“Jennifer, may I speak with you for a moment, please?” Dr. T. asked from the open door of his exam room.
“Me?” I asked. I followed him into another exam room bathed in fluorescent light. He waited until I was inside before shutting the door behind us. He turned toward me. His face was solemn.
“This is very bad, I’m afraid,” he said. “I just wanted someone in her family to know.”
It was the same feeling I’d had when the doctors at St. Vincent’s estimated that my father had three to six months to live: My center of gravity sank like a stone, past my stomach, and headed straight for the floor.
“What are you saying?” I asked, but I couldn’t hear myself speak. This instant reversal of fortune had sent the blood flooding into my ears, blocking out anything but the thumping of my heart. He pointed to the X-ray hanging on the wall behind him and flipped on the backlight so I could see the spots. There were small masses on one of her lungs and some more splattered throughout her thoracic cavity. “At this point, I would characterize the progression as stage IIB-IIIA,” he gravely informed me. “I need a biopsy to be sure that it’s cancer, but even without one, I’m pretty certain. I mean, I don’t really need a biopsy to see what this is.”
I knew enough about cancer staging to understand that my mother’s condition straddled the border between treatable and terminal cancer. “Um, her heart … she has a heart condition. How—I mean, can she survive chemotherapy?” I stammered. “My uncle Joey, he had lung cancer, and all the chemo and radiation, it—heart attack, he died, very suddenly—” I leaned back against the counter that held oversized glass jars of swabs and tongue depressors and slowly slid to the floor. “You don’t understand,” I said, trying to reason with this man who really had very little power over how sick my mother suddenly was. “I only have one parent left. This can’t happen to me again. She’s all I have! You must understand. This can’t be happening to me again.”
He obviously hadn’t expected this kind of reaction. His face changed, became softer. “Um, listen, I report to a cardiothoracic board with oncologists and surgeons, and I’m sure I could recommend her case for treatment, perhaps even surgery …” It was no use. He looked at me, bewildered: My legs had given out from under me and my heart hammered a lethal drumbeat on the left side of my chest. My face was drenched with tears, and the sudden migration of eyeliner and mascara down my cheeks was not something I could easily explain to my mother.
“Listen,” he said, “I have to go into the office now and talk to her. It’s just outside the exam room. Take a few minutes to compose yourself.” He walked out and closed the door behind him.
I shuffled into the bathroom and washed my face. I caught my reflection in the mirror, and as much as I tried to avoid looking into my own eyes, I couldn’t help it. Jennifer, I silently implored, whatever will become of you?
I cried harder. My mother might never see me get my master’s degree, should I be accepted to Columbia. She would never see my kids. She wouldn’t even see me turn thirty. Neither of them would. This time I would be really, truly alone. And worse, she’d be dying the same death that had thrown its long, suffocating shadow over us as it came to claim my father. We’d escaped it that day in May, but it was back, this time for her. And one day it would come for me.
I was still crying when I heard rapping on the bathroom door. It was Dr. T. “Gimme a minute!” I said, flushing the toilet a couple of times. When I finally dragged myself into his office I encountered my mother, seated, but no sign of Dr. T. He must have given up waiting for me. “There you are,” she said to me. Seeing her face, nervous but still relatively innocent, calmed me. If she still didn’t know, it was almost like it hadn’t happened yet.
Dr. T. arrived shortly thereafter. He had the X-rays illuminated on another white board behind him and pointed out a few spots to my mother. Here it comes …
“We won’t know anything without a biopsy,” he said, “and to get that we’ll need to do a bronchoscopy. It’s unpleasant, but you’ll be heavily sedated.”
“I know,” my mother said with a groan. “My husband had one. Not pleasant.”
Wait—what was happening? Where was his “pretty certain” diagnosis of stage III lung cancer? My head whipped from his placid mug to my mother’s ignorance and back again. When was he going to tell her?
“Okay, so we’ll set up an appointment for your bronchoscopy,” Dr. T. said in closing. “Any questions?”
We left Dr. T.’s office and ambled across the street to One Fish Two Fish and ordered an early bird special. I grabbed my phone and quickly excused myself to go to the bathroom. I hit speed dial #4 and prayed I didn’t get voice mail.
“Sarah!” I said when she answered. I was crying again.
