Silent InHERitance

Silent InHERitance is a campaign for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition (NOCC), built around one idea: silence is the first symptom. It follows real women: survivors, BRCA carriers, daughters, all telling the stories their families never did.  

I didn’t come into this project thinking I understood ovarian cancer, and I still don’t think I do. If anything, working on Silent InHERitance showed me how deeply ignorant I was on the matter. Going into this project, though, made me aware of something else very quickly. The reason why I didn’t know anything about the underlying risks of ovarian cancer had to do with the fact that nobody in my life ever talked about it. Not one woman in my family or friends ever discussed their risk, let alone take preventive measures against it. How could they? They grew up in the same silence I did.  

It’s funny how sometimes you can notice something not by its shape, but by its absence, the negative space it forms when something should be there and isn’t. Watching the brave women from this campaign, both in front and behind the cameras, talk about their lives and their mothers, affected me deeply. It’s the way they did it: not in a clinical way, but in the way you talk about someone you miss, or someone you’re scared of becoming, or even someone whose silence you’re still trying to make sense of. Now, I am not a daughter, so I will never carry that particular fear in my body. But as a son, I can only imagine what may have been held back from me, you know, “for my protection”.  

There’s a kind of privilege in getting close to stories that aren’t yours to tell, but that you’re trusted to help tell anyway. I don’t take that lightly. These women didn’t owe us their mothers’ stories, or their own. They gave them because they wanted something to change. Our job was to build something worthy of what they handed us, without making it about craft, or cleverness. To make the wound into the weapon. To make silence scream as loud as possible.  

Working alongside the amazing people at NOCC made my resolve even stronger. You realize how much of medicine still depends on someone deciding to speak first, and NOCC has spent years building those spaces and the trust that comes with it. A test only matters if someone gets to it. A genetic counselor only matters if someone walks through the door. All that starts with a conversation that, in a lot of families, has just never happened.  

Silent InHERitance made me aware of what I owe the people I love, which is at minimum the willingness to ask, and to listen.  

That’s it; I didn’t inherit the risk, but I sure did inherit the silence, same as everyone else. This campaign gave me a chance to do something about it for the first time. And for that I am grateful.