Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  I gripped my sister’s hand and pulled her close to me.

  The light changed, and she clung to my arm again as we crossed wordlessly to the little apartment, where she fought for another night of life, and I did everything I could to help her. Because this is the place you come to when someone you love is slowly dying: You’re desperate for it to be over, and even more desperate to make it last.

  Betty Rollin’s groundbreaking bestseller First, You Cry was published in 1976, and I read it simply because everyone else was reading it. It was the big book that was being talked about, and that in itself was astonishing. In fact, much of the talk about the book, as I recall, centered on how remarkable it was that everyone was talking about it. The movie starring Mary Tyler Moore came out in 1978, the year after Suzy was diagnosed. Suzy saw it on TV and read the book while she was in treatment at M. D. Anderson. She was impressed with Rollin’s candor about the physical and emotional wreckage breast cancer had brought into her life, but beyond that, it encouraged her to see this bright pinhole of light shining through the heavy curtain of silence and stigma. Breast cancer was still effectively barred from polite conversation, but it was no longer an obscenity. (Not in the rhetorical sense, anyway.)

  “It needs to be talked about,” said Suzy. “Betty Ford, Happy Rockefeller, Shirley Temple Black … They aren’t the least bit afraid to talk about breast cancer—what it really is, what it does. We have to talk about it too. Promise me, Nan, when I get better, we’ll do something with Junior League or B’nai B’rith. We could call the American Cancer Society and get some ideas.”

  “When I get better, Nan, you and I are going to do something about the hideous décor in this waiting room. It’s usually all girls. It should be pretty and light.”

  “When I get better, Nan, we should have a luncheon to raise awareness for the new mammogram machines. So few women know about the newest technology.”

  “When I get better, Nanny, we have to do a tea—something educational, but fun and lovely with flowers and—oh! We could all wear hats. We could invite Dr. Blumenschein to speak. Promise you’ll help me put it together.”

  These were plans she was making for me, not for herself, but I smiled and nodded, knowing that talking about doing these things made her feel included in some version of the future. She was still her mother’s daughter, full of good intentions and good ideas to back them up. She didn’t have to ask what to do, and she wasn’t ready to get out of the kitchen.

  As the summer wore on, her good days became few and far between.

  Suzy rallied every ounce of strength she could to be with her children, but there were frustrating moments when there was no way to make it okay for them. Scott was ten years old now, old enough to know something was terribly wrong but not yet able to make sense out of it. He didn’t want to talk about it, and he was sick of hearing that Mommy couldn’t get out of bed today or Mommy was going away again or Mommy was too tired to talk on the phone. Stephanie was six and in school now, vaguely aware that her family didn’t function the way her friends’ families did, but unable to remember a time when things were different. Suzy had been in treatment for half of her little girl’s life, so Steffie saw nothing odd about her mother disappearing for days at a time, sleeping in the daytime, or eating a soda cracker and ginger ale instead of whatever was on the dinner table for everyone else.

  More and more often now, there were times when Steffie wanted and needed more than Suzy could give. It was agony for Suzy that she didn’t have the strength to sweep her little girl up in her arms. She couldn’t be there for every school program and PTA meeting. When Steffie tugged Suzy’s hand, begging her to come into the swimming pool, Suzy had to pull away and adjust the neckline of her beach robe so Steffie wouldn’t see the cath port and lesions on her mother’s chest.

  Suzy was torn between caring for herself and caring for her children. Mommy was torn between caring for her daughter and caring for her grandchildren. I did what I could do from Dallas. Stan and Daddy were there, strong and constant, in Peoria, along with Suzy’s posse—a fabulous cadre of half a dozen true-blue friends who stuck close by her, took turns making dinner for her family, picked up the children for play dates and school events, and never for a moment left her without a shoulder. We all did our best to wrap our love around Scott and Steffie, wanting to shelter them from what was coming. It was like trying to pitch a tent in the path of a tornado.

  One afternoon, Mom and Suzy stood at the kitchen window, watching Scott and Steffie dash back and forth in the cool spray of the lawn sprinkler.