“Jenny, my god, what is it?” Only in times of stress did she call me Jenny; usually she called me Fuh, her original nickname for me. As in Jenni-fuh. Ha, ha.
“Sarah, what do I do?” I explained what Dr. T. had done to me—turned me into the bearer of unbearable news—“and I can’t face her and not tell her,” I sobbed. “How do I tell her? But how can I look into her eyes and not tell her?”
“What kind of doctor goes over a patient’s head to tell her family but doesn’t even tell her?” Sarah fumed.
“Well,” I said, slowly returning to life, “I’d say he got his medical degree at Target, but I don’t think that place was around in the 1910s.”
“Jenny,” she said, her steady composure rising to the occasion, “you have to tell her. You just do.”
“I do?” I asked, but I knew I did. Sarah was right—how could this doctor have handed me this burden? Wasn’t this stuff covered during his residency?
“Yes. Go.”
I left the bathroom on wobbly knees and sat across from my mother. It was just the two of us now, and this role, by default, fell to me. Maybe my father was watching me, rooting for me, from wherever he was. I silently begged for any strength he could lend me, and realized that despite all he’d been through, he’d never had to do something like this.
“I have to tell you something,” I began as we waited for our salads.
My mother addressed me with a bemused expression, one she might use when entertaining the ramblings of a child. “Yes?”
“Mommy.” I breathed in and out a couple of times. “Mommy. You have cancer. He told me, when he pulled me aside. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you. It’s in your lymph nodes. He said he could see it on the X-ray. It’s stage IIB—still treatable,” I noted, omitting the IIIA part of the equation. “He said that the doctors could give you chemo and it wouldn’t necessarily hurt your heart. There are therapies now that aren’t that hard on your heart. It’s treatable, Mom. It’s not like Dad. And he even mentioned operating. See? They never said that to Dad.”
I let the news sink in. I think it may have been because I was there watching her, but she didn’t fall apart. She leaned back in her chair and kept her stare fixed on an imaginary point in space slightly off to the right and nodded, slowly. I thought I caught a tear in her eye, but it quickly evaporated. Her maternal instinct must have kicked in, preventing her from exploding with grief until she was alone. Now that my duty had been performed, my head slumped between my shoulders and nearly hit the table. I stifled another sob and looked up at her as she sat, expressionless.
“Mommy, I am so sorry,” I mumbled. “Mommy, you have to fight. For me. Please.”
She nodded, appearing to calculate something in her head. “I will, baby,” she said. “I want to see you graduate. I want to see you have a baby. I’ll stay around, for you. I have to.” I mindlessly picked at my salmon as she implored me to eat. I seemed to be taking this harder than she was. I remembered her reaction on September 11, as we watched the towers fall in the city in which she grew up: She was placid, soothing, never betraying her emotions as long as I couldn’t handle mine. And a few months before that, when I forced myself to kick Kareem out of my apartment, she was there to catch me
when I fell apart. I’d never really appreciated it before, but it was this steady, solid quality that made her a mother—a strong mother, a very good mother. She met my eyes then, and I wondered how we got to this point. What she had been for my father, I now was for her, and it had happened in less than an hour. I had become a primary caregiver.
Afterward we strolled up Madison Avenue to Starbucks like it was any other night. But it wasn’t, and I could feel it in my adrenalized, worn-out muscles. There would be calls to make, battle plans to be drawn up, setbacks against which to steel ourselves. We returned to my apartment and settled in for the sleep of our lives—for my mother, a sobering countdown had begun; for me, an inexorable slide into certain grief, protracted and life-altering. Grief, I realized, would be a state that would infuse the rest of my life; it would be the lens through which everything else would be seen, felt, and heard. To say that I wouldn’t be the same would be inadequate; I didn’t know who I would become, that person now just a dot in the distance.
“JENNY … CALL ME baaaaack! You’re going to be very interested in what I have to saaaay!”
