My heart is in pieces all over the world and now I cannot put it back together again.  I see a photo of Africa and it is a knife through my heart.  Perhaps it is something about the light there, or the color.  Or the faces.  But I long for this place that was so difficult to live in, because I was alive.  Now grief has entered my body like an alien invader.  I have taken my health for granted because I have so much to do.  But there is a shadow on the wall, too small for diagnosis, but nonetheless present.  Opacity on the mammogram requires stilting French phone calls about echography.  Try explaining that in high school French.  Non Je ne parle pas Anglais, says the receptionist disapprovingly.  Alemagne?  Luxembourgish?  Non non, I say, exhausted, and we continue in broken French.  So I have learned that an appointment is a rendezvous (sounds much more exciting this way) and test results are resultat.  The staff at the hospital with the echography machine speak a bit of broken English, although after the second mammogram a nurse keeps telling me not to rest.  I am confusd.  Not to rest?  I am not planning a nap in the clinic.  Finally I understand she means for me not to dress.  They reconduct the mammogram over and over again. The echography is done with a hot gooey liquid, and I would think I was having a massage if I didn't know better.  Not bad on a bitterly cold day.   I see something but it is very small, the man keeps muttering, as if that is a bad thing.  I am puzzled.  Turns out it is bad, because the 'something' is too small for a biopsy, and so no release in sight.  It is also to small to reveal vascularization (is that the way we say it English too?) so the nature of the 'thing' is not clear.  I try not to appear self conscious while this man sits with his metal detector on my breast.  In Luxembourg apparently they don't give you gowns to cover yourself, so you just sit there with no top on.  Three or four orderlies come in and out while I sit there, but appear unimpressed by my nakedness. I am after all a 55 year old woman.

So there is a time bomb there, but no one can say anything. For now I continue as if nothing had occurred, but must return every four months, not to rest, but to peer openly into the mystery of my gland ducts, hoping for the end of grief, the light at the end of the tunnel, as I continue to cook lunches and wash clothes for my beautiful boys.