“Oh, no! What happened?” I asked.
“Your mother has cancer.”
The first time a doctor at a nearby military hospital discovered a lump in my mother’s breast she was forty-one. I was twenty-one. As with military medicine, she had to be referred for the biopsy and then wait for the appointment—a few days, a week or more, I don’t remember—but I do remember the pall over our home and the fact that she and I did not discuss it. This matter was my parents’ to deal with, so I didn’t dare to ask, though I wondered how she felt—was she afraid? I wanted to tell her how I felt. I was afraid. Instead, I busied myself around the house to help.
I watched out the kitchen window as she lay in the cold, late fall weather in a lawn chair, buttoned up in her coat and scarf, wrapped in a blanket and alone in her thoughts. For at least two days she would go outside and stay there for hours. I see now that it was the one place she could be totally alone with thoughts and feelings. Thankfully, that time, we got the news that her lump was benign.
“Is she okay out there?” I asked my father.
“Let her alone,” he’d say. “She needs that.”
They found the next lump while my parents were in Korea. They were incommunicado for almost three weeks. After trying to reach them every day by phone from stateside, I finally did. My Dad told me that they had found another lump. Mom had gone to Hawaii for the biopsy, and it, too, was benign. I would not find out until later that the biopsy had been a traumatic experience for Mom. She thought she was having a needle biopsy (a new procedure then) rather than the invasive and deforming surgical biopsy the military doctors performed without her consent. When she finally saw the incision after the procedure, she felt that they had misled her and was both angry and depressed. I do not believe she ever got over that experience, despite being relieved that it was not cancer.
In 1987, while lying in bed and performing a self-exam, which my mother did religiously, she found another lump.
“She said, ‘Lowen, I have a lump,’” Dad told me later, “I tried to feel it, but I couldn’t. ‘It’s right here,’ and she pointed to it, but I couldn’t feel it. When the doctor looked at the results of her mammogram, he could barely see it. He said he wasn’t sure how she found it.”
This time it was cancer, so required a mastectomy. My husband and I encouraged Mom to have the procedure at Georgetown University Hospital’s Lombardi Cancer Center. My husband worked at the University at the time and helped get her an appointment right away with one of the best surgeons.
The doctors let her know that they got everything, that no evidence of it spreading existed. Despite that, they recommended a short course of chemotherapy and radiation. Mom refused both.
Mom and I talked a lot this time, but she was far more focused on the fact that my third baby would be arriving in a few months. In my relief that she was okay and that her prognosis was good, it didn’t occur to me to request that when things like this happened that she and Dad let me know right away and that dispensing important information on a “need-to-know” basis was upsetting and unfair.
Here we were again, nineteen years later, and the cancer came back. I knew that she’d had a physical scheduled that week. She’d been having back pain for some time. She believed that it was due to a fall from a tree during her childhood. Her primary care physician had ordered X-rays and referred her to an orthopedic surgeon.
“I was with her,” Dad told me. “She always wanted me there when she talked to doctors, you know. She filled the doctor in on what had been going on, and he suggested she go over to the hospital for X-rays. She told him that she’d had those done the day before, so he went out of the room to call them up. When he returned with a nurse, I knew it was bad.”
The surgeon let her know that cancer had metastasized. It was in her bones. He wasn’t sure whether it was due to the breast cancer or the tumor in her pancreas.
“Wait,” I interrupted him, “Breast cancer? And a pancreatic tumor?”
“We went back to her oncologist in Delaware, and he said, ‘We can beat this, Suzanne.’”
“Dad, it’s in her bones. What about the tumor in her pancreas? I don’t understand….”
He stopped me. “Nancie, the doctor said we can beat this. He’s the doctor.”
I knew my mother was going to die. Even if she only had breast cancer that had spread to her bones, it was a matter of time, but pancreatic cancer, in those days, gave patients a life expectancy of six weeks to six months.
