With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir

by Christine Quinn

  But for all these years, the activity that sustained me was horseback riding. If you have ever looked into the eyes of a horse, you know what I mean. Sadness and kindness flow from them. And if you take care of your horse almost every day, you form a relationship that is filled with gratitude and affection. And a horse is reliable. You don’t find them happy one day and miserable the next. An apple, a carrot, a sugar cube, and all is well. I found in the stables not only solace but the need for commitment and a kind of control that I couldn’t find elsewhere.

  If I’d had any idea that the summer of 1982 was going to be my mother’s last, I’d have chosen another time to break my back. But that’s the thing about trouble. You don’t see it coming, and then you just have to make the best of it.

  In all my years of horseback riding and competing, I’d never had a serious accident. But one Sunday, as I got a leg up onto my horse, he reared up, and I fell off onto a rock. In seconds my father and our cousin, Father Gene, who was visiting from Ireland, were standing over me while an EMT was checking my vital signs and telling my dad he was calling an ambulance.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my dad was in a panic. He had reason to be. He said, “You can’t take her to Stony Brook Hospital. I have to take my wife to Sloan-Kettering in the morning, and my mother-in-law’s checking into Glen Cove Hospital. I can’t have three of them in different hospitals.” So the EMT said, “Either you take her to Stony Brook, or I have you arrested for endangering the life of a minor.”

  By this point in my life, I had no problem challenging authority and taking charge. I’d seen my mother question doctors endlessly, grill them about where they went to school, and challenge their recommendations for treatment. So when the EMT said we had no choice, I decided we did have a choice. But looking back and considering the very real possibility that I was seriously hurt, I see that the EMT was right. From the perspective of a sixteen-year-old who had to get home to help take care of her mother and grandmother, there was only one option. I couldn’t be in the hospital with everything else that was going on and definitely not in a hospital that was an hour and a half from home. I looked up at the EMT, who was straddling me, and yelled, “Get off me or I’m gonna knee you in the balls!” I think he was so shocked by what came out of my mouth that he did exactly what I told him to do. (Given how angry I was, I can easily imagine that what I said was laced with profanities.)

  Somehow, with a little help from my father and my cousin, I got up off the ground, and after a few tentative steps I felt mostly okay. We walked the horse a bit to make sure he hadn’t hurt himself, put him in the trailer, and drove back to Glen Cove. My father went in to tell my mother that I’d been in an accident. I heard her scream as I slowly climbed the stairs and tried to get into bed. I got one leg up onto the bed, but that was as far as I got because it hurt too much to lift the other one. I called for my father and asked him to pick up my other leg and put it in the bed, which he did. It hurt like hell, and I screamed. The EMT had been right. I needed to go to the hospital.

  After examining me and taking X-rays, they checked me in. It turned out I’d fractured three of my vertebrae. When you crack vertebrae, they put you in bed for a few days and wait to see if you begin to heal. It helps to be young, and in a couple of days I was sent home and told to get a lot of rest, and not to do any lifting, riding, or anything strenuous. After I got home, my summer didn’t include the recuperating that had been suggested. It involved looking after my mother and grandmother.

  This may not have been the best recuperation plan, but it’s what had to be done, and I was home anyway. And whether I was physically ready or not, it’s what I wanted to do. In the morning, after my father left for work with my aunt—he drove her to the train station so she could go to her job at Gimbels—I’d make sure my grandmother was awake and I’d get her going. Then I’d head downstairs to the family room, where we had a hospital bed set up for my mother, to make sure she was awake. I’d give her the morning pills.

  Once my grandmother was dressed, I’d put her in a chair in the driveway to wait for the bus to take her to the Glen Cove Senior Center, where she spent the day. She really enjoyed her time at the center—it gave her a place to go and something to do—and I think it contributed in no small part to her longevity. Next I’d get my mother out of bed and make her breakfast. After breakfast I’d get her set up in the backyard, where she liked to sit. Then I did the laundry, cleaned the house, made lunch, and gave my mother her afternoon pills.

  After lunch my grandmother came home from the senior center, and I’d take care of her for a while. Then it was time to make dinner for both my grandmother and my mother and give my mother her later-in-the-day pills. And once I was finished with my grandmother and my mother, I’d get dinner ready for my father and my aunt. In the evenings they would generally take over my mother’s and grandmother’s care, and sometimes I’d go to a friend’s house for the night. Or I’d head upstairs and talk on the phone with my friends or watch TV.

  For most of the years after my mother’s first surgery, which she’d had at our local hospital, she was treated in Manhattan at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. But over that last summer, she got too sick to continue going in and out of the city, and her treatment was moved to North Shore Hospital on Long Island, a terrific hospital. They had this amazing service, where a van with doctors and nurses and all the necessary equipment would come to the house to give my mother chemo or whatever treatment she needed right at home. It made things a lot easier for her and for me and my dad.

