On another afternoon, Josh, Melissa, and Little Molly came over to watch home movies. I’d found some of my grandpa’s old silent 8 mm films from the 50s and 60s and had them transferred to DVD. I heated up some chicken broth for Mom, with one matzo ball and one carrot, just how she liked it. Josh gave her a foot rub on the purple couch as we settled into the living room for our screening.
Mom must’ve been the one holding the camera most of the time, because we mainly saw her parents, always immaculately dressed, and her little sister. We caught Mom’s instantly recognizable smile from time to time, but only in quick flashes.
“There’s you, Mom!” I said excitedly, spotting her in a family party scene. She looked radiant in a sleeveless polka dot dress.
“Your mother is fixing your hair,” Melissa commented, noticing Grandma tucking back a few wandering strands.
“She always told me how to wear my hair, until the day she died. She always wanted to control how I looked,” Mom said, sighing. “Eventually I developed