  Suzy said, “I worked so hard to get them, Mommy. Now I’ll never know what happens.”

  Mom put her arm around Suzy. She would never have insulted Suzy by saying some platitude or making some empty promise that everything would be all right; they both knew it wouldn’t be. We could surround these children with all the family we had, but without their mother, the landscape of their lives would be forever altered.

  “I know you’ll take care of everyone,” Suzy said, and Mommy nodded. That she could promise, and they both knew what it meant. They didn’t discuss any particulars.

  As difficult as it was for her to leave her family, Suzy seemed relieved to be in Houston with me. She didn’t have to be brave or perky when it was just the two of us. She could close her eyes when she needed to. She could cry or throw up without trying to hide. She could take care of herself without feeling torn in two. When the little apartment wasn’t available, we stayed at a nice hotel near the medical center, and Suzy loved to stretch out by the swimming pool, reading paperback novels and soaking in the sun.

  “I look healthier with a little color in my face,” she said.

  I agreed, though we both knew healthier was a relative term these days. Suzy was acutely aware of how visibly sick she was. People were ill at ease sitting near her in a restaurant or making eye contact in the mirror in the ladies’ room. When we walked into a clothing boutique, the salesgirl’s ready smile quickly faded. It made me furious, but I didn’t want to make it worse for her by venting. It had always been next to impossible to walk into the grocery store in Peoria without meeting someone who loved Suzy. The folks behind the deli and bakery counters used to wave and call to her. Acquaintances from Junior League and PTA rushed to hug her in the produce section. Now people averted their eyes, scurried down the aisle, dodged behind a stack of canned goods. They crossed the street to avoid brushing by her on the sidewalk, recoiled from her as if she were contagious.

  Certainly, Suzy noticed and was hurt by it, but it didn’t change the way she conducted herself. She didn’t leave the house without putting herself together: wig, makeup, the same stylish clothes she’d always worn. She was still as charitable and outgoing as ever, not about to be defined by this disease or by anyone’s adverse reaction to it. Instead of decrying the acquaintances who migrated away from her, Suzy held fast to that fabulous little cadre of friends and told them often how much she loved and appreciated them.

  Stretched out on the chaise by the hotel pool in Houston, Suzy wore Jackie O shades and a wide-brimmed hat with a tropical beachy cover-up that concealed the Gershon port below her collarbone but left her bare legs in the sunshine. Whatever she was reading had her fully engaged, so she didn’t notice me watching her chest rise and fall with a soft, dry wheeze. Her limbs were so thin and knobby, she looked like a little girl playing dress-up. I had to smile, suddenly thinking of Suzy and me in the backyard, dancing for Aunt Rose in our coconut bras and hula skirts. Suzy and me at the stable, pretending our ponies were Royal Lipizzaner stallions. Suzy and me in Paris, tromping up a hill at Père-Lachaise. Suzy and me on the porch at Mom and Dad’s, playing patty-cake with our babies and planning another Halloween birthday.

  Tears stung my eyes behind my sunglasses. Suzy’s mainstay role in my life had begun with the sound of her voice before I was born, and she’d been with me for every major moment since. The memories flickered faster, a stream of images and emotion. The
dizzying speed with which our time together had come and gone left me breathless. I tried to catch her as she flew by on her two-wheeler, so real I could hear the patter of the playing card stuck in the spokes. My heart called out to her as she skipped down the front steps in her pink ribbons and crinolines, but she was already sailing across the dance floor at the Excelsior with a handsome young Italian.

  Don’t go, Suzy. Don’t leave me.

  The unbearable weight of losing her crushed against my rib cage.

  Where I live now there are cherry trees, and sometimes children run after the blossoms as they rain down in the spring wind, trying to catch and collect as many as they can. I think that must be what I was doing that day by the pool. I’d brought along the notebook in which we logged Suzy’s office visits and recorded her meds, but I flipped past all that to a clean, white page and started scribbling one line after another, catching and collecting every moment I could grasp, frantic at the possibility that I would lose a single charm bracelet artifact or forget her expression when she heard the opening skiff of her favorite song on the radio.

