At age 43, English author and journalist Sarah Gabriel, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had two young daughters and a loving partner and while cancer took her mother at a young age, she was determined not to accept her genetic legacy.

In her new memoir, Eating Pomegranates, Gabriel writes about her fight to survive, stay sane, to protect her young daughters and to stop the BRCA1, the rare and deadly genetic mutation that had caused her cancer, from claiming another victim. Gabriel also sketches a history of breast cancer treatment, from surgery without anaesthetic in the nineteenth century to modern chemical regimes

In a series of columns for That'sFit.ca, Gabriel, now three and a half years out from diagnosis, recounts her experience with this all too common disease. In this installment she remembers telling her girls she has breast cancer.

If the hospital was bad, home was even worse. We lurched back late from appointments in London to pick up the children, who had been farmed out to friends, neighbours, and after-school club.

There were grim meals, made from whatever was left in the cupboard. Pasta and peas. Pasta and peas. Followed by peas and pasta. Then screaming bedtimes because these children – still just five and three - were tired and disorientated, and didn't know what was happening to them.

'We need to talk to them,' said R, my husband.

'I can't,' I said. 'I don't know what to say to them.'

We need to say something,' he said. 'They don't know what's going on.'

'Just don't push me. I'm not ready.'

I was 19 when I watched my own mother die. It was a great shock. I had known she was ill, but didn't know she had cancer until my father summoned me home to be at her deathbed where she was on morphine and in the process of slipping from consciousness.

I had never fully recovered. There had been a lifetime of missing her: that ache when a mother isn't there for you as you graduate from university, get married, have a child, move house. When she isn't there for you if a marriage breaks up, or you get ill, or you're struggling to combine work and family.

I couldn't bear the thought that my own children might have to go through this even younger than I had. Right now they were like a pair of apple trees, sturdy and strong and vital. But I knew that none of this early strength could withstand such a blow. It would damage their lives irrevocably.

So in my shock and fear, I was unable to talk to them. I found it hard even to look at them.

'Why are you at the hospital all the time?' asked Michaela, our eldest.

'Mummy's got a lump in her breast and we have to find out what it is,' said R.

'What is the lump?'

We don't know yet,' he said. 'The doctors are trying to find out.'

'Will I get one?'

'No, no,' he said, extremely upset, because part of the grief of our situation was that each of our daughters has a 50/50 chance of having inherited the same genetic mutation that had given me cancer. 'Of course, you won't get a lump.'

It was several weeks before I could talk to Michaela and Kitty. They were hard weeks. Weeks where Kitty, our youngest, started having accidents at school and coming back in someone else's clothes. Michaela alternated between pale, tight-lipped compliance and bursts of anger. They didn't know what was going on. They knew it was something dreadful – children always do know. But no one was helping them out with any sort of explanation.

The leaflets I picked up from hospital were clear in their advice. 'Children have an ability to deal with the truth that adults often underestimate,' said one. 'Not knowing things can make them very anxious. Even very sad truths will be better than the uncertainty of not knowing what is happening.'

I knew this only too well from my own life, when the silence about my mother's illness had caused great trauma. But still, I wasn't able to talk to them. I felt that all I would communicate was my own terror, the conviction that a diagnosis of cancer had only one outcome.

Finally, I got help from a local organization set up to help families suffering a bereavement. A woman called Kathy Moore came along with her golden Labrador and spent the morning talking me through how to talk to my own children.

'You just tell them what's happening in simple terms. You tell them, if you want, that you are poorly with cancer. That you have to go into hospital so that the doctors can make you better. You tell them when you're going, and how long for, and who is going to look after them while you're gone. You reassure them that even though times are hard now, things will get better.'

'And what if they don't?'

'You don't have to think about that now. You just stay with the present.'

So finally I did talk to them, in the bath one evening. I explained what had happened in simple terms and tried to deal with their questions about what cancer was and where it came from – not easy at the time. They were quiet and grave, but afterwards they seemed calmer.

I felt that talking to them brought us together as a family. I couldn't protect them from the uncertainty of a cancer diagnosis. I couldn't protect them from the fear and trauma of what was happening in our house. But I could stop pretending it wasn't happening to them. I could include them in our life as a family – and from that point, we went forward together.

Click the "breast cancer" link at the top of this post to read all of Sarah Gabriel's columns.