“I know it’s a slippery slope,” I said, taking a swallow.
“It’s not a slippery slope for you, Abigail,” he said, nursing the Knob Creek he shouldn’t have been drinking. “It’s a waterslide.”
“And you?” I said. “Your liver is shot to hell.”
Chuck shrugged.
Then my son, Ralph, visiting for the weekend, sat me down. He is very gentle, but he talks straight. “Ma,” he said, “I have to be honest with you. You need to think about what you’re doing.” Beer bottles were everywhere, by the sides of chairs, next to the sofa, under the sofa, next to the telephone, half a dozen in my studio, several on my desk, and the recycling bin was full. “Drinking isn’t reality,” he said. “Reality is better than nonreality. Even scary reality.”
But I had my reasons.
“I have one more beer,” I finally said, “and I’m going to drink it.” I did, and that, I thought, was that. Done.
Daphne
Daphne, my newest dog, ducks under the covers and makes her way to the end of the bed. She places her forelegs over my ankles, then lays her head on my feet. She licks me for a while, which provides a surprisingly pleasant sensation, then falls asleep. From time to time I can feel her delicate swallow, now and then her legs pump and I know she’s running after something in the backyard, sometimes she just moves her jaws with none of the muffled barking the other two dogs do (a hilarious sound, barking with mouth closed) but I’m pretty sure Daphne is dreaming of eating. Or chewing. The lawn is littered with items stolen from everywhere—rolls of paper towels mutilated and scattered, loaves of raisin bread, only the wrappers remaining; an entire box of black-and-white cookies; the brisket I had wrapped up for my daughter, the only part of which remained (when I turned my back for two minutes) was the tinfoil. Daphne has stolen all the books from the bottom shelf (writers whose last names begin with “E”). I have found Jeffrey Eugenides, George Eliot, Alice Thomas Ellis, Clyde Edgerton, Deborah Eisenberg, all lying on the lawn with their bindings chewed. The red comforter has been reduced to fluff, the green coverlet is now lace. I don’t dare put anything pretty on my bed lest it be turned to ribbons, so I sleep under rags. I don’t care. I love her. Yesterday I caught her just in time scooting through the dog door with my daughter Catherine’s baseball cap, the one with the bronze wig attached. Catherine has cancer. She has other wigs, but this one’s her favorite.
Finding Out
She found a lump in her breast, summer of 2011. She went to the doctor, and had a biopsy. A week went by. The results were supposed to come on Monday, and Catherine drove to my house to wait for the call. When her phone rang she stiffened. “It’s them,” she said, and listened for a moment before she turned away, her shoulders shaking. “Is this a death sentence?” I heard her whisper, weeping. I put my arms around her. Catherine makes no sound when she weeps, but her body heaves and trembles. “It will be all right,” I told her. “It will be all right.” But my body was ice-cold.
I called her sisters and her brother, who had one question. Will she be all right?
“Of course,” I think I said. “Of course she will.”
Then I called Chuck. “It’s cancer,” I told him.
“God, no,” he said.
“I’m terrified,” I said.
Triple Negative
Catherine’s cancer is triple negative, which means there is no standard treatment. “I’m going to try to look on this as an adventure, Mom,” she said, and my heart broke for her innocence and courage.
“Triple negative” means that Catherine’s cancer cells don’t have receptors for estrogen, progesterone, or HER2. As a result, her cancer cells don’t respond to therapies that block estrogen, progesterone, or HER2. There is no protocol. Furthermore, because there are no effective treatments, this cancer is extremely aggressive. “Likely to recur,” said a hospital pamphlet in a doctor’s waiting room. Afraid that Catherine might read this terrifying phrase (why could they not have said “more likely to recur”?), I stuffed the damn thing in my bag to toss, but it sticks with me.
Help
Jennifer came down, and Ralph, and Sarah. Everyone helped. The community helped. The cancer support center in Kingston helped. My friend Amy was generous with her advice, and brought food to the hospital while we waited for Catherine’s turn. Friends brought suppers to the little family.
On the corridor wall of the main hospital, Catherine and I walked past a photograph of my father, who had once been the head of Memorial Sloan Kettering. We always stopped there for a minute, both of us wishing he were still here. He would say something gentle.
Treatment
The waiting room at Evelyn H. Lauder Center is cheerful and bright, one side all windows. There are comfortable chairs, tables filled with magazines. The waiting room was filled, but we found seats by the window. Around us were women young and old, wealthy and not, some with family accompanying them, some alone. When Catherine’s name was called, I waited for everyone to lift their heads in amazement as this beautiful young woman rose from her chair. Nobody even glanced up. Who could help but notice that this daughter of mine was the loveliest woman they had ever seen? I was angry. Why didn’t every head turn in sorrow?
The oncologist recommended a lumpectomy. The following week, after surgery, the surgeon came to tell us the margins were clear. They had gotten all of it out. No lymph node involvement. Good news.