Dad was insistent. The plan was to beat this. We would all follow the plan. I didn’t attempt to breach the fortress he built around Mom and himself at that time. I followed his orders, avoiding a confrontation. I fell into step on the path through denial that my father cleared, paved, and directed my brothers and me to follow.
During the months that followed, I would call my younger brother—the middle child—to compare notes and, when I felt Dad wasn’t listening to me, ask him to intercede with Dad. But Dad wasn’t talking to him either. I was sure, since my younger brother lived at home at the time but had a long commute to Fort Meade each day, that Dad or Mom did not share much with him either.
CHAPTER 18
Hail and Farewell
I WANTED TO GO OUT to visit right away, but Dad said he’d rather I wait until they set up a routine and saw what Mom could deal with. He didn’t want to disrupt her schedule. There was no surgery necessary since the breast cancer was located on the side where she’d had the mastectomy. According to Dad, they were going to focus on the breast cancer and deal with the pancreatic tumor later. She had doctors’ appointments, radiation, and chemo treatments, which exhausted her.
I offered to take off work, but Dad and Mom said there would be time for that later. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Mom on the phone at all during the weeks after the diagnosis; she was so tired from the ordeal she was under. Dad became primary caretaker, giving up everything to be with her and manage her days. Finally, Dad said I could come out to see them.
I arrived on a Friday night, as I usually did, then got up early the next morning to have coffee with Mom. We sat in their television room—Mom on the couch, me in a chair across from her. She was in her nightgown, me in mine. Looking at us, you’d have thought it was any other Saturday morning. I knew we occupied a small piece in time in a critical and fragile space. We had convinced Dad that he did not have to hover and that he should take advantage of my weekend visit to run errands, or, perhaps, take a nap. He’d seemed afraid to leave us.
Although she was in her nightgown and bathrobe, Mom wore her usual lipstick and earrings. I freshened our mugs of coffee: hers black with an ice cube, mine with milk. She sat on the edge of the sofa. I studied her. Her color was still good, though she looked tired and had lost some weight. I noticed the toes of her right foot curled slightly around the top of the left. A sign she was uneasy. Over time, I’d become used to looking at my mother’s feet for signs of how she felt, as though her emotions fell to her feet where they might be solidly planted, unsteady, or moving nervously despite how composed the rest of her body appeared to be.
This was the first time she and I had talked since her diagnosis.
She learned forward on the sofa, and said, “I don’t think I’ll make it through this, Nancie.”
I didn’t hear what she said as a statement. I heard a question. I know now that she was telling me. She was not going to make it. I did not offer a reassuring, “Don’t be silly. Of course, you will! They’ve made such strides in fighting cancer. You beat this before.”
I knew she was going to die, despite the doctor’s “We can handle this.” What, exactly, could they handle? It didn’t matter how positive my father tried to be. It didn’t matter how strategic his battle plan, how precise the logistics he laid out, how hard he fought.
I was not going to lie to her. Not now. But if she didn’t know or was not ready to know, I was not going to be the one to tell her. Instead, I leaned toward her and asked softly, “Mom, are you afraid?�
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I remember noticing that my voice didn’t sound as adult-like as I would have wanted. It sounded like a curious question that begged an honest answer. The kinds of questions I asked when I was a child and wanted her reassurance about something.
She stared at me as though surprised by my response. Maybe I imagined that. Maybe she was just being thoughtful. She leaned back on the sofa and stared out through the door that led to the patio outside the dark room into the sunny fall day. My eyes followed hers. It was clear and crisp outside. Branches filled with autumn colored leaves moved gently. Fall. How appropriate a time….
“Of dying? No.” Then with certainty she said, “No, I’m not afraid of dying. I loved and married your father. We had wonderful children.”
I wanted to cry. I wanted to move to her side and hold her. Really, I wanted to have her hold me so we could both cry and rock together for comfort. But I didn’t know how to do that or ask for that. We were not a family practiced in public displays of affection or any real outward expressions of emotion except through the filter of humor. Random eruptions of anger were viewed as a total lack of control. A cardinal sin.
