by Nina Riggs
Anniversaries make me nervous—the way you are supposed to be able to summon your feelings about someone or something because they match up with a day of the year. Sometimes being in the exact place helps, because it summons the intangibles of smells and the way the light looks.
Following that logic, we should all be gathered tight in her stale bedroom—but being here on the island evokes plenty. Not only her death—do her ashes still somehow surround us in the grasses?—but her life. We are all slightly sunburned from a day at the beach, we’ve been taking turns in the outdoor shower, we are sipping wine from mismatched cups, the pack of kids—six boys—are running wild by the boulders, concocting a play they want to put on for the grown-ups tonight: Revoloosh On!, a sort of improvised Hamilton off-shoot featuring mostly dramatic battle scenes. We have promised to trek down to their roughshod amphitheater out by the compost pile to be their audience as soon as we’ve made it through the first round of drinks.
“Have you been able to feel her at all?” I ask Charlie.
“I guess if feeling the absence of her is feeling her, I feel her,” he says. “I keep having the sense that we’re waiting for one more person to sit down to dinner, to enter the room. Like she’s in the bathroom and she’ll be back in a sec.”
“Yeah, I’m having that exact feeling a lot, too,” I say. “And the feeling that I’m getting away with something that she is about to call me out on.”
Family vacations were often the time where she most liked to keep it real. You’d be relaxing in the hot tub together and all of a sudden she’d start saying, “You know what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about?” and in an instant you are whirling through a universe where is it obvious to everyone but you that you have been failing at life in some deeply subtle but disturbing way, where wearing socks with holes in them is fundamentally disrespectful, where you have irrevocably spoiled your children by allowing them to negotiate for dessert after they have clearly violated dinnertime rules.
I can tell my dad has been feeling it, too: Should we go off on a picnic, even though we’re getting a late start? Can we spend the whole day reading by the window? Did anyone sweep the kitchen today? No one is here to tell us what we should be doing. I keep decluttering the coffee table in the living room from a place of fear.
“I can give you a thorough talking-to, if it would make you feel better,” Charlie jokes.
Usually my parents slept in my dad’s parents’ old bedroom, but this year he chooses to sleep in the bedroom that was his grandmother’s. So John and I take my grandparents’ quarters—a big west-facing room with a private bathroom, a view of the bay, a nice draft when the predominant wind blows, and a screen door leading out onto the porch.
I sit on the edge of the bed and examine through the faded mirror on the dresser the mass of curls on my head, livelier than usual in the salt air. My face is tan; I’m wearing a tank top. I don’t look sick.
“I’m definitely going to die in the winter,” my mom told me once, a few years ago. “Summer is so kind. Winter always seems like it has it in for me.”
Now I can feel her sitting right here on the bed with a book, late in the afternoon like this when the light shifts and the breeze picks up, my dad headed down the path for some predinner fishing just offshore in the boat. She is everything but absent. As a little girl—and even a teenager—I loved to come and find her here, to have her to myself, even though I knew it risked being told about all my latest shortcomings. Just to sit with her and enjoy the quietness around her—the way so many children seem to love to do with their mothers without understanding how we disturb that quietness with our very presence. Just now, I hear Benny galumphing down the hall toward me: “Mom! Where are you? I need to nuzzle you!”
* * *
The visceral anniversary of her death doesn’t come until after summer has officially passed, and of course it comes as a surprise. The end of September. We are home from the Cape. The kids have returned to school. Charlie and Amelia have just arrived in town. They’ve decided to escape the Western Mass winter and come live down here for a little while at my dad’s house while Charlie works on finishing his dissertation.
They have a new dog—Luna—a young, bouncy pit mix that likes to get in the middle of everything. She hardly ever stops moving, and she’s still recovering from a run-in over the summer in the woods with a skunk. Charlie and Amelia can barely control her.
