Moved in. Paid no rent.

Doctors called it stress. Hormonal imbalance. Maybe too much coffee. Maybe not enough fiber. They didn’t say, “Maybe your body is grieving too loudly for anyone to hear.” They didn’t say, “Maybe your gut is holding onto something your mouth never got to say.”

So I turned to qigong. Lower dantian. Breathwork. Teas that tasted like damp forest floors. I chased peace like it was something I could trick my cells into believing. But the truth? My qi got worse, not better. You can’t regulate a nervous system that doesn’t trust safety. You can’t find calm when chaos is your oldest friend.

My body doesn’t trust “safe.” It trusts what it knows. And what it knows is loss. What it knows is shame.

For ten years, I’ve lived half-in healing and half-in a grave I keep digging with my own bare hands. The same hands that scattered my mother’s ashes are the ones that fed me poison with a fork and a smile. Because after someone you love dies by suicide, every comfort feels like betrayal. Every moment of peace feels stolen.

And then came the diagnosis.

Rectal cancer. A lightbulb. A confirmation.

“Oh. That makes perfect sense.”

It wasn’t a shock. It was a prophecy fulfilled. My body had been whispering the ending to me for years. I just hadn’t turned the volume up.

I don’t think it’s coincidence. I don’t think it’s random. I don’t think cancer just “happened.”

My dog had been glued to my side for months before the scans. Animals know. And so do trauma survivors. We feel the aftershocks before the earthquake hits. We recognize the scent of death before it has a name.

According to The Body Keeps the Score, “Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies. The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.”

It’s not metaphor. It’s biology. CPTSD = inflammation + gut permeability + immune dysfunction. This is exactly the recipe for cancer.

Trauma lives in the gut—the so-called “second brain.” And when the gut goes down, the rest follows. Studies now show trauma survivors are more prone to chronic inflammation, hormone disruption, immune collapse, even rectal cancer.

Source: “Stress and the gut: pathophysiology, clinical consequences, diagnostic approach and treatment options” (World Journal of Gastroenterology, 2014).

Source: “Gut microbiota and colorectal cancer” (Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 2019).

And then there’s the ACE study. The landmark CDC-Kaiser Permanente research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) found that people with 4 or more ACEs are twice as likely to develop cancer.

Twice.

That’s not a footnote. That’s a damn warning shot.

But I didn’t need a study. I had the scar tissue. I had the chronic pain. I had the knowing.

When my oncologist asked, “How did this happen?” I wanted to say: Because I’ve been punishing myself for not saving her. Because shame lives in the gut, and so did the tumor. Because you can’t walk through the desert of grief crawling on your knees and expect to come out clean. Because I’ve been dying by degrees since the day she died all at once.

But I just nodded. Because what’s the point of screaming when the body already knows?

I know exactly how I got cancer.

Not in the medical charts or the scans. But in the nights I didn’t sleep, the dinners I skipped, the fights I picked with myself. In the decade of waking up in a body that felt more like punishment than place. I knew it when I carried her ashes home and my stomach started burning and never stopped. When I stopped calling it grief and started calling it “just how I am.”

So when they told me the diagnosis, it wasn’t a reveal. It was a rerun.

Because part of me had been dying with her all along.

And the part that stayed? It stayed to pay for it. To carry it. To answer a question that no one ever asked out loud: What happens when you survive the person who didn’t want to live?

There’s no ribbon for this kind of cancer. No fundraiser. No finish line.

This isn’t about hope or healing. This is about aftermath. About what a body does when it’s been holding in a scream for too long. About what grief becomes when it has nowhere else to go.

It becomes you. It becomes your cells. It becomes your story. And then it tries to finish what it started.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer