If I hadn’t already moved back to America, I said, even if I still lived in Berlin, I don’t think I would have been able to go back, when it happened. I think I would have abandoned my whole life there.
But of course I said that, because I didn’t actually have anything to go back to. I had already abandoned my whole life there, disassembled my apartment, given away my possessions, posted a sign in the inner courtyard window of my living room that said: Tschussi, Nachbarn! so that the men making smoothies in their matching red tracksuits and the other neighbours who I’d watched for a year would know that I was leaving, and that I’d cared about them.
When I left Berlin, I felt pulled, reluctant, but I didn’t feel like I could return. After the loss of my father I needed to be in the place where I’d come from. So I understood what my mother was doing, when she decided to move back to Scotland. But I was still sad.
There were ways in which my mother and I had sometimes been a little hard on each other over the years, as mothers and daughters can be. But after my father died, it seemed to me that we both set these ways aside, for the most part. We were both very kind. Whereas my siblings had partners, my mother and I were both on our own, and so we leaned on each other in a way that maybe we had never leaned on each other before. Instead of rolling my eyes and sighing, I waited for her when I felt that she was being too slow and deliberate. Instead of snapping at me for not paying attention, my mother kept quiet when she thought I was being careless and flip.
After the funeral, when my brother went back to his family in California, and my sister and her husband went back to Scotland, it was just the two of us left in Baltimore. Me and my mother and the things that my father had left behind. The cushions of his chair, still holding the shape of his body. A half-finished box of Kleenex. A half-finished book. Pain medications, wool sweaters, giant jars of raspberry jam that he had bought at the Russian grocery store that reminded him of his grandparents. A filing cabinet full of a lifetime of correspondence, from letters that my grandfather had sent him in the 1970s to emails from his children that he’d printed and put in a folder, for safekeeping. Magazines, photographs. Pairs of tweezers, pairs of socks. Loaves of bread he’d baked that were still in the freezer, still tasty when defrosted, sliced, and made into toast. Spread with jam.
A couple of weeks after my dad died, after my brother and sister had returned to their homes, my mother came upstairs to the guest room where I was skulking. I’d gone back to New York to move in to my new apartment and then I’d come back to Baltimore, to take care of my mother, or for my mother to take care of me. We never put words to which one it was. On that particular morning, my mother smiled and told me that my sister was on the phone and had some news for me. She handed me the cordless house phone, and I took it.
Elspeth said: I’m pregnant.
I said: Yes, I know. Then I handed the phone back to my mother.
I didn’t know, not for sure, but I had suspected. I’d noticed that my sister did not drink any alcohol in the days when we were together just after Dad died, which seemed to me like a better time to drink than most. I had also noticed that she looked a little fuller than usual around her waist. That my sister had not only something to return to, a real home to go back to, after our father died, but had something to be happy about, that my sister was going to become a mother, was not something that I felt able to contemplate.
That my five-years-younger sister got married before me had not upset me.
But that she was going to have a baby, when I felt so hopeless and unmoored and alone: that was hard to take.
Before the death of my father, the last time my mother and I had spent so much time in each other’s exclusive company I was in nursery school. It was before my sister was born, and when my brother was in school for six hours every day. I remember the joy of it: her reading me nursery rhymes aloud for hours, me playing in the kitchen while she talked on the rotary phone, riding in the shopping cart through the supermarket, watching through the bay window in the front of the house for the yellow school bus to deposit my brother at the end of his day.
But my mother sometimes recounted a story of an occasion in that era when I was very small and fell and hurt myself on the front steps of the house that we lived in then. I don’t remember falling, but I do remember those front steps, which were cement and sharp-edged.
You were crying, my mother said, when she told me the story, which she did now and then. You were crying, and I tried to comfort you, but you pushed me away and went to your bedroom and climbed into bed and faced the wall.
When my mother told me this story, it made sense, almost as if I remembered it myself. I had always adored my mother, and she had always adored me, but I think sometimes I needed more space from her than she needed from me.
And then sometimes when she needed more space from me, I did not allow her to take it. Ten years or so later, when I was overcome with depression, my mother was my fiercest advocate. I remember lying on a rug in the kitchen with the family dog while she called adolescent psychiatrists, one after the other, trying to find one who would take our insurance and who would take me as a patient. My mother got me through that illness, and its relapses, with total focus and determination. I’m sure it was very hard for her.
But now, in this new stage of life in which we needed each other, my mother and I found ways to be softer and kinder. We solved problems together without raising our voices, or almost never. When we did, it was often because we were faced with the kinds of obstacles that we were used to having my father resolve: a broken dishwasher, a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. We went to the movies together. We went out to dinner. We went to a wedding together because neither of us had an And Guest. We left the wedding early, went back to the Courtyard Marriott where we were sharing a room, and laughed at our nearly matching pyjamas: navy with small white polka dots.