  Bibity boo bot

  Party for Boppie’s Eightieth

  Louie

  “I’m in love with Hieronymus Bosch!”

  Hadassah fashion show

  This woman needs a raincoat

  Suzy’s life was so much greater than the sum of all these small parts, but I could see in each moment of her—even the moments of anger and silliness—a gift for someone else. The list became a eulogy and then a prayer.

  I took Suzy back to Peoria, and she was happy to be home. She wanted to avoid the hospital as long as possible, so Stan and Mommy did their best to care for her with the help of hired nurses, but she was in and out of the hospital a lot toward the end.

  She was wasting away rapidly now, her lungs constantly clouding over with fluid, new lesions emerging all over the front of her body. I visited every other week and stayed as long as I could, but by Sunday afternoon, I was eager to get back to Dallas, where I could fetch Eric from my friend’s house and immerse myself in another week of work. When Daddy took up his car keys to take me to the airport, Suzy always insisted on coming along. Anytime she wasn’t in the hospital, she had to ride along to greet me and send me off. For the most part, she slept, curled up on the backseat of the car, but that gesture of being there for me was important to her, and looking back on it, it means the world to me.

  The last time I saw Suzy was probably the last Sunday in July 1980.

  “Can you stay another day or two, Nan?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Eric needs me.”

  This was a lie; the truth was, I needed him. He anchored my sanity these days with his sturdy little grin and self-reliant lunchbox. Daddy took up his keys, and I got in the backseat with Suzy. We rode in silence for a while. Her lungs were filling with fluid again, so when she did speak, it was barely above a whisper.

  “We have to do something … to help … those women at the hospital. Make it better … for them … for their families.”

  “We will, Suz.” I patted her hand, watching my hometown amble by the open window.

  “Nan.” She gripped my wrist. “Promise me it’ll be better.”

  “Suzy … I promise.”

  “It has to be talked about. Breast cancer—we have to talk about it. It has to change … so women know … so they don’t die. Promise me, Nanny. Promise … you’ll make it change.”

  It wasn’t like the good intentions, couched in the optimistic time frame of “when I get better.” This time there was no mention of pretty specifics, no inkling of a plan, only purpose burning in her sunken eyes, weighing on her emaciated shoulders. If she’d asked me to swim the length of the Nile, I would have found a way to do it. She said it like she was pleading for her life. I didn’t understand until three years later that it was my life she was about to save.

  I promised. I swore with all my broken heart.

  “I promise, Suzy. I swear. Even if it takes the rest of my life.…”

  I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as Daddy pulled up to the curb, then gave Daddy a quick kiss on the cheek as I threw the car door open, needing to stretch my legs and get out in the air. Striding toward the terminal, I swung my bag onto my shoulder. Dallas. Eric. One foot in front of the other.

  There was an odd little sound behind me. It felt more than sounded like my name.

  Nan.

  I turned and saw Suzy standing unsteadily next to the open car door, trying to smooth the front of her rumpled blouse. Her scrawny legs looked impossibly wobbly, and her wig had shifted a little to the side. But she smiled at me and opened her arms.

  “Suzy …”

  I dropped my bulky messenger bag and ran back to her. Knowing I should scold her and tuck her back in the car, I swept her into my arms instead. Abandoning the eggshell genteel hugs we’d been exchanging lately, we held each other as hard as we could.

  “Goodbye, Nanny. I love you.”

  My throat closed before I could say a word. I’m not sure I could have said that particular word anyway. Goodbye. I just didn’t have it in me. All I could do was hang on until Suzy couldn’t hang on any longer. Then I helped her back in the car, scooped up my bag, and loped down the concourse to catch my flight.

  A few days later, Mommy took Suzy to the hospital in Peoria. They drained her lungs again, did what they could to make her comfortable. She never wanted Scott and Stephanie to see her in that setting, but this time, she told Stan to bring them and asked Mom to help her into a pretty robe before they arrived. She watched them play together in the waiting room for a while, then managed a little walk with each of them alone.

