by Clay Byars
I don’t want to sound callous—as if the news of my mother’s cancer wasn’t the most jarring part of my sister’s call—but I had been through so much loss in my life by then, and among my first thoughts was I can’t believe this is happening to me. Or, worse than that, Again? Partly it had to do with control. Placing this new shock in the unbelievable pattern of things that had happened to me before I’d even turned thirty-seven was a way of distancing myself, making it into a story. Whatever it was, I knew that my life had just entered another new phase. I couldn’t speak for a minute. I said, “I’m on my way home.”
It didn’t take me long to pack a few clothes and load the dogs up, but when I got to the house, her lawyer had already visited. He was just leaving. I wanted to scoff but didn’t. She was simply trying to stay on top of things. I regret what I said as soon as I saw her almost as much as I do that time when I told her thanks for life and money. I think I was trying to lighten the moment. I know that I wasn’t trying to be cruel. “Well,” I said, “at least now you know you’re not in ultimate control of your body. Are you scared?” She stared at me for a second before she started crying. “I don’t want to die,” she said.
My sister motioned for me to step out in the hall. She said, “Dr. Jones wants you to call him.”
Dr. Jones was my doctor as well as my mother’s. We were well acquainted, thanks to my many falls. He said they were going to biopsy the mass on the following Tuesday, and that we really wouldn’t know anything more until then. But he also said he would be surprised if it was not malignant, quickly adding that there are many different grades of malignancy. “This could be easily treatable.”
The distance that began to develop right away between my mother and reality nauseated me. She was now the patient. It put me in mind of my own days in the hospital and how much I’d hated such a designation, other people putting it on me, whereas she seemed almost to embrace it. Before she went in for the biopsy, which would require a few days’ stay in the hospital, she hired a sitter and had a hospital bed installed in the front study of her house. All of it felt like a performance.
The sitter went with her to the hospital. I went back to the farm after the procedure, which they described as successful. She was recovering in the hospital. I tried rereading some of my favorite stories and essays, trying to get back into the mind-set where this wasn’t the end of the world. My mother’s condition was harmless. I told myself that I knew it, deep down, but I was caught up and scared. With her gift for looking the other way, you would have thought she was on vacation, having whatever she wanted brought to her and gossiping on the phone. But I knew she was scared as well.
One day the previous fall, after I’d moved from the lake to the farm, I got an e-mail message from Eleanor. She had a different last name, but I knew right away it was her. “I bet you thought you’d never hear from me again,” she wrote. She told me generally about her life over the past years. She was married to a guy she’d dated in college, who was from Chicago. She lived there with him and their two daughters. He was also a graduate of NOLS, the same program she and I met on—he’d done a semester in the Rockies in 1989. She told me she now ran marathons competitively. “Okay, now your turn,” she wrote. The phrase seemed like a jolt of her former assertiveness and trust coming through. The news that she was married with children didn’t bother me. I would have been surprised to learn otherwise. Mainly I was just ecstatic to hear from her.
We began trading e-mails. At first they held a sense of possibility for me, a feeling that maybe the past wasn’t completely past. Not that I hoped she’d leave her husband or anything like that, but it seemed there could still be something between us. Soon, though, our back-and-forth started to feel obligatory. With the perspective of years, the fact that we’d only ever spent a little more than a month in each other’s presence became apparent—especially given the consequences of the stroke. We were “different people.” Neither of us seemed upset about this. It was the way things had unfolded.
But stubbornness was something she and I had in common, so we made plans to meet in Chicago, where my college roommate lived and where I would occasionally visit. We chose the dates months in advance, before I knew anything about my mother’s illness. But now she was sick, or we feared so—she’d been released from the hospital where they’d performed the biopsy, but we hadn’t yet gone to see the oncologist about the results. The approaching weekend with Eleanor took on ominous overtones. I made sure before the biopsy that my mother was still okay with my going. She said, “Don’t be silly.”
When I came into town on the Thursday before I left, I heard her hysterically laughing as soon as I walked in the front door. It was the middle of the day and the sun was shining. She was sitting up in the hospital bed watching the TV, and the uniformed sitter was knitting obliviously in a recliner opposite her. On the screen was one of the first commercials for Progressive Insurance, the ads in which the supposed customers stand on the white floor of a mock showroom with a white background. A jaunty, apron-wearing actress was leading the group around to the different policies and trying to be clever. The setting gave the whole thing an ethereal, idea-of-heaven feel, but the humor played to the lowest common denominator—it played on the premise that everyone was ignorant except for you and Progressive—and wasn’t even funny for that. My mother had tears in her eyes.
“Have you seen this?” she said.
As I was leaving to go to the airport the next day, when I went in to tell her bye, she said, “Where are you going?” My automatic thought was to wonder if her brain had been affected as well, then to remind myself how much had been on her mind recently.