I retrieved the message in the bathroom stall at work on a lazy April afternoon. I’d been expecting an envelope from Columbia, and I knew the mailman delivered his bundles at 1:30 P.M., but my mother swore she didn’t know that when, at 1:31, she impulsively descended the stairs and unlocked my mailbox and ripped open my acceptance letter. My future was set, and not a moment too soon. At that point my mother had been receiving chemo and radiation for three months, and just as we’d essentially moved to Sloan-Kettering when my father became ill, my mother and I spent enough time in Mount Sinai’s sunlit atrium and above-average cafeteria to call it home. Since it was just four avenue blocks from my apartment she lived with me during the week, an arrangement that drove us both a little nuts. But she was overjoyed that at least one piece of my life had finally clicked into place—perhaps I’d finally get the master’s degree from Columbia that had ultimately eluded her. She took to calling me “Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter” after the comic strip character, and even though I didn’t get the reference I’d giggle at how tickled she seemed by my newly chosen profession.
But our celebration was tempered by a return, the following morning, to the grind: radiation five times a week and chemotherapy on Tuesdays. Radiation was the lesser of the two evils, as the only side effect was a slight sunburn, and she loved Dr. C., her easygoing radiation oncologist. Of all her new doctors at Sinai—cardiologist, pulmonologist, pulmonary oncologist, cardiothoracic surgeon—she liked Dr. C. the best. When she asked him why the sunny disposition, he explained that radiation oncologists never really see anyone at their sickest, they generally don’t see anyone die, and patients are in and out in fifteen minutes. We also loved Dr. S., her cardiothoracic surgeon, but he wasn’t really her surgeon; he’d been “retained” in the hope that her cancer could be excised. But since the primary tumor was wrapped around her pulmonary artery, and taking the lung wasn’t an option because five decades of cigarette smoking had diminished the breathing capacity in her other lung by 40 percent, we didn’t see him very often.
While I had physically been there for my mother during the first half of her yearlong cancer ordeal, in the shadows of my mind I felt that I wasn’t really there for her at all. True, I woke up every morning for the first couple of months and went with her to radiation, sat with her in Dr. C.’s office and ate the graham crackers and drank the orange juice they provided, and every Tuesday I accompanied her down the hall to chemo. “I’m a human pincushion!” she’d habitually remark as the nurses struggled to find a plump vein among the multitude that were collapsing in her arms. Chemotherapy was actually semi-entertaining for both of us; as her Benadryl took hold she became woozier and woozier until she spoke so nonsensically she sounded thoroughly sloshed. I then took her back to my apartment, where she slept off the chemo like a drunk, and since they loaded her up with gallons of Compazine, she mercifully never threw up. She also didn’t fully lose her hair, though at the end it did get thin and patchy in spots and she got creative with an assortment of colorful scarves.
But around month three I started to get lazy, and she noticed. Since radiation only took fifteen minutes and Sinai was so close to my apartment, I let her go without me once, then twice, then a few times a week. I’d sleep in and arrive for chemo when it was already in progress. I was still working at the restaurant twenty hours a week and attending my first reporting class at Columbia, but class time and outside reporting only absorbed fifteen hours of my week. So why did I feel so exhausted all the time? I couldn’t, for the life of me, wake myself up, and sometimes even when I came late to chemo I slept in the bed next to her if it was empty. This annoyed her, as she wanted a person there to give her moral support and allay her fears, not fall asleep. I was useless to her. I had read a few years before that Céline Dion attended every single one of her husband’s radiation appointments when he had throat cancer. She was a superstar, busy with recording and touring, not to mention angling to freeze her husband’s sperm for future pollination. If a woman with these demands could do it, why couldn’t I? I wish I could have been there for her the way she wanted me to, instead of running to a friend’s apartment every night to smoke a joint, despite the protests my mother hurled at my back as I ran out the door: “Jenny! You shouldn’t be taking anything into your lungs, not with your genetics!” But what she really meant was, Don’t leave me and tune out. Stay with me.
Which is what she must have been trying to express the morning she crawled into bed with me as I slept past noon. In my twilight sleep I felt her reach tentatively for my back; I’d fallen asleep facing the wall. We shared a bed in these days, reminding me uncomfortably of our forced cohabitation during that last year in California, and I assumed she was waking up and wanted me to wake up, too. She hated making coffee and eating breakfast alone, and here she was, saddled with a late sleeper. But I felt her nails on my shoulders as she brushed away my hair, followed by sobbing. It sounded at first like she was laughing, then choking. I stirred, then froze. Soon I felt sweaty hair and hot, wet cheeks on my back. I heard her suck in her snot and imagined it dripping from her nose. My heart went out to her, but I decided to feign sleep until I figured out what to do.
