"See these?" the radiologist asks. The screen is a landscape of black with pockets of fluorescent white. Highways and intersections lit up like a neural network. The satellite photo of a city at night. The clearer discrete bodies—grains of rice or salt—hide close to the surface, popping from the mammogram, while goosebumps pop from my exposed skin.

She points at the image showing a grouping of calcifications on the lower inner area of my left breast. Other calcifications form a line along a milk duct. These tiny grains have thrown our family's winter break into havoc, whirling around a breast biopsy three days before Christmas. Next week, a stranger will tell me if I need treatment. If I have cancer. If I could die.

Funeral procession. Police escort the line of cars through city streets toward the cemetery. The rain worsens to squall-like conditions. Golf umbrellas hover while your husband steps into the surge to share the burden of the casket, ferrying Grandma to her resting place without any cover for himself.

The staff explain the process for the stereotactic biopsy. My special chair will move forward for the mammograms, then backward to collect the tissue samples, and up and down as the nurses adjust it for height. Seated in the chair, I study the mammography machine with its odd tilt, its arms horizontal, both screens displaying 90. It looks out of kilter—like me, unbalanced by fear. If I have cancer, how will I tell the kids?

Today's challenge. Fulfill your promise. Play your violin, which will always be her violin. You have played it since middle school. You've practiced the songs she picked for her service.

Two internet stock photos are fixed to the machine, frameless. The waterfall in a lush forest could be a photo from my own album. My body untenses, recalling slow-paced hikes through the Hoh Rainforest and rambles along dirt footpaths to hot springs. Cold, then squashing, calls me back to the now. They compress my flesh into the machine. I force my breath, contracting abdominal muscles in Ujjayi-style exhales to keep the growing panic at bay.

When my sons were little, we spent hours manipulating clay with the Play-Doh fun factory. Remove fresh clay from small tubs. Massage it, flattening it into the compartment. Squeeze handle, forcing out red, blue, and purple shapes. My breast tissue presses in, the handle lowers and squeezes it through the outlines at the other end: long star-shaped tubes and skinny noodles. Lime green, yellow, eggplant, scarlet.

Photo memory. You smile with Grandma but inwardly fume at the shadow of her death on such a day. One block away, under brilliant July sun, the waves crash—reforming the sand-scape with each tide.

The mammography machine spins. The digital numbers change as the arm whirls. The wheel of fortune: spin to claim your prize.

Weather alert. Heavy rain. Accumulation over two inches. "Rain" is too gentle a word. The forecasted weather event will be cruel and aggressive. Torrents pouring from the sky will drown the minister's words, make him pause the graveside service. No thunder—just constant drumming, a stampeding on the tent, testing its stability and water resistance. Testing your resilience.

After the mammogram, my nurses distract me with conversation. Pain—the needle with the numbing agent enters the inner bottom of my breast, drawing me out of dread for the future and into the immediate moment. Yes, I feel the numbness. If only they could numb the fear.

Your fingers get cold before you play. Loss is glacial, ice-cold in your veins. Both the ice-covered mountain to be climbed and the crevasse, a fracture whose depths are treacherous. Unseen.

Do I feel the next needle? No—wait, yes. That hurts, I blurt, even though my mouth is set hard, not wanting to form the words, forbidding me to tell the secret. The radiologist adds more numbing agent. When she inserts the core needle again, it is pressure—and something more, but not quite pain. I don't see the blood, but I know—there is a lot of bleeding. I sense it—the scarlet. I inhale and hold. They can have my blood, but not my breath. Did Grandma go through this? When she was diagnosed at eighty-seven?

Drawn from a spiritual source, vibration and frequency channel a transcendent reality. You play a note that rings—it resonates with clarity and pitch. You have opened a conduit to the divine, and now, to Grandma Agnes. Your breaths are full, more connected. To each other, to the notes. To her.

I draw breath again. They put me under "light" compression for another mammogram. My attendants step away, the machine whirs and spins again, so that the digital numbers change. They capture an image of the first site and the titanium marker—it has fallen out.  

I stare at the waterfall and squint at something I can't identify. Leaves? A snake? Why would there be a coiled snake in a picture of a serene waterfall, meant to be an object of focus—a Drishti?

Resentment at irrelevant details. She was secretary for twenty-five years in a church no longer open, no longer holding funerals, not even hers.

They tilt me back, away from the machine, and I face the ceiling. A nurse pushes, compresses, forcing out as much blood as possible, to prevent future bleeding. There is wiping and cleaning and bandaging and cheering me on. "Are you all right? You're doing great!" Am I all right? I focus on the waterfall, on the spray on my face, on the force drumming into the stream below. 

I don't feel great. But I'm not lightheaded or dizzy. Neither do I feel relief. Or anything at all. The numbing agent is working its magic, casting its spell. I'm not here. I'm immersed in the waterfall.

Funeral music playlist. Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago. Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee. The Church in the Wildwood.

I didn't know my grandmother had found a lump. I didn't pace, worried, imagining the worst. Not yet. They only called me after they knew, when she had already decided on a double mastectomy.

You must do this for her, when she gave so much to you. With every bow stroke, vibrate the air in the funeral home with beauty.

Site number two. First the mammogram. They clean the area and inject more numbing agent. Then the core sampling, like in a meteor movie or a geology lab. "Still okay?" they ask.

Your family rushes from the joyless room that mimics a church sanctuary. No pause to greet friends, no "Thank you for coming." There is a schedule, a deadline imposed by the cemetery for beginning the graveside service. The living world dictates its will where it does not belong.

Picture her, shaking her head. She lived over ninety years, abiding by the world's time constraints. Even her death is governed by them. Her life was drained in months after the cancer returned. Grieving her, the world makes clear, is on a timetable, too.

Inside, I am carved out. Empty. Later, I'll examine my breast—bruised lime green, grape, and crimson—and cry, pouring out the anxiety. For now, I nod that I'm okay. They sweep my chair to the side and tilt me back. The nurse starts her compression work again.

You are the violin with its hollow interior. How long can you play, now that she's gone? Will the bittersweetness mellow into a tinged joy? The loss is too sharp for now, but you hope that eventually, the emptiness will allow for sound again, giving space for resonance. For peace. 

Once I'm out of the chair and dressed, I step close to the waterfall photo behind the Play-Doh fun factory. It's neither a snake nor leaves. It's fungi. Shelf-like mushrooms that cling to a rotting log. Seemingly invasive but forming their own ecosystem. Useful decomposers, ancient inhabitants of the Earth.

I touch my finger to the fungi captured by the camera.

Run your hands over the wood's polished roughness, inspect the bridge's positioning and straightness. Caress the marks scratched into the chinrest before Grandma's time, the cool metal of the rose embellishment on the tailpiece.

Was there ever any purpose, any use for cancer cells? I hear the waterfall, the downpour's drowning rhythm on the tent at the graveside five years ago, echoing the resonance of the notes I played. Followed by the overpowering morning sun from the previous summer, when Grandma told me—before her cancer came back, the sky a deep blue—when she fixed me with sea-green eyes. You know you're going to play at my funeral.

Turning to leave, I catch a glimpse of a reflection in the plastic of the mammography machine. A shadowy hint at something more than myself. A remembered, lingering note. Goodbye, Grandma.