“Chicago,” I said. “Remember? It’s just for the weekend.”
She looked scared. “You’re not really going, are you?”
I told her it was too late to change my plans, though we both knew it wasn’t. I then said that Eleanor had made dinner reservations for us, as if those, too, would be binding. Finally, I said, “Mom, please don’t do this to me.”
The last bit of resilience seemed to leave her. I’d beaten her, but suddenly I wasn’t sure I shouldn’t have let her win.
“Do you really want me to stay here?” I said.
With a crinkled nose, she just shook her head.
I knew as soon as Eleanor got to my roommate’s apartment to pick me up that whatever had been between us wasn’t there anymore. She knew it, too, and I could tell by the way she hurriedly began talking, asking my roommate questions without waiting for the answers, that she had expected me to look more like I’d used to (and my letters had apparently led her to believe). She was trying not to betray her disappointment. She didn’t look identical to seventeen years before, either—she was skinnier (from running, she said), and more angular—but the change in my appearance was a lot more drastic. Living alone and rarely seeing people who hadn’t seen me in a while, I could become unaware that I’d once looked different. I didn’t feel different.
Throughout our uneventful meal and then at a local coffee shop afterward, we both seemed to be trying to make the present and the past cohere. But they were just too distinct. A few inconsequential confidences were shared, but I think we both knew that this was it. When we said goodbye, I kissed her cheek. At least I think I did. I’m sure I did. We promised to stay in touch, and kept it up for a while, but in a way you could tell was going to fade.
When I got back home that Sunday, my mother was a different person. I noticed it in how she dealt with the on-call nurse. Whereas before, when the woman had first shown up, my mother had uneasily laughed about it, saying probably she wouldn’t need too much help, now the assistance was necessary. My mother was in pain.
That night, I got into a physical confrontation with my sister, who to my mind was acting like a newly appointed matriarch, addressing me as if I were her son. Having learned from my mother, she treated the whole thing like a performance, and now she had the lead. I told her that she was a terrible sister, and
she slapped me in the face. The sitter called Will to come break us up. We hadn’t even been to see the oncologist yet, and already the end seemed near.
Even in her condition, my mother did everything she could to change or postpone the appointment. People say that not knowing is the worst part, but for her, it was much better than knowing, since it at least allowed for hope. Everyone else wanted to get the results, so treatment could begin as soon as possible. It almost seemed that the progression of my mother’s cancer accelerated after the initial diagnosis was made.
A long, silent walk, first along the corridor from the parking deck, then across an atrium to the elevators that went up to the oncologist’s office, did nothing to help the feeling that we were en route to her execution. She was sitting in a wheelchair, and her face was expressionless.
When she said she had to go to the bathroom before we went into the office, I felt that I was going to be sick as well. I was right there with her. But the oncologist happened to meet us out in the open area by the restrooms. This seemed to be a good sign—we would get the visit over with here.
He spent some time organizing the folder that had my mother’s test results in it, and asked if he could feel where the hip mass had been. I saw how scared my mother was, because although she’d always been prim and proper and harped on etiquette, she stood up and dropped her pants right there. He felt around her pelvis, saying nothing.
He asked if we had any questions. Our faces must have looked confused—he hadn’t told us anything yet. We’d evidently run into him before he was prepared. “I’ll get together with Dr. Jones to discuss a treatment plan,” he said.
My sister asked about chemotherapy, saying she knew it had “come a long way” (Will and I glanced at each other). What could we expect there? Would she lose her hair?
He replied that, given the wide area over which the cancer had spread, they would start with the general chemotherapy that had been around since the seventies. He let that answer the second question, about the hair. After a moment, he looked at Will and me and said, “These aren’t party drugs.”
After the appointment I went back to the farm with the dogs, assuming the oncologist wouldn’t be speaking with Dr. Jones until the next day at the soonest, so I was immediately put on alert when Will called me that afternoon. He said he’d just gotten off the phone with Dr. Jones, who himself had just spoken with the oncologist, and they had decided not even to start chemotherapy. The cancer was already so far gone, treating her would likely do more harm than good, especially with medicine that takes you to the brink of death anyway. I paused. I thought about my mother, and knew without asking that she must have felt relieved when they’d told her. The prospect of chemo was, for her, worse than anything. When I asked Will how long they thought she had, he said Dr. Jones hadn’t given him a number. “He just said it should be quick.”
A few days later—a week?—I went in to see her. The sitter had just stepped out of the room. I couldn’t believe the decline. She was sleeping most of the time and taking an oral solution of concentrated morphine, for which I had to sign two different forms to pick up from the pharmacy. Her face was withered, and she had the same “tiny” eyes that Will gets when he’s drunk. She was awake, though. This time I did somewhat better on my opening comment. Taking her hand, I said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She hoarsely whispered that, because of me, she wasn’t. She added, “I’m gonna miss you.”