“Jenny, I am so fuckin’ scared,” she said, her voice dipping into an octave I only heard her use when she cried over my father. I remained in my semicomatose state, waiting for a sign. “Jenny,” she said, rocking me slightly. “I need you.” I murmured something incomprehensible. She rocked me again. “Jenny.” She wasn’t yelling at me, like she did during one of our regular battles of will. She was needing me; it was infused in each of her half-swallowed sentences and the little gasps for breath she emitted after each sob. “Jenny, I am so fucking scared,” she wept. “I don’t want to die.”
She was killing me. But I didn’t stir. What was I supposed to say? That I, too, had severe bouts of death anxiety, the kind that everybody has but no one except Woody Allen likes to talk about? That I’d begun having them again, that they’d wrenched my insides, beginning the day she called me and informed me that yes, the results had definitively come back positive for cancer, and I hung up and collapsed hysterically on West Fifty-seventh Street because that was the moment I knew for certain I was going to lose her? That the clock had started that night, ticking away the seconds until the demise of what was left of my family? That I’d wandered Columbus Circle in a haze, weighed down by the devastating heaviness of it all until Sarah picked up her phone and took me in for the night, and even then I couldn’t shake the crushing doom that awaited us both? Should I have used the opportunity on the morning she cried to my back to compound her fears by telling her the truth—that yes, she was going to die, and yes, I knew it? Should I have mourned her death with her right there and then? Tried to articulate that my fear of living without her had been buried so deep for so long that it was in a place I was only vaguely aware of and couldn’t even begin to acc
ess? Should I have brought her on that journey with me, even though I feared it would have been selfish to do so?
While I sensed all this that morning and accepted it as fact for the duration of her illness, I felt that speaking these things aloud deposited me in the land of cliché, and anyway, it was tiny compared to what she was going through. Really, who wanted to hear what I thought? This was her death, not mine. But here she was, reaching out to me in desperation, laying herself bare in a way I bet she’d never done with anyone. When she’d cried hardest over my father, the day she said she realized she was going to lose him after all those years of fighting for him, she grieved alone, sobbing into his bedsheets at Sloan-Kettering after they wheeled him off to get a scan. So when she needed me—or anyone—with an unprecedented ache, why didn’t I open myself up in kind? Why couldn’t I just turn around and comfort her? Really, what would it have cost me? Maybe I decided, in a place somewhere deep down where these decisions are made, that I would instead act brave and say little, that it was better for both of us—that if we started mourning our impending separation now we’d get lost in a big dark hole that had two full bottles of Xanax at the bottom. I am satisfied that my mother knew how I felt about her; I am not so sure she knew how I felt about losing her. Not that morning, anyway.
My aunt Arline later told me that my mother expressed many times that year how scared she was for me in the event of her death—that I’d be lost without her, that I wouldn’t finish school, that I wouldn’t have anyone. She hid from me most of her fears regarding the effect her death might have on me. And for that, I’m glad. She spared us both a lot of agony.
CHAPTER 14
December 2005
• • •
MY MOTHER LIKED TO QUOTE THAT LINE FROM THE MOVIE Seabiscuit, which we saw a couple of years before she got sick, when the famed horse’s trainer says to its owner, “You don’t throw away a whole life just ’cause he’s banged up a little.” I knew why she connected with it: She’d always felt discarded by her father, and his cold, dismissive treatment unleashed feelings of worthlessness she’d have to battle over the course of her entire life. But this quote seemed especially apt as she stared down her final months. And as her banged-up body got weaker from the chemo and the hulking oxygen machine made its first appearance in her apartment, it could have applied literally as well. Though she claimed she only needed the oxygen once in a while “to catch my breath,” she was drowning in fluid: It was in her lungs and around her heart, cutting off her breathing if she fell asleep in any other position but sitting up. Of course she didn’t tell me that; instead she’d call in the middle of the night, breathlessly requesting my companionship under the guise of benign chitchat. She either knew what was wrong and pretended not to, or convinced herself that her breathlessness would subside. But by the time Christmas Eve rolled around, we came to understand how severely we’d both underestimated her condition.
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