On the occasion of the one-year anniversary of Dad’s death, I went to Baltimore to spend time with my mother because I decided that she would need company, or maybe because I needed company, but either way I got so upset and angry – at my mother, but really at my father, at death – I decided to leave days earlier than planned. That was the worst time between us after Dad died, I think, the darkest time, but still, my mother and I soon found our way back together to a place we could share that felt loving and good.
My mother came to Brooklyn to see me for the first time a few months after I’d moved there, and a few months after Dad died. She helped me set up my new apartment, the one I’d chosen because I’d hoped he would be able to make it up the stairs. It was her birthday that weekend, and for the occasion I took her to a pizza restaurant with a live jazz band at the end of the block. The next day she bought me an end table with a ceramic top from a man across the street from my new apartment who was selling off a houseful of junk.
Afterwards my mother and I agreed that it had been acquired by dubious means: that the man who sold it to us was not, as he claimed, a distinguished psychiatrist, selling a houseful of junk before using the building to set up his distinguished psychiatry practice.
That man, my mother said, is not a psychiatrist!
You don’t think so? I said. I guess you may be right that psychiatrists don’t usually have housefuls of antiques to sell before they can set up their private practices on obscure Brooklyn streets near the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway.
Definitely not! my mother said. That is not usual!
We laughed.
It’s a nice table, I said.
I put the table next to an armchair in my windowless living room and my mother was the first person to set something down on it: her cup of tea, between sips.
I understood why my mother would want to move back to Scotland, her country. But I did feel worried about who would be there to look after me if I got cancer.
If.
When.
2
In New York, the medical appointments started after the diagnosis, after the ph
one call, after the chat about snorkelling and yoga. After the end of that part of my life where I had no particular idea about how I was likely to die. The appointments came one after another. Each appointment led to more appointments. Then came the voicemails, from the medical assistants. Give us a call when you have a moment, the assistants said. I’d leave my desk in the office and go and sit on a cold cement step in the emergency stairwell, because it was the only place to make a private phone call without being overheard by colleagues. I’d call the medical assistants back and my hands would shake and the medical assistants would say: You need to make another appointment, or We’re just making sure that you’re attending your next appointment. They would say these things to me as if they believed I was sick.
Thank you, I’d say, when these assistants called me, because they were just doing their jobs, but I resented having to say it. I was not grateful. Memory has always been my strong point: at work, I rarely write to-do lists. I just remember things. But now I found that I was confused about which doctors I had to see: where, when. I recalled when I tried to understand math in high school with my dad, when he told me that the problem with my inability to retain what I’d learned was that I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t interested in these doctors, either. I remembered the list that he kept on his iPhone, entitled Bill’s Cancer. I made my own, logging physicians’ names and office addresses, phone numbers and specialties. I called it Jean’s Doctors.
The last time I’d seen a doctor in the United States, in my earliest twenties, I’d been on the health insurance that my father’s job provided for our family. I did not know how to manage it myself. I had never encountered a medical bill. In England and Germany, health care was free, but I’d rarely seen a doctor. I was rarely ill, and when I was, the doctors seemed disinclined to help me, as if they believed that my American accent meant that I was soft, and grasping. One London GP responded to my request for a particular kind of steroids to help me with my asthma with: We don’t do that in this country! In response, I cried. And every time thereafter when I visited that doctor’s surgery I saw that there was a note at the top of my file that said: Patient is difficult.
In England, doctors hadn’t seemed interested in me. Now, it seemed, they couldn’t get enough. Every evening in the Clinton Hill apartment, the landlady left my mail on a polished occasional table in the foyer of the building: stacks of correspondence from my health insurers, annotated lists of things they’d paid for. THIS IS NOT A BILL was printed on the documents, but even though they weren’t an immediate demand for money, the litany of charges still felt like a threat. It had been less than a year since I moved to New York, but I already felt like I’d forgotten what I’d hoped for when I moved there.
When I first learned that I had Lynch syndrome, I’d sometimes say to people, Of course I’ve had this since the day I was born. I just know about it now.
When I said this I would shrug, do a people-pleasing smile, because I wanted to make the people I said it to feel more relaxed and less afraid. It was hard to mention cancer in relation to myself without making people panicked or uncomfortable or upset. Nothing is different, I’d say, to make them feel better. But what I really wanted to say was: I wish I didn’t know this.
Sometimes I looked out at the New York City skyline – I could see the Empire State Building from the very tip-top of my street in Brooklyn, when I was walking home from the subway stop – and think: What if I had stayed in Berlin and never found out?
And then I would think: I was happy in Berlin.
One time in Berlin I had tried to call a doctor, or maybe a genetics institute, some place I’d found and parsed on the internet, to talk about getting a test for Lynch syndrome. But of course I couldn’t speak German well enough to explain what it was that I wanted. I had many friends by then who were fluent German-speakers. If I really wanted to do it, I could have asked them for help. Instead, I hung up the phone. I had tried.