  Seeing them seemed to strengthen her. She wanted to go home again, wanted Mommy to stay with her and sit up with her at night to help her stay awake. She was afraid to fall asleep. Mom cared for her at home for a few days, but they both knew it couldn’t last.

  “Sweetheart, we have to go to the hospital,” Mom told her one morning after Stan took the children to school. “We need to go over there and get you better.”

  Suzy tried to answer, but her tongue was swollen in her dry mouth.

  “I know, I know,” Mom soothed her, stroked her hand. “But I love you, your dad loves you, your sister loves you, your family loves you.… That’s what you know for sure.”

  She was awake and trying to talk on the way to the hospital, but Mommy couldn’t understand what she was saying. The moment they pulled in, the orderlies rushed out, and by the time Mom had parked the car and caught up with them, Suzy was in a bed and had slipped into unconsciousness. Mommy stayed beside her, unable to tear herself away as long as there was the slightest chance Suzy might drift to the surface for a moment.

  Over the next few days, Stan came when he could get someone to be with the children. Daddy came when he could stand it. Suzy’s closest friends—Linda, Patty, and Dee—took turns, keeping the quiet vigil with Mommy.

  If we should stumble when musicians play,

  Time will say nothing but I told you so.…

  I made arrangements for Eric and lined up a flight from Dallas.

  Because I love you more than I can say,

  If I could tell you I would let you know.…

  Looking down at the verdant green of the midwestern summer, I knew in my heart I was too late.

  Suzy died August 4, 1980.

  She was thirty-six years old. Her children were ten and six. Mommy and Linda were there with her. I was on my way, but Daddy met me at the airport again, his eyes rimmed in red, his mouth drawn down to a tight line of self-control.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  There was a shock wave of agony, relief, guilt, and sorrow. Then a strange state of white noise settled in my head. That night I slept with Steffie in her ruffled pink bed, drifting off for a few minutes, then jarring awake as if a bell tolled in a tower next to my head. I cried as quietly as I could for a while, then lay there feeling empty, listening to the soft, cons
istent breathing of Suzy’s little girl beside me.

  “Aunt Nan?”

  The door creaked open, and Scott peeked in. I patted the bed beside me. He crept over and crawled in, and though he was a great big boy of ten, he let me pull him into a good snuggle.

  “What’s going to happen now?” he asked.

  “It’ll be like … when your mommy had to be away for a few days,” I lied, but trying to make it true, I added, “Grammy will be here. And your daddy.”

  “Will you be here?”

  “I … yes. Sure, Scott. I’ll be here.”

  He looked up at me. Skeptical. Ten.

  “I will, Scott. Maybe not as often as I have been lately, but I’ll come to visit you, and you’ll come see me and Eric in Dallas, and we’ll all go to Florida to see Grammy and Grandpa. It’ll be hard for a while. You have to be a good big brother, and we all have to … just … just cover each other up with love.”

  He burrowed into my side, and I stroked his hair away from his forehead, resting my other hand on Stephanie’s back, and we stayed that way until morning.

  We all walked through the next few days as if we were characters in an old TV show, negotiating the set pieces, speaking our lines through the static, our faces in grayscale, everything around us black and white. With a numb efficiency, Mommy and I ordered flowers and discussed appropriate readings with the rabbi. We agreed that Suzy personified Solomon’s good woman in the Song of Songs.

  I am a rose of Sharon, I am a lily of the valleys.

  As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.…

  Daddy made arrangements for the above-ground mausoleum. Stan nodded and agreed to things, ashen, exhausted. Suzy’s wonderful friends stepped in with food and flowers and warmth for Scott and Steffie.

  Set me as a seal upon thy heart … for love is strong as death.…

  The casket was to be closed during Suzy’s funeral, but there was a private viewing for the family before the service. I knew Suzy wasn’t there, but I needed to see her.