Much of my quest for healthier food and safer body care products has to do with my fear of cancer. When I started learning about pesticides, and becoming mistrustful of the food and cosmetic industries’ unregulated use of dubious, often carcinogenic, substances, I wanted to protect my family. I asked Hova for bad food habits and regularly bombarded my mother with articles about the things I thought she shouldn’t eat. Then she got breast cancer and I backed off a bit, until she got better and then I became even more annoying.

When Georgia was born, my zeal to protect her meant only organic everything. Now that she’s older, and our finances have taken a dive, I regularly refer to the Environmental Working Group’s pesticide guide to see what foods I can safely let Georgia eat without paying the price of organic. Still, most of what we feed her is organic, and I even have some superstitions, like her nightly “dose” of organic blueberries and spinach with dinner. I feel safer when she has eaten that combination of vitamin and antioxidant rich super foods, and though I let her eat too many sweets, and she would eat bacon for every meal if she could, she generally has a healthy, varied diet.

But here I am in a panic. It’s the sad anniversary of the awful cancer death of Keegan, a sweet, silly 12-year-old, my cousin’s son. Georgia was smitten with him, and just as she was getting to know him, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. We visited him in the hospital, and at home as his health deteriorated. Weeks after he died, Georgia said his ghost came to visit her. And now, somehow, without being able to read a calendar, she remembered it first and talked about Keegan’s death. She has processed it, and dealt with what death means to her. I have pushed it away and it makes me want to put Georgia in a bubble.

Now, after four years of trying to get his doctors to look at a lump, my stepfather has been diagnosed with cancer. He is a strong, fairly healthy 70-something, and I hate that this fear has come up for him, for my mom and for me. I hate that I’ve rebuked them about what they eat, but wish I had been more convincing. Is there any real reason for me to believe that what Keegan, my mom and my stepdad ate had some evil, magical effect on their bodies? They each developed a different type of cancer, they grew up in different areas, had completely different lives, who knows what cocktail of cause affected an errant cell to go off. The untraceable source, the unknowable tweak that changed their lives is a constant stomach-acid spring of worry for me.

I feel fearful. I imagine losing Georgia. I hate to admit I can’t know what will keep my family safe. I hate to wrangle with Georgia over a peach, telling her some truths about why we choose organic fruits, in my gut wondering if this particular peach, the produce with the highest pesticide load, the peach I might let Georgia talk me into, will produce something in her that I can’t take back.