The second night after they move into town, Luna and my Dad’s geriatric fat beagle Clyde get into a nasty fight over some food, and Luna rips Clyde’s face up pretty badly: chunks of flesh torn from his snout. Clyde, already well on his way to complete dementia, becomes completely incontinent. The house is a minefield of puddles and piles of shit, and Clyde is too fragile to undergo what it would take to patch his face. The next morning, my dad decides to put him down. The vet offers to come out to the house.
My dad calls me: “We’re doing it in about ten minutes.”
“Okay,” I say, jumping in the car, texting John a jumble of autocorrect nonsense at the stop sign. “Luna a Soul Train Clyde; running to my dad’s; herbed late; patting him down; FUCK. None of that. We have to put Clyde down. Long story. XO.”
Already the first signs of déjà vu are setting in.
When I get to the house, I can tell Charlie is kind of a mess, and Amelia seems freaked: They’ve had Luna shut upstairs all morning, and Clyde is wandering around listlessly in the garden.
“This is so awful,” says Amelia, sitting at the patio table with her knees wrapped up under her chin.
Charlie wipes his nose.
“It’s kind of fishy,” I try to joke. “Every time you guys come to town, someone dies or almost dies.” We all look at each other, but no one is moved to laugh. My dad and the vet show up.
The way the vet hugs and greets me, I can tell right away she thinks I’m my mother. We look alike if you don’t know us very well, and I’m sure my cane isn’t giving me a youthful air.
“Oh, poor Clyde!” she gushes. “I’m so sorry today is the day! He has lived such a great long life with you all.”
“Thank you for being here,” I say. My dad is being characteristically quiet. We’re all standing around looking guiltily at our feet. I keep kneeling down and petting Clyde compulsively—more than I normally would—because I can tell my dad is totally checked out and I feel like someone should.
“Are we going to do it out here on the patio? It’s such a nice day!” says the vet, “Do you want to bring his doggy bed out here? He might like that.”
“That’s a really great idea,” I say, and my dad runs inside to grab the urine-steeped cushion, the deathbed.
We don’t plan it this way, but at precisely noon—the bells on the campus church tolling—the vet injects Clyde, who lies on his bed as we awkwardly circle around him, with a very hefty dose of pentobarbital into his veins. After a minute or so passes, she checks his pulse, decides to give him another shot, and then he is gone.
The vet, of course, does not know that the color of the scrubs shirt she wears and her haircut and her general vibe remind us all overwhelmingly of Patty, my mom’s hospice nurse. She doesn’t know how we gathered here out on the patio the morning after my mom died—these very chairs—and felt the first day without her creep into being, how the sun felt so similarly crushing and yet warming. She doesn’t know of our loss at all. In fact: She thinks my mom is me.
“You’ll find grief is very strange,” she says as Clyde’s paws and jowls stop twitching. She is unmarried, has just lost her fifteen-year-old dachshund this year. “You think you have a handle on it, and then you don’t at all.”
When she hugs me goodbye, she squeezes my arm. “I’m glad to see you’re doing well. I heard you were very sick. God is good.”
After she leaves, Amelia and I sit on the patio. My dad and Charlie dig a big hole in the yard on the other side of the garage by the fence where Clyde loved to lie in the forsythia. We watch them heave Clyde’s bo
dy from the dog bed into the earth, and then fill the hole back up.
“Won’t Luna want to dig him up?” I say to Amelia.
“Probably,” says Amelia darkly.
But my dad is on it—covering the wound of dirt with some junk from the garage: some pieces of plywood and a ladder.
“That should do it,” he says, never exactly one for aesthetics.
“Rest in peace, old dog,” I say, hugging my dad.
I have never been able to say that phrase about my mom. It feels morbid and clichéd. It’s etched on a Styrofoam gravestone that the boys love to stake into the front yard every Halloween. But of course, it’s what I wish most for her, for myself: Rest in peace, Mom.
“Rest in peace,” my dad says, climbing into his beat-up van to head back to work.
21. Item 18-B
John and I go talk to a financial planner because that seems like something grown-ups do. John is forty now. I’m supposed to turn forty in the spring.
