And it was. It was there. I just didn’t know what ‘it’, my life in America, was for. I had moved back to America six weeks earlier to be close to my father, and six weeks later he had died.
8
Extending Life was the name of the only magazine in the waiting room of the clinic, and when I sat down to wait for my name to be called I saw it and thought: That’s sad. I thought it was sad because I imagined that the people writing and editing Extending Life once had big dreams of being journalists on a beat other than end-stage cancer.
I used to be one of them: a young journalist who wrote content for businesses to boost my meagre income from book reviews and op-eds. I covered conference travel and developments in office furniture. I wrote about shipping containers. I edited a website about home improvements for first-time home buyers, filled with articles written by all of my freelance journalist friends who were supplementing their own meagre incomes, people like me who had also never owned or improved a home. In that waiting room I saw Extending Life and imagined I knew how the journalists who worked there must have felt every time they slammed out another paragraph about nutritional supplement milkshakes, or detailed how to set up a hospital bed to turn a living room into a dying one.
On that day, in that waiting room, I was not ready to read an issue of Extending Life. George Clooney had just gotten married to Amal Alamuddin, and I would have been happy to read the in-depth coverage of their wedding in People. I would even have been happy to flick through a decades-old copy of Cat Fancy. I was not ready for Extending Life, but no other reading material had been provided. The clinic was a place that catered to the very ill, to the dying, but I was not sick. Not yet.
My father had been dead for six months before I was brave enough to go and get the test. I was no longer in a state of deepest grief. I didn’t cry every day any more. Just some of them. I spent fewer weekends with my mother in Baltimore and more with my new friends in Brooklyn. I had moved into the apartment that my father was no longer the guarantor for because he was dead, and I had bought a starter sofa, the cheapest on the West Elm website. I hired a man from the internet to assemble my new bed. One morning, I noticed coffee grounds all over the kitchen counter, and then I googled the coffee grounds and I realized that the coffee grounds were mouse shit, and so I also bought a range of different mousetraps, hoping each morning to find dying rodents convulsing in the glue. The traps were always empty.
I went on some dates with men who I met on apps on my phone. I swiped left, and left, and left, and sometimes right. It was a long time since I’d been on a date with an American man, and I wasn’t sure that I knew how to do it. On the dates I asked the American men about their lives. Most of the men were quite boring, and most of the time I found that I had forgotten their names by the time we’d bid farewell, me saying: It was nice to meet you! in a tone that probably let them know that it was not. I smiled, I nodded, I ordered the Brussels sprouts like I’d been doing it my whole life, I split the bill when I knew that I did not want to see them again. Sometimes when the men asked me why I had moved back to America I would tell them about my father, and sometimes I would tell them about my job.
I went to the clinic to see a gastroenterologist. The seats in the clinic were upholstered with chintzy fabric, and the fabric was covered in thick, clear plastic, I guess because gastroenterology patients have a tendency to leak. I slid around on one of the chairs for a few minutes until a nurse took me back to collect my vital statistics.
Any medication? she said.
No, I said.
I see here it says that you were treated for depression, she said, gesturing to the form I filled out in the waiting room with all the details of my medical history since birth.
Yes, I said. When I was a teenager.
Oh, she said. Did you take medication for that?
Yes, I said. But I stopped it about five years ago.
How did it make you feel? the nurse said.
What? I said.
It’s a personal question, she said. You see, I’ve been thinking about taking antidepressants. I’ve been feeling down.
Oh, I said. Um, I guess they made me feel better?
Oh, OK, said the nurse. You see, I’m a mom and I don’t want my little girl to see me so sad all the time.
Yes, I said, I see, of course. You should . . . I mean, I think you should do what’s best for you and your daughter.
Thanks, said the nurse.
I felt worried about the nurse.
The nurse showed me into another examination room and left me there for twenty minutes, to wait. I sat on the examination couch, which seemed like the right place to wait, as a patient, even though I was just there to ask the gastroenterologist for a blood test, which was probably something that I could do from a regular chair.
Later that day I was planning to meet Joanne for drinks on a glamorous Manhattan rooftop. I can’t recall if it was for a particular occasion or just to celebrate being alive, but that morning I had dressed for it: a nice dress, peep-toe heels, a long necklace. It was an outfit which then felt kind of dumb to be wearing while sitting on an examination couch. My legs dangled.
The room looked like it hadn’t been updated since a decade in which I had not yet been born. The sole piece of decoration was a large Proctor & Gamble-branded plastic poster of the human digestive system, rendered in relief. The poster depicted every possible digestive ailment known to man, or at least every possible digestive ailment known to man in the 1970s. Appendicitis and colitis and bowel cancer; stomach cancer and acid reflux. Every organ was sporting a tumour. The medical illustrator had even included a couple of insects, fluttering towards the edge of the poster as if they were trying to escape: parasites.
How are you? said the gastroenterologist when he arrived. He appeared to be only two or three years older than I was.
I’m fine, I said to the gastroenterologist. Even though I’ve been looking at this horrible poster for twenty minutes.
You’d be surprised, said the gastroenterologist, by how many people there are who don’t know what a colon is.
