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Grief Book Club

Essays, opinions, and poetry about grief, loss, and sad things.

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Being a Superstitious Parent Didn’t Spare My Children

4 min readMay 29, 2025

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Painting of a dreamy landscape with a bit of a menacing overtone. Features colorful trees, soft skies, and a tiny figure of a girl looking out over a chasm.
Illustration by author

Twenty-four years ago we didn’t buy the house near the Hurley flats because it was in a rumored cancer cluster. We heard they’d been spraying pesticides across thousands of acres of farmland for decades. Maybe it would’ve been fine, but I was 7 months pregnant and didn’t want to tempt fate. This was my first misconception as a soon-to-be parent — that I had any semblance of control.

We bought a house a few miles away from the flats and the baby was born whole and healthy. She stayed that way for 11 years before the cancer found her.

Turns out you can’t trick fate, no matter how superstitious you are. But that didn’t stop me from trying.

I didn’t walk under ladders. I didn’t step on cracks. I threw salt over my shoulder. I brought the baby to every well visit, got her every vaccination, learned how to keep her fever from spiking too high, got the carseat checked and rechecked by the fire department, childproofed the house, taught her to look both ways…

I left the mezuzah in the doorway where we found it when we moved in. Ana walked past it thousands of times, but it didn’t stop the cancer from coming.

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Grief Book Club
Grief Book Club

Published in Grief Book Club

Essays, opinions, and poetry about grief, loss, and sad things.

Jacqueline Dooley
Jacqueline Dooley

Written by Jacqueline Dooley

I'm whatever the opposite of a data scientist is. Essayist. Content writer. Bereaved parent. Mediocre artist. Lover of birds, mushrooms, tiny dogs, and nature.

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