The planner is nice—approximately our age, friendly, kids, knows lots of the same people we know. Seems a good match. John has told him about my diagnosis ahead of time, over the phone.
“Real sorry to hear about your situation,” he says when we come into his office, looking me in the eye, shaking my hand heartily. “Can’t imagine doing what you do every day.”
A snarky part of me thinks, Well, likewise—but I’m immediately grateful for this kind man and his clarity and his handshake and his ability to do long multiplication in his head and his bright office full of stacks of spreadsheets carefully plotting out the future. He has a huge view that looks northwest, out toward the greenest part of Greensboro.
“So tell me what your priorities are,” he says to us when we get settled. “What means the most to you? What do you want your life to look like?”
This is obviously a loaded question, but I like thinking about it. Financial planning, it turns out, is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor.
John and I look kind of sheepishly back and forth at each other, and then I say, “I guess I’d like to travel for as long as I can—make some memories with the kids.”
“Yup,” John agrees. “And I’d also really like to pee further away from the children. Like nowhere near them.” He is referring to our mutual wish for a master bathroom someday.
“Oh yeah—and for them to go to college!” I add.
“Gotcha gotcha,” says the planner, smiling. “All sounds good, doable.” We’ve brought him all the important papers of our life—bank statements, tax returns, pension reports, etc.—which at home we still keep all stuffed in one giant file marked Important Papers in my twenty-three-year-old handwriting—and which he now has duplicated in a neat stack in front of him.
“So what happens next is we’ll take a look at all this, run some numbers on our end, and then let you know what we think a good plan is next time we meet.”
I have to miss the next meeting because of a doctor’s appointment, but John hands me the impressive twenty-seven-page report when I get home: chart after chart, scenario after scenario.
“Item 18-B is kind of a doozy,” he says.
Item 18-B is a breakdown of both of our yearly income and expenses by age. John’s column goes up through age ninety-three. Mine stops at age forty-four.
“Yikes,” I say. “He doesn’t have much faith in me, does he?” My first thought is wondering if he somehow spoke with Dr. Cavanaugh and now knows something I don’t.
22. Faith
A few weeks ago, Carla—the tech who escorts me back for CT scans—taped a small square of paper onto my cane where it bends into the handle. It says FAITH, all caps.
“Believe me,” Carla said when she stuck it on there. “You gotta have it, and you’re gonna need it.”
I wasn’t sure what to think. Faith is a word I have struggled with—a cipher I can’t solve or release. I developed a habit of rubbing my left index finger over the taped tab. Sometimes out of embarrassment, self-consciousness: for wearing this word so ostentatiously displayed—as if it had anything to do with me. Sometimes more meditatively: a reminder to work harder to figure out what it’s all about, a reminder to feel more at ease with the unknown, the poorly understood.
For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown—and being okay with that. And if I can achieve that—BREATHE. STOP BREATHING. BREATHE—even for a quick moment, that is truly something.
Given the name tag, now the kids call my cane Faith. It suits her: her floral print, her sturdy rubber nub. “Don’t forget Faith!” Freddy says with a grin. “Did you lose Faith again?” I’m beginning to think Carla was playing a bit of a prank. Some days I don’t need Faith, my crutch, at all—and others I depend on her heavily. I live on fentanyl, oxycodone, ibuprofen—but Faith is what keeps me moving forward.
* * *
It’s hard to say exactly how the pain shapes my days; it is as variable as the weather, as tomatoes, as a child. Sometimes it finds me with the first turn in bed; sometimes only after too long at a party; sometimes it is all that I am—my truest self—and other times I only recognize it on the faces and stoops of others enough to say its name. Pain—you are a cipher as well.
I go to lunch with friends, propping Faith on the back of the chair where she dangles and rests. My friends ask a new kind of question: How is today? I hope the pain is manageable today.