I laughed. He laughed.
How are you . . . feeling? the gastroenterologist said.
Great, I said. I feel great! Except that I need to get tested to see if I have Lynch syndrome.
Right, he said.
My father was diagnosed with it in 2010, I said. He died.
I’m sorry, said the gastroenterologist.
So, I said, I guess I should get tested for it.
Yeah, said the gastroenterologist. OK. I mean, usually I test people for Lynch syndrome by taking a biopsy when they have a colonoscopy.
OK, I said.
But you can have a blood test, said the gastroenterologist. And then if you don’t have it you don’t have to have a colonoscopy. Do you want a blood test?
Sure, I said.
The gastroenterologist picked up a large book. He started turning pages. A lot of pages.
I guess it’s in here somewhere, he said.
Should I google it for you? I said.
No, no, he says. It won’t be on the internet! I’m sure it’s in this book.
OK, I said. I thought: It’s probably on the internet.
I swung my legs a little, like I used to do thirty years earlier, waiting in my paediatrician’s office for a physical. I looked at my fancy shoes.
So, said the gastroenterologist, still flipping, your siblings have been tested?
Yes, I said. They’re negative. And my cousin on that side of the family was negative, too.
That’s great, said the gastroenterologist in a bright voice. So that means . . .
That I still have a fifty per cent chance of having it, I said.
Yeah, said the gastroenterologist, losing his sparkle. Yeah.
It took four weeks to get the results of the test. Once the blood was out of my arm, I didn’t think about it again. Instead, I carried on as normal. I went to work in an office on 5th Avenue at my uninsp
iring and well-paid job that provided me with health insurance. I rode my bike in circles around Prospect Park. I drank iced coffees on patios. I went on some more dates with men whose names I forgot as soon as I said it was nice to meet them.
I went on vacation to Mexico with Joanne, an end-of-summer jaunt, and the gastroenterologist left me a voicemail while we were there. My phone didn’t work in Tulum, so I could see that he’d called, but was only able to hear the message a few days after he left it, just after the plane touched down at JFK. I listened as the plane taxied to the gate.
Call me when you can, the gastroenterologist said on the phone, in a voice that sounded relaxed.
Great! I said to Joanne. The gastroenterologist wouldn’t just call me on the phone with this terrible life-changing news. I must be negative!
He wouldn’t! she said. You must!
It was a nice end to our vacation.
I called the gastroenterologist back the next day.
So, said the gastroenterologist, how was your vacation? You were in Mexico?
It was good, I said, I went to Tulum.
Oh, said the gastroenterologist, did you go snorkelling?
No, I said, yoga.
So, said the gastroenterologist, I’m looking at your test results here, and you do have the mutation for the MSH2 gene that causes Lynch syndrome.
He would. He would just call me on the phone.
Oh, I said.
I’m going to refer you to a geneticist, the gastroenterologist said.
OK, I said.
I said goodbye to the gastroenterologist. I lay down on my bed. I screamed.
Eventually, I picked up my phone. My mother was on a trip to Scotland, visiting Elspeth, and it was too late to call her. So I called Arthur.
I have it, I said.
FUCK, he said.
BEFORE
1
What would you do if you had your whole life ahead of you, if you never thought about how or why you might die?
What I did was follow my heart, or at least what was in my heart when I was not yet twenty-two years old. Which is to say: I followed a boy across the Atlantic. Maybe I didn’t follow so much as I pursued. I moved to London to be with Paul in the way that you do when you’re that age, and a young woman, and believe that the love you have at not-yet-twenty-two is the greatest love of all. I was also going to graduate school in London, that’s true, a good one, but I picked the course because of Paul. Graduate school was a vehicle to get me to London, but in the beginning, Paul was the main reason that I wanted to be there.
The decision was simple. At twenty-one and some months, heart-following seemed like the most important thing for me to do. Other than my heart, I didn’t have much: an OK undergraduate degree from McGill University, a group of friends, some vague ambitions to be a writer.
On the last day of my work-study job, as an editorial assistant at the university alumni magazine, my colleagues, who were ten or twenty or thirty years into their careers, took me out to lunch.
What do you want to do now? said one of them, a thirty-something editor.
I took a deep breath. Maybe it was because I’d drunk half a glass of wine at lunch, or maybe it was because I felt close to these people, having spent several hours a week with them in the attic office of the magazine, writing reviews of books by alumni of the university and looking up how much money celebrity graduates had donated (this latter activity was not part of my job, but a hobby). For almost two years we’d drunk the same coffee from the same chipped mugs, and I’d listened to them complain about their spouses or lack thereof.
Well, I said, flattered that the mid-level editor was showing that much interest in my hopes and dreams. Well, eventually I would like to write for the New Yorker.
He smirked, or maybe he laughed, I don’t remember. I just remember how discouraged I felt when he said, with confidence: That will never happen.
I believed him.
Sometimes, now, I look at people who are ten, fifteen years younger than me, young people who seem to have the wisdom not to follow the whims of romance when they are making decisions about what to do with their lives. I wonder what they know or feel that I didn’t.