Therapies
I drove Catherine into the city once a week for chemo. We stayed at my sister Judy’s apartment the night before. Judy made us laugh, gave Catherine presents, baked popovers for us in the mornings. She was so funny and so kind. She insisted on giving us her bed. Catherine and I never sleep under the sheets but wrap ourselves in comforters, and Catherine always spills her tea and I drink coffee without using a saucer, and Judy, a very tidy soul, would give us a withering look, then announce, “Barbarians!” It was always funny. We looked forward to these weekly visits.
Tim was working in the city and often met us in the waiting room. The days were long, and Catherine scarfed up all the good trashy magazines and we settled ourselves near the windows. “I don’t know who any of these people are,” I said to her, looking at the covers of six People magazines. “I don’t either, Mom,” she said, but we read them anyway.
The chemo rooms were airy and private. Catherine was getting infusions of several drugs. The nurses were kind and expert with the needle, and Catherine usually fell asleep, her hands clutching the pillow on her lap. After chemo, if she was up to it, we shopped at the Whole Foods on Columbus Avenue, stocking up on cookies. Driving home, Catherine slept on a pillow against the window, wrapped in blankets.
Then, three months into chemo, another tumor appeared. Catherine was immediately scheduled for a mastectomy. I called Chuck. “Another tumor,” I said. “How can this be happening? How can it have grown right in the middle of chemo?”
“But that’s what this cancer is,” he said quietly. “That’s what it does.”
Chuck spoke gently, but he was matter-of-fact. I was still afraid, but the shock was gone.
Radiation
After she healed from the mastectomy, Catherine opted for six weeks of radiation, five days a week. We used the radiology lab at Benedictine Hospital, fifteen minutes away. No more trips to New York.
“I miss Judy,” Catherine said.
Tim & Catherine
Tim puts his arms around Catherine as if to keep her safe forever. The two of them in one another’s arms are like a point on the map, a location in time, a destination. Jennifer took a picture of this embrace, and I love to look at it.
Unsympathetic
Not long after Catherine’s diagnosis, my grandson Joe is here, nursing a broken heart. He is the oldest of Sarah’s five kids. Usually I am a good listener. Usually I am sympathetic to a broken heart. I love this young man, and he is clearly bewildered, even stunned by th
e pain. We are sitting outside on the uncomfortable wire chairs I bought years ago, and he tells us his girlfriend left him. Now she won’t answer his calls. She gives no explanation for the breakup. He looks to me for advice, for reassurance, for sympathy. I look back at him with god knows what expression on my face. There is a brief silence.
“It’s not cancer,” I say.
“Mom,” says Catherine later. She is shocked. “That was really harsh.”
I don’t care. I have no sympathy for ordinary grief.
Mice
Catherine comes over on Tuesdays. Today she arrived carrying a wire basket filled with soft blankets, and a sheaf of papers the top of which turned out to be instructions for feeding abandoned tiny creatures. “I have something to show you,” she said, her cheeks flushed with excitement. Chuck was here and she sat between us and we watched as she carefully unwrapped the blanket, revealing in its depths the smallest live creature with four legs I ever saw: a baby mouse, no bigger than the first two joints of my little finger. Her cat Carlos had brought it in injured, two puncture wounds in its neck, but alive. Catherine is feeding him/her (“I wish I knew which,” she says) with a formula she bought for abandoned kittens. She uses one of the syringes (minus the needle) she keeps to inject her diabetic cat, older than dirt, who spends most of his life asleep on the kitchen table under a vase of flowers, his scruffy back sprinkled with fallen petals.
The mouse’s eyes are still closed. Its paws and nose are pink, the rest of him is a soft gray. “Look!” she says, holding the little thing in the palm of her hand, stroking its back very softly.
The mouse died half an hour later.
“I’m glad it died while I was holding it,” Catherine says, tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” says Chuck, his arm around her shoulder.
“You did everything you could,” I say, putting my hand on hers. “It was just too small to survive without its mother.”
Then we all fall silent. I wish I hadn’t spoken. I hope Catherine isn’t thinking about what I am suddenly thinking about: her boys.
Tree
We had a hurricane. I went outside in the screaming wind and discovered, on the north side of the house, a tree leaning over at a forty-five-degree angle, its enormous root-ball cracking the surface of the ground, snarled roots dangling, and nothing to be done. A perfect example of inevitable.
Worries
When I worry about Catherine I call Chuck and he says something considered and thoughtful, which is how I know he is worried too. When I am worried about Chuck I call Catherine, and she is silent, which is how I know she is worried too. We function, at least for me, as a family. I count on Chuck the way I would on her father. Chuck cares for her in his own way too, but the role of parent suits him and helps me. Odd, after all we have been through. I don’t know that we would have been as close as we are now without the breakage, the damage done. We have built something sturdy out of the wreckage.
A Dream
I looked down and there was a little bell, and I could see the silver clapper beating inside and realized, Oh, this is my heart, what’s it doing outside my body? And why is it transparent? Can everyone see? I was nervous but kept on dreaming. Because what the hell.