“We lived all over the world,” she said. Then she smiled at me. “Just two kids from Brooklyn.” Her eyes wandered around the room—German steins on the mantel, cuckoo clocks on the walls, cloisonné and porcelain knick-knacks from Taiwan and Japan on the bookshelves, temple rubbings from Thailand, footrests made from camel saddles from someplace with camels, which held feet when not filled with magazines, my father’s military memorabilia. She turned to me again. She seemed to relax. “I’ve had a good life. I’m satisfied.”
We quietly sipped our coffee. How unusual for me not to try to fill the uncomfortable silence. I waited.
“I am afraid of the pain though.”
I felt myself slip into a role more comfortable than the grieving daughter I was becoming. I morphed into attentive listener, observer of body language and facial expressions, sleuth of sub-text, mirror to what she said. I was brave. I’ve always known that crippling fear can coexist with courage. It’s just easier to display courage, even small amounts, in the face of fear and overwhelming sadness.
We talked about her fear of pain and the palliative measures available now, while my mind organized all the people and resources I could consult while displacing any of my own emotional pain. Suddenly, she blurted out, “My family is gone. My close friends who aren’t dead live too far away. Who will give my eulogy?”
This time I was surprised. My mother was not afraid of death, but of being forgotten. This I could relate to, though I wondered how she thought anyone would not remember her.
“I will,” I said, almost immediately. I almost regretted volunteering so quickly, not because I didn’t want to write and deliver her eulogy, but I wondered if this was a rhetorical question. I wondered if that was what she really wanted. I wondered if I would have been the person she would have chosen if I had not volunteered. I wondered if I had put her in a difficult position in case there was someone that she would prefer to have eulogize her. And I wondered if I could even manage to deliver her eulogy if I wrote it.
“You will?” she asked. She seemed both surprised and happy.
I nodded.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course.” And I was certain. I could write her eulogy. In that moment, I knew I was meant to do this. I began to think about it immediately: what I’d say, poetic references, funny stories.
Six months later, during my mother’s memorial service, attended only by her husband, her three children, my sister-in-law, and my three daughters, my brother delivered her eulogy.
CHAPTER 19
Situation Normal
I DID NOT SPEND MUCH TIME with my mother during the six months between her diagnosis and death. There were reasons for that. Not good reasons, just ones that I rationalized as acceptable, given my way of filtering the world and family dynamics, especially those between my mother and father at the time. It seemed perfectly normal that I wasn’t visiting frequently or staying longer than two or three days when I did.
I told myself that we reacted to death differently than others. My father was a military man. We were a military family. From the time I was ten or eleven until I was twenty-two—the Vietnam years—someone’s death had been a regular occurrence. At the height of it, when I was in high school, we’d see the green sedans carrying the bearers of the death notification traveling through our neighborhood. Our eyes would follow the car and conversations would stop momentarily as each of us thought about who we knew on that street. There was no morbid curiosity, no being drawn to the accident. We walked on. We’d know soon enough. And we were relieved when it wasn’t our street or our house in front of which the sedan parked.
I lost friends from elementary and high school as well as college. My friends lost family members. I had witnessed death up close several times while directed through gory automobile accident scenes by police officers. I’d stood in the same rooms near the beds of dying patients and their family members while working as a crisis counselor and supporting my own client in the next bed in a small rural hospital with a three-bed emergency room. Sometimes the dying and their families were people I knew.
I listened as doctors and nurses in scrubs and masks rattled off numbers and followed procedures, then moved around each other in well-choreographed and practiced dances. Familiar to me were military funerals, the community coming together in ceremony to mourn and bury its own. Standing at attention. Flags. Salutes. Control.