On the day you left you said you’d only be gone for a year, my mother told me, not long after I returned to America, in the waning days of 2013. She said it with a smile. It was something she recalled with good humour, and it certainly sounded like a thing I might have said on the day I left, which was June 13th, 2003. I remember the date that I left for Ireland so well because it was also my mother’s birthday. It also sounded like a thing that my mother, a mother, would have recalled. For a moment I thought about whether her birthday was an inconsiderate day to emigrate, but then I booked the ticket anyway. For what is motherhood but the gradual drifting away of someone that was once part of your own body?
I don’t know what it’s like to be a mother. Not firsthand. But I do know that once I started approaching the age at which my mother gave birth to me – thirty-four – I began to understand, or maybe, at least, to realize, that my mother’s life had not begun on the day that I, or any other of her children, were born.
In the ten years that I spent living on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from my parents, my mother never asked me to come back to America, or even suggested it. Not even after I called that summer from Berlin and said: I’m thinking about coming home. My mother said, That would be nice, but she did not say, I would like that to happen, or We need you. She did not say the things that parents say in movies. Not telling her adult children how to live their lives is something that my mother has often told me she takes seriously. I appreciate it.
But when I did at last return to America, that December before my father died, my mother still said: You said you’d be back in a year. Perhaps she wanted me to know that she’d noticed. Or maybe she said something similar to her own mother when she left home: when she and my father packed up their home in Scotland, and their small son – my older brother – and left for America. My mother also didn’t know how long she’d be away, not for sure. Perhaps it was just one more thing that ran in the family.
Sometimes when I was living so far away from my parents, people I met presumed that I must have made that choice because we didn’t get along. That’s not the case at all, I’d say. But if the people making the presumption were people who hadn’t moved far from home, I don’t think they always believed me. And in London, in the south of England, I met many people who had not moved far from home, people who in their twenties and early thirties still saw their parents on a weekly basis, never missed watching a family member blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, had dads who came over to help them build IKEA furniture, had mums who’d pick them up and drive them back home down the motorway to Hampshire or Surrey or East Sussex so that they could sleep in their suburban childhood bedrooms when they had a heavy cold.
If my parents lived in London I would certainly live at home! I’d say, to show that I was not passing judgement on their local lifestyles by living mine in a different way. I meant it. Much as I seemed to have distanced myself from my parents, the truth was I was not rebelling. I was conforming. Some people go to the same universities as their parents, pursue similar careers, marry the kinds of people who their parents are. I was also doing exactly what each of my parents had done, when they were young and had their whole lives ahead of them: crossing the Atlantic to live far away from the people who raised them.
I thought about my parents a lot when I was living in London. But in particular, every now and then, I’d think of my mother when I was on my own and feeling joyful. There were a lot of times in London when I did not feel joyful. Times when I felt like whatever it was I was aiming for by being there was something that I would never be able to get my hands on. In London I so often felt out of place: I like being out of place, I’d think to myself, because that’s what I’d chosen to do. But thinking it did not make it true. Not when people interviewing me for jobs
told me to go back to America, or when black-cab drivers assumed from my accent that I was a tourist and took too-long routes. Not when the mid-noughties fashion for negging meant that men at parties would introduce themselves to me and then smile and say: Lose your accent.
Every now and then I’d have an evening where I felt OK: like I did the right things, said the right things, laughed the right laugh and wore the right outfit. And sometimes on those right-feeling evenings, when I was on my way home, I would wonder whether in her late twenties, my mother might also have enjoyed the fancy-free feeling of standing on a street corner in the middle of the city where she’d chosen to try out her life as an adult, buzzed from a couple of glasses of wine, and grateful for night air warm enough that she could walk home on her own under bright street lights that made the puddles from afternoon rain flicker.
And then, on the other hand, I also wondered if maybe before she met my father, which didn’t happen until she was twenty-nine years old, my mother found it difficult to get to sleep in the solitude of her small apartment because she was wondering if she would ever be normal. If my mother ever also stared at the ceiling above her bed between the hours of two and four a.m. and felt a pain that she could not locate or allay. If my mother ever wondered if she would ever meet a partner and be a mother at all. These were all things that I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was in London, when I wondered if the problem of having my whole life ahead of me, free and clear and open for anything, was that having an unlimited number of options made the chance of choosing the wrong thing so high.
In London, in those long dark nights of staring at the ceiling, I believed that if my life derailed it would be because I made bad decisions that could not be remedied. It never occurred to me that the path of my life was anything but unpredictable, meandering, despite my best attempts to shape and control it. I did not ever consider that my fate was written in every cell of my body. Scripted in the twists of my DNA.
Why do you live in London? people would ask me for the whole time I was there, all of the nine years. It didn’t matter that I had a British passport: I still had an American accent, and for that reason I was often regarded as if I had just arrived. Sometimes this was unkind. Sometimes this was well-meaning, people trying to explain to me the way that the government worked, or how to be safe while crossing the road, while I smiled and nodded patiently until they paused for breath, until I could say: I know. I’ve lived here for almost a decade.
This Really Isn't About You Page 6