Sometimes, in the weeks and months after I received the diagnosis, I would think about killing myself. Suicide was something that I thought about a lot when I was a teenager, a very depressed one, in the time before I started taking antidepressants, at just fourteen, and in the ebbs and flows since. Over the years my suicidal feelings and I had reached a kind of peaceful coexistence, and on the rare occasions that they bubbled up I knew it was because I was under stress, or sad, or I had missed an appointment with my therapist, or was about to get my period, and not because I wanted to kill myself, or was going to try. Maybe it’s hard for someone to understand, if they’ve never thought: I should kill myself, that this idea could roll around in my head for all these years so much it became no more than an off-key hum. But over all that time I’d learn to understand the difference between those self-destructive synaptic snaps and what I really desired.
But the thoughts I had after the diagnosis were different: they were not the familiar urges. They were thoughts about how everything felt over when I was not yet sure if it had really begun. On those days, I would find it hard to get out of bed, and when I finally left to go to work, I would walk up the street to the bus stop chanting a mantra in my head: My life has value. My life has value. My life has value.
That autumn, a young woman with brain cancer was in the news because she had decided to move to Oregon to end her life under the state’s assisted-dying laws. She was twenty-nine, and she was beautiful, and she’d been diagnosed with cancer less than a year after she’d gotten married, which was something the media liked to emphasize, as if the loss of her life wasn’t already sad enough: a man loved her enough to marry her, but she was going to die, anyway. Was choosing to die. I thought about that young woman a lot. Every day when I got to work, I would sit at my desk and google the latest update. The updates were usually illustrated with two photos: one, from before she was sick, cuddling a puppy. One more recent, when her face was puffy from steroids, and the puppy was nowhere to be seen. When, at last, the young woman got the legal clearance she needed to die, and did so, I shed a tear for this person who I’d never met, and I thought: I get it.
3
After the diagnosis, my first doctor’s appointment was with a geneticist. An expert in explaining to people who they are. I suppose if they made it their business, in theory a geneticist could tell you everything that’s good about yourself: that you’re likely to be a talented artist, that you’ll run far and fast, that your bones are thick and strong and reluctant to snap, that your hair will always be luxuriant. But geneticists aren’t in the business of bringing people good news. The bread and butter of the genetics business is to tell you what’s wrong, the errors your parents wrote in your body the day that you were conceived, thanks to the errors their parents wrote for them. Their parents, before. Ad infinitum.
The geneticist I went to see was in a clinic on the Upper East Side, a salubrious neighbourhood that I’d spent little time in, because when I came to New York I decided that I was a Brooklyn person, not an Upper East Side person. I had friends who lived there, who encouraged me to check out the neighbourhood, to come and visit, to think about making the Upper East Side my home. But when I got out of the subway at 86th Street, I knew it was not for me. The storefronts were shining big boxes. The people were smooth and well-groomed. The Upper East Side seemed like a kind of tidy place for Americans who had their lives in order, which was not a kind of person who I was.
It was still September when I went to my appointment with the geneticist. It was still mostly warm, I still had a bit of a tan left over from Mexico. On my way to the clinic I watched women. On the Upper East Side, I observed, many of them were white and thin and wealthy: they wore large diamond engagement rings and yoga clothing, Lululemon sports bras and leggings and vest tops, at an hour on a weekday that was neither before or after work, which were the only hours when I went to yoga classes during the week.
This impressed me: the appearance that these women did not have work to do beyond honing their tiny, tight bodies, perhaps becau
se of the people who had given them their large diamond engagement rings. I looked at these women and I imagined what my own life would be like, or could have been like. If I had come to New York City straight after university, if I had different aims, could I too have a large diamond engagement ring and a yoga mat under my arm, a low body-fat percentage and hair treated quarterly with keratin to smooth the curls? Could I live in a high-rise apartment with a doorman, where all the doorframes were straight-edged and the floors didn’t slant, where the windows opened from side-to-side instead of up and down and where there were no mice at all? In this life with level edges, would I go out to yoga with my mat and my diamond ring, would I meet neighbours in the elevator who were off to walk their small clean white dogs? Would I nod and smile at the neighbours and say a brief hello, but take care not to get to know them on a deeper level, because I wanted my life to remain contained within straight edges and I’d understand that this was their desire too? If I had aimed to become this kind of woman: a thin, diamond, right-angle woman, would it have mattered that I would still have had – because I’d always had – Lynch syndrome?
It didn’t matter. I’d made my decisions and now it was too late for that kind of life. I was too old to get that kind of diamond ring. I would never be that thin. No matter how much time I spent hanging around the Starbucks by the entrance to the subway at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue, I would never be chosen by one of the men who facilitated the daytime yoga and diamond lifestyle. I would always need to continue working at a job in an office that I didn’t care a great deal about because I needed to have health insurance. On my walk to the genetics clinic, I looked at those women who I would never be, and thought: Even though you are thin and wealthy, some of you will die of cancer before I do, and you don’t even know that yet.
It was an ungenerous thing to think about strangers, but it was not untrue.
This Really Isn't About You Page 14