Another Date
I took Augie out to Cucina the other night, as I had taken Fred the month before. “I’ve got to get ready, Mom,” he said to Catherine hours before our date, and proceeded to dress himself. He chose a blue and white striped shirt, khaki pants, and matching socks. He wore a small snap-on necktie Catherine had bought because it reminded her of the ties her father wore.
Augie is six years old. We sat down, put our napkins in our laps, and he blew out the candle on the table. Usually I admonish him, but tonight was special. I lit the candle again, and said, “Blow it out and make a wish.” He did.
“I guess it won’t not come true if I tell you,” he said.
“What did you wish for?” I asked.
“I wished Mommy’s cancer would go away.”
I wish that all the time.
I lit the candle again. He made another wish and blew it out.
“I wish for a happy family life,” he said, this child of six.
Me too.
I lit the candle again. “Here’s my ultimate wish,” he said, gathering himself up to blow again. “I wish for a . . .” and then he named an action figure I can’t remember the name of. He had two cherry sodas and the shrimp pasta. He didn’t like the tails so he pulled them all off and placed them on the edge of my plate. I ate them. “They are very good,” I told him, “thank you.”
“I don’t like them,” he said, pulling off another and tossing it my way.
Both boys were here yesterday. We found thousands of tiny inch-high maples hiding in the grass.
“Good-bye, you little seedlings,” I called to the boys when they left. Augie’s voice came from the car. “Good-bye, big flower,” he called.
Awful Days
What are these awful days? Days full of phone calls I don’t return or even pick up; people I ought to call because of recent deaths; party invitations to which I don’t even respond. I am rude and thoughtless. I can’t rouse myself longer than half an hour before I again climb the stairs with the dogs for another long nap under the covers, shades drawn, fan on for white noise, telephone tucked where I can’t hear it. But if this lasts too long, Jennifer alerts Catherine, and Catherine calls Chuck, and someone comes over to see if I’m okay. “Your daughters are worried about you,” says Chuck this morning. “I came to see if you were dead.”
Beautiful
Catherine is beautiful. Six weeks of radiation are over now, and her hair is growing in like duckling down, with waves and cowlicks; the color is a pale fawn. “You look like Ingrid Bergman in that movie,” I tell her. She gives me a patient look. “I absolutely love your hair.”
“You say that all the time, Mom,” she says, “but this just isn’t me.”
Before treatment, her hair was longer and bleached blond, often with pink streaks running through it. To me she looks more like who she is now, or who she is becoming, but since there’s no way to explain that to myself, I can’t explain it to her.
Anger
I’m not a good cancer patient, Mom,” says Catherine. “I’m not having any fun.” She looks at books written by cancer survivors who detail how their lives changed—new foods to explore, a fresh outlook, appreciating life in the moment. “There is no book about how cancer sucks,” she says.
But she has always had a rich appreciation for life. Most of the pictures my daughter Jennifer has taken of Catherine show her bending down to examine something in the grass. Catherine loves tiny live things; she loves fossils, flowers, bones, stones. There is a collection of river stones on her front porch, and bones of various kinds. Ralph gave her one of his most treasured possessions: a raven skull. She displays it in her office, which also contains shelves and shelves of things she has collected off the face of the earth. I bought her a trilobite in Colorado, 400 million years old. It gave us both the shivers when we held it in our hands. “Did you know, Mom,” she said, “that our bodies are made out of stars? Stars and dinosaurs and grass, everything is in us. We’re all part of the Big Bang. Don’t you love that?”
I love her.
Anger?
Chuck and I are having breakfast at Oriole 9. “It makes me furious,” I tell him, “all these people writing about how good cancer was for them, how they developed a fresh outlook on everything, how cancer changed their lives for the better. All so self-congratulatory.” I’m talking through my hat, really, having read only about this kind of book, not the books themselves.
“I’m so angry,” I say, “that all this shit makes Catherine feel inferior.”
Chuck looks at me. “You might not be angry at them,” he says, “you might be angry that Catherine got cancer.”
; This is a wonderfully provocative remark.
“Thank you,” I say, “this gives me something to think about.”
But I’m not sure it’s true.
Anger is a luxury. Anger wants answers, retribution, reasons, something that makes sense. Anger wants a story, stories help us make sense out of everything. But while we scramble to help those who need it, who has time for anger? Who has time to make sense out of anything? There is only what is. Anger is a distraction. Anger removes me from grief, and the opportunity to be helpful.
Am I angry? No. Catherine is alive.
Dread
I have no use for the future and it has little use for me. I exist in the present. But I live in dread, whose roots are in the future. Dread owes its very existence to the future.
“What can come?” my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries. Our family has repeated this question for years, laughing.
Dread can be all-purpose, or it can roost on a specific branch. I know my daughter is cancer-free now, at this moment, and that this moment is it.
But I admit dread has taken up residence. My daughter has been free of cancer for a year, but I’m still afraid of what can come.
What Comes Next and How to Like It Page 8