Montaigne talks about how the Egyptians at their feasts liked to present their guests with an image of death—a skeleton, a skull maybe—and a subtle entertainer who yelled out: “Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead!”
Faith is my skeleton at the feast, I think sometimes. I see the young mother’s double take, the kids who stare, the waiter’s nervous glance, my friends who jump to adjust my chair. Maybe the skeleton at the feast is me.
23. The Reaper
For Halloween, Freddy is a perfect Slash from Guns N’ Roses—top hat, leather jacket, black wig of curls, electric guitar, rock-star attitude. Benny is a last-minute Grim Reaper.
“What happened to being a nuzzly little fox?” I say to him when he appears downstairs in a hooded black cloak from Freddy’s Harry Potter getup last year and a convincing scythe made of duct-taped sticks. “I loved your little orange tail and your little orange ears!”
“Sorry,” he says very seriously. “I just wasn’t in the mood for my fox anymore. I promise I’ll be a fox next year. This year it turned out I just really wanted to be a reaper.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “I know how it goes. One minute you are a happy little woodland critter, and the next you’re death incarnate.”
“Yup, Mom,” says Benny, swinging his scythe over his shoulder as he admires himself in the dining room mirror. “That’s precisely how it goes.”
24. Heavy Debris
I get into a clinical trial just after Thanksgiving. Dr. Cavanaugh finds that my original tumor tests positive—at least marginally—for the hormone androgen, meaning that if we use a medication that blocks androgen in the body, there is a chance it might slow down the growth of my tumors. She is running a trial that is studying this theory.
Qualifying for a clinical trial produces some ecstatic feelings not unlike what I imagine qualifying for an Olympic trial feels like: You did it! Congratulations! All your fortitude has paid off! Gold medal in lab draws. Gold medal in initials at the bottom of the page. Gold medal in patience. It’s a very odd balance: You’re sick enough to get in, not sick enough to be disqualified, and you possess some special trait worth studying.
“Let’s call in the trial protocol team and get you consented right away,” Dr. Cavanaugh says, clearly energized by being back on a worn path, reentering a known world. Now we’re cooking with gas. Now we got us a plan, Stan. It takes a while for it to settle in that the worn path in this instance is the path of scientific experimentation—hypotheses, data collection, waiting for the unknown.
The protocol team who runs
the study takes me through dozens of pages: likely side effects, possible side effects, rare and serious side effects. There are privacy concerns, research methods. There is: You must understand that we don’t totally understand.
Possible: fatigue, pain, tremors, confusion, nausea, sweating, birth defects.
There are land mines everywhere:
“We need you to have a second form of birth control in use,” says the protocol nurse. I snort, thinking of our chaste evenings lately: me drooling on John’s shoulder while we watch a show on Netflix about British detectives or superheroes or elite special forces units and he tries not to jostle me and prompt the need for another pain pill. I think we’re all set.
“IUD? Vasectomy?” she asks.
Everyone looks over at John in the corner.
“It’s fine with me!” he exclaims, putting up his hands in the air. “I’ve been ready for years!”
“No,” I say firmly. “I’ll get an IUD as soon as possible. I’m sure I can get in with my gynecologist this week.”
The protocol nurse marks it down. “Okay—whatever you all decide, just let us know.”
“It will be an IUD,” I repeat.
“What’s your deal?” John says to me when the team empties the exam room. “Why are you so emphatic about the IUD?”
“You’re not getting a vasectomy. It doesn’t feel right,” I say, stuffing the ream of paperwork into my bag, not looking at him. “You have no idea what you might want—after.”
“Jesus, Nina,” says John. He hands me my cane. “I do know that the last thing I’ll want is more kids. I hardly even wanted kids with you!”
“You never know what your new wife might want.”
“Screw that casserole bitch,” says John.
IUD. IED. I don’t know a thing about land mines, except that once you step on one you can’t unstep without it blowing up. Or without some special forces soldier coming in and miraculously shifting the weight seamlessly from your foot to something else—like to another person or some heavy nearby debris.