“What should I be for Halloween when I’m bald?” I asked my 7-year-old, casually tossing a long, gray-streaked handful of my hair to the ground. Sitting across from me under the trees, my daughter took videos with my phone while I clipped and shaved and attempted silly banter.

“How about a hairless cat?” she suggested thoughtfully. “Or … oh, I know! A turkey vulture!”

Like many a cancer patient facing chemotherapy, I was shaving my head in a bid for control, desperate for a small handhold in what felt like a sinkhole of dire news and ghastly medical procedures, all sucking me toward my final destination under the earth. For my daughter’s sake, I tried to appear calm, but my diagnosis — triple negative invasive ductal carcinoma, a less common and very aggressive type of breast cancer — weighed on my every thought and emotion. I’d been warned not to Google, but of course I did it anyway, and I knew the odds. They were not great.

I’d never really confronted my own mortality before, having survived nearly 49 years largely on hubris and exceptional luck. And although I’ve been a single parent since my daughter was just learning to walk, I’d managed to avoid considering what would happen to her if something were to happen to me, her primary caretaker and provider, her protector, her champion. The thought of my own life coming to a premature and painful end filled me with sorrow; the threat of leaving her motherless in this difficult world sent me into quiet, late-night paroxysms of grief that spiraled into panic attacks.

Wrestling my own terror into a chokehold, I had gently told my very sensitive child what I thought she needed to know about my health and no more. By the time our two-person, backyard head-shaving party rolled around, she knew I was sick and had already started treatment. She knew my hair was going to fall out and I would look different for a while. She knew her dad and other important people in her life would be around more often, helping to take care of her and stepping into roles that had always been mine alone. She knew too, in a general sense, what cancer is and how it’s treated. What she didn’t know (or at least, I never told her outright), was that I was fighting for my life — for our life.