My parents were not a short drive away. I worked at an extremely stressful job, often sixty hours a week, and there were still two children at home, one young enough to need more supervision and support than the other. Someone had to grocery shop, cook, and make sure she got to school and activities, which included almost weekly away competitions. And it was her senior year of high school. She took the required SATs and ACTs. We made college visits.
I continued to call my father to remind him that I could come out on weekends, take time off work, or come anytime they needed. I offered to make meals, give him a break, do any housework that needed doing. Or I could sit with Mom so he could nap or run errands.
“That’s not necessary,” he’d say. “We have a routine and your mother needs to rest. You have your children to take care of and your own responsibilities. The more normal things are the better. I’ll call you if we need you.”
I heard, “You’ll just get in the way. You might upset your mother. We’ll be fine.”
I knew Dad did not think he needed me. But I wondered if my mother wondered why I didn’t come. And though I knew I needed to see Mom, at some level, I was relieved my father waved me off. My mother knew I was exhausted. I could barely manage to keep my head above water in the rough sea that was my life as one wave after another knocked me down. It was getting harder and harder to get back up. I did not know how I could lose one or both of my parents, and I was worried about Dad’s health too.
It had only been a year since a hospital social worker had said that my parents could no longer care for my paternal grandfather alone. Now at the age of 102, he lived in a nursing facility not too far away from their house, and I had hoped that they would reclaim their independence and freedom to live their retired life. Now this. I wanted to wail that it was unfair. But I didn’t. Mom and Dad were not wailing or crying. How could I?
Adept at avoidance, I categorized my decision not to pack up the car and show up on their doorstep as respect for the two of them. They would let me know if they needed me. I did not consider what I needed; if I had, I would have admitted that I needed to be there.
Finally, I managed to get my mother on the phone, and asked if it would be okay if I drove out to visit that weekend. She said, “Of course! I’d love to see you.”
Dad left me alone with Mom while he ran out for something at the store. It was impossible not to notice that she had lost a significant amount of weight. She
asked if I minded helping her bathe.
“Of course not!” I said. “Let’s do this.”
“I can shower by myself,” she told me, “but I just need help getting in and out of the tub.”
She took off her robe, then turned to look at me, holding her bathrobe with two hands up to her neck. She paused before saying, “I am so embarrassed to have to ask you to do this.”
“Mom,” I responded, “If I were ill, would you do this for me?”
“Yes, of course I would,” she told me, without hesitation. This seemed to make her feel better. Then she took off her nightgown and hung it on top of her robe on back of the bathroom door.
My mother had always been comfortable with her body, far more than I had ever been with my own. I’d always envied her for this. She had never been shy about taking off her clothes while dressing in front of me but seemed so now.
“Now don’t be shocked,” she said.
It was all that I could do not to gasp. I noticed the weight loss when I arrived, but I was not prepared to see skin and bones when she took off her nightgown. She looked like a malnourished twelve-year-old girl with no promise of a future.
I helped her into the tub and sat nearby while she washed herself and shampooed her hair. She approached showering—scrubbing her head and body—with so much effort that she reminded me of someone who’d just come out of the desert and jumped into a lake for the first time in a month. We didn’t speak; I just watched, while giving her as much privacy as I could as I tried to make sure she did not lose her balance. It broke my heart.
“I don’t like to ask your father to do this, you know.”
“Why not, Mom?” I was surprised.
“I know he is willing, but you know your Dad. He’s always in such a hurry. I don’t want to feel rushed and I don’t want him to lose patience with me.”
I knew that this should be the farthest thing from my mother’s thoughts. It just was not true. I watched my father care for my mother. After living with the news of the diagnosis for a few days, my mother had asked him, “You won’t leave me alone, will you?” and he’d told her not to worry, of course he wouldn’t. He gave up golf and anything else that wasn’t related to her care. And though able to afford twenty-four-hour, in-home support for her given his wise choice of enrolling in extended-care insurance years before, he refused in the first few months to bring anyone in to help, choosing to do everything himself.
Tea With Dad Page 13