  The first time the North Shore van arrived, a social worker came along to do a formal intake. My father and I sat next to each other on the sofa in the living room, and the social worker sat diagonally across from us. He asked a long list of questions including, “Is the patient depressed?” We said she was. (She was dying—of course she was depressed!) And then he asked, “Is the patient suicidal?” My father said no, which was true. My mother wanted desperately to live at that point.

  At the end of the intake interview, the social worker offered family and individual counseling. We both said no almost instantaneously. I wasn’t the kind of person to talk about my feelings easily and never have been, and back then I didn’t see any need.

  Ellen was extremely helpful during all this. We talked all the time about what was going on and what needed to be done. She came home often to do anything and everything. I never really mentioned being upset. I don’t think I even had the language or the sense of what I would express. Besides, I was focused on the tasks at hand. That was easier than thinking about the fact that my mother was going to die, and it gave me a sense of purpose and control. Counseling would never have worked for my father. He would never talk about his feelings with Ellen or me—let alone a stranger. I followed his lead for my own reasons.

  When the summer was over, I went back to school, and we had to get nurses during the day. That was something of a relief to me, but by this stage of my mother’s illness her hearing was even worse, and she decided I was the only person whose lips she could read. So I was the one who could be her go-between. I remember her saying, “Only Christine can tell me. I can only hear Christine.” It’s true that she could read my lips more easily than anyone else’s. Sometimes people tell me that when I talk, I move my jaw and mouth in an exaggerated way. I think it came from those years of talking with my mother so she could read my lips and understand what I was saying.

  Those last months of being my mother’s go-between were a nightmare. When there was a medical decision for her to make or unfortunate news to be delivered, I more often than not had to be the one to talk with her. She was back and forth between home and the hospital and basically bedridden at this point because the cancer had spread to her bones and so her hips were mostly hollow. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to get up, and I was the one who had to explain that her bones were too weak to support her and that if she put any weight on her hips, they’d crumble.
There was nothing but bad news, so I had to tell my mother, in slow increments, information that ultimately made her realize that she was dying. By that stage, the doctors had nothing else they could do and my mother was waiting for a miracle.

  All she had left was prayer. She had an altar set up on her bedroom dresser, with lots of relics and religious statues. All the statues represented women, and the relics came from women. Elizabeth Ann Seton was her favorite saint. It wasn’t lost on me that every entity my mother prayed to was a woman. She believed in women to bring her miraculous intervention. She would say the rosary. And when she couldn’t take the time to say a whole rosary, she’d say prayers. I found her faith hard to accept. As I witnessed her painful decline, I didn’t think we would get a miracle.

  My mother had survived for so long that when the end came, in late December, we were caught off guard. She hadn’t been doing well, but she hadn’t been doing well for a long time, so we convinced ourselves she had at least a few more months. Now of course I know, but I couldn’t have then, that when I left for the stable for two hours on the afternoon of December 21, she had only hours to live.

  When I got home she was barely conscious. She couldn’t talk. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see us. And her breathing was labored. The nurse who was there recommended we get her to the hospital, and my father and I agreed. We debated calling 911 or calling a private ambulance: a call to 911 would mean she’d get taken to the local hospital, which we knew she didn’t like. So we called for a private ambulance to take her to North Shore.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the ambulance to get there when I heard through the closed louvered doors to the playroom, “Oh no!” I don’t know who said it—my father, Aunt Julia, or the nurse—but I ran up to my room crying. I came out a few minutes later to go to the bathroom and saw my father at the bottom of the stairs looking up at me. I guess he’d been on his way up to tell me. I noticed he was wearing a red plaid shirt and an Irish sweater, which was odd for two reasons. First, my mother had bought matching red plaid shirts for herself and my father, and he was wearing the shirt, which he never wore. Second, it wasn’t at all cold in the house, so I didn’t know why he was wearing a sweater.

  My father had tears coming down his face, and I asked him a question that really didn’t need an answer. I said, “Is Mommy dead?” And he said, “Yes.” I didn’t wait for him to come up the stairs—I just headed to the bathroom. When I got back to my room, I called my sister, who wasn’t home, and I left a message with her fiancé that she had to come home right away. Then I called a high school friend and made plans to spend the night at her house. I was ready to leave by the time she came to get me, and as we left the house, the ambulance was just arriving.

  As devastated as I was that my mother had died, I wasn’t sorry that she died before the ambulance arrived. At that stage of her illness, the hospital could have done nothing other than extend her life for a few hours or days, which would have been torture for her.

  The funeral was held on Christmas Eve at McLaughlin Kramer and St. Patrick’s in Glen Cove, the same place where we later had my grandmother’s and my aunt’s funerals. Not long before she died, my mother had given Ellen an envelope with all manner of instructions. She’d already made her own funeral arrangements, picked out her coffin, and prepared her funeral card. In the instructions, she told Ellen what clothes she wanted to wear and asked that the coffin be closed. She cared very much about how she looked, and the ten years she’d spent fighting cancer had taken their toll. It turns out, however, that Julia wanted an open casket. As my sister, Ellen, recently observed, “We had a distraught live lady who wanted it open. And a demanding dead lady who wanted it closed.” Julia won that argument. We had an open casket.