To keep from crying in her face, I blurted out, “I’m not going anywhere!” … that, instead of all the things I might have said, that I thought of later.
Her head fell back on the pillow and she closed her eyes.
I’m not sure how much time passed between that moment and the actual end, but I can’t picture her alive after that. I don’t think I ever talked to her again, or at least never talked to her alone again.
One other memory of that time: there was a night when Will and my sister went into the study and my mother, waking up partway, screamed at them for keeping her alive.
Then early one morning the sitter called up the stairs, “Clay, you need to come down. Your mother has passed.”
It wasn’t until after I’d gone to the bathroom and begun to brush my teeth that I wondered if I should just have gone straight downstairs, if anyone was expecting me. I could hear Will climbing the stairs over the sound of the faucet. He barged into the bathroom, to see how I was taking the news. When he saw that I was fine, he almost smiled as he took in a breath, as if to say, “Well, here it is.”
What he said was “What now?”
28
Nothing is left to you at this moment but to burst out into a loud laugh. You have accomplished a final turning and in very truth know that when a cow in Kuai-chou grazes the herbage, a horse in I-chou finds its stomach filled.
—YUN-AN P’U-YEN, 1156–1226
In the hospital—that is, during my own stay, after they first said I would die, and then remain paralyzed from my eyes down—I had this liberating flash of vision, feeling … knowing. At first I didn’t make much of it. This wasn’t a near-death experience; it came from out of nowhere, when I’d slipped into thinking that none of what was happening to me was real, and since this experience had nothing to do with the external world, or even with words or images, I had lumped it in with everything else, with everything I’d imagined. But I couldn’t forget it.
It happened in an instant but seemed somehow also to occur in geological time. My first impulse is to compare it to a glacier calving, a giant chunk of ice falling off, something that had been building for eons and then happened. My peripheral vision jumped out to where there was no longer anything—my skin, other surfaces, the distance between them—separating me from anything else. I’d gradually stopped being aware of my unresponsive body, but now I was at the core of an infinitely expanded being. This wasn’t a thought, or even a chain of thoughts. It was too seamless to allow time for thinking. But I felt it—the biggest release of my life. Release not just from the stress of being unable to move or speak, but from myself. From my self. It felt like I’d bloomed.
Unlike with morphine, this wasn’t passive; nothing from outside my body was being introduced. This was active, like an orgasm, but less concentrated, and a thousand times stronger. It was as if a tinted shade I’d never known was there had been lifted. I said before that the experience wasn’t composed of words or images, but there was an underlying cerebral aspect to it, an accompanying knowledge, like knowing how to breathe. It was a culmination of everything I’d learned in my life before then and a simultaneous disregarding of it. My dramatic idea of myself still existed, and had the same setup as always: me writing a script, acting it out, and watching from the audience at the same time. But the walls that had separated them were gone. I fully became each and all of them, as well as everything else—good and bad. I had the vivid sense, too, that this had always been the case. It had never been me against anything. It dawned on me not that everything was going to be okay, but that everything was okay. The clarity I felt was like becoming decongested. It was that close to my normal perception.
From later reading, I learned that people of all backgrounds, cultures, and religions, throughout history, have had versions, in varying degrees, of the same experience, of what I’d taken to calling my “willing elimination of options.” In his essay “This Is It” the philosopher Alan Watts says, “the experience has a tendency to arise in situations of total extremity or despair, when the individual finds himself without any alternative but to surrender himself entirely.” I smiled when I read that. This was it. I knew I wasn’t crazy.
I had already surrendered my body soon after I got to the hospital, but only by letting go of my desire to live or to die—to control my existence—could I surrender entirely. Doing so was not conscious. The experience felt both like I’d willed it and like it had come out of nowhere. I became my will—there was nothing holding me back anymore—but my will was more than me.
As an identical twin, I’d always thought along these lines, but now it was made certain. It didn’t seem strange how refreshed and unafraid I felt, just inevitable.
29
It took longer than Dewin thought it would before I could actually sing a song—and certainly my voice has a ways to go—but over the years of weekly lessons, it has noticeably improved. The first song we attempted was “Happy Birthday,” which was challenging enough at first. It felt different than just doing the exercises. The song imparted rhythm, and that was useful—people talk in rhythm.
A few months ago, we started going through the aria “Ah! Tu Non Sai” from Handel’s Ottone. Just writing the title makes the whole thing sound suspect. Who was I kidding? But as opera songs go, it’s fairly straightforward. It follows a pattern, and it flows.
The song is in Italian, too, which Dewin had mentioned is more conducive to singing than English. Not as many rough transitions. Dewin let me see an English translation of the words. A woman, Matilda, is pleading with the emperor to release her lover from prison.