  The funeral card my mother designed was not your typical mass card. It was printed on cream-colored wedding-invitation card stock. A gold Celtic cross adorned the front on top. In the middle was a quote from Saint Paul, with his name underneath. When you opened the card, it said on the inside, “Gratefully, Mary Callaghan Quinn, December 21st, 1982.” It was printed in such a way that Saint Paul’s name on the outside of the card lined up perfectly with the date of my mother’s death on the inside, so when the card was closed, Saint Paul’s name sat directly over the date.

  I stayed fairly well composed during the wake’s three sittings, but I lost it at the funeral. Even before it started, I remember my father and sister walking up to the front of the room to pray at my mother’s casket. I was standing in the doorway in the back and couldn’t move. I watched from behind as Ellen turned to my father, crying, “Oh, Daddy.” I must have joined them at some point, because I remember the coffin. I’d already said no to the funeral director when he’d asked me if I’d bring the wine and the host up to the priest during the mass. I’d pointed to my first cousins and said, “They’ll do it!” I just couldn’t.

  It was a typical funeral mass, which is similar to a regular mass: two readings, a gospel, and a sermon. There were two priests doing the mass. One came from my family’s church, St. Patrick’s, and one came from St. Rocco’s, a church that my mother liked and attended on occasion. The priests both gave eulogies as well. No one else spoke, which was typical in those days for Catholic funerals.

  I had to be taken out of the funeral at one point, because I was so upset. My mother’s friend Mrs. Gorman (the mother of the family I was always sent to visit) walked me around outside. One of my friends said later that since I’d held up so well at the wake, she was surprised when I fell to pieces at the funeral. I begged my father and Ellen to let me skip the cemetery. It was such a long drive, and I just wanted to go home and go to bed. But I had no choice. When we got there, we watched as the plain wooden box was lowered into the ground. The coffin was inside the box to protect it from the dirt.

  The priests recited some prayers, we were each given a rose to throw on top of the coffin, and then it was over. Everything went off as my mother had planned, except for the open casket and the fact that we ran out of funeral cards. She hadn’t counted on the huge number of people who would attend. We also didn’t have a gathering at our house or at a restaurant after the funeral, which is typically done, because the funeral was held on Christmas Eve; people had other places to go and things to do.

  After the burial, I couldn’t wait to get home, but Ellen had other ideas. She wanted to finish the Christmas shopping and insisted that we go home, change, and drive to the Miracle Mile shopping area in Manhasset, which isn’t far from where we lived. What I didn’t know at the time was that among the notes our mother left for Ellen were instructions regarding Christmas gifts. The note listed the gifts she’d already bought and the ones she wanted Ellen to buy, and she explained where they were supposed to go, including which ones were for me. In the instructions she wrote, “This gift is for Christine,” and each time she wrote my name, she underlined it three times. Ellen thinks she did that because she wanted to be sure that I received the gifts she’d bought for me.

  I can’t remember what I got for Christmas that year, but I know what I got from my mother. She left me with a sense of worth and possibility. She left me with a sense that I have a responsibility to continue her mission, to improve people’s lives, and to make sure that nobody is left behind. The urgency she conveyed—because she knew her time was short—gets me up and out every morning. My mother taught me to use every minute, because we never know when our time is up.

  CHAPTER 4

  High School Follies

  Our house was a much quieter—and sadder—place at the start of 1983. My mother was gone. My grandmother, too. She had moved into a nursing home before my mother died. Her age and related conditions made it too difficult for us to take care of her. So now it was just Julia, my father, and me living at home. Without any discussion, we quickly fell into our own routines and very much went our separate ways. For me that meant focusing on school and school-related activities, spending time at the stable, and goi
ng out with my friends on the weekends.

  That sounds sad, and it was, but there were a lot of bright spots for me in those years. I loved high school, Old Westbury School of the Holy Child. It was a place of salvation and great comfort for me in many ways. It hadn’t been my first choice—I’d wanted to go to a coed public high school—but that wasn’t in the cards. My mother and father were both extremely religious, so there was never any question that Ellen and I would go to Catholic school. At my high school, being Catholic was a given, but it was background noise to me. You were taught the way things were, and you weren’t expected to ask questions.

  What made Holy Child so special was the fact that it was a small school: there were only twenty-four students in my entire class, and they were all girls. A small school was a great place for me, especially after my mother died, because everyone was so supportive.

  Because there were so few of us, we got a lot of individual attention, and no one fell through the cracks. Everyone participated in every aspect of school life, including the sports teams, because you needed everybody to play. So there wasn’t the kind of hierarchy you might have found at a larger school. We did have cool kids, smart kids, and athletic kids, but our classes were so small that nobody cared.

  My experience with a single-sex high school was also positive. When you take boys out of the equation, girls wind up focusing on their potential and their skills. I think if every girl went to a girls’ school, regardless of ability to pay, it would be an extremely empowering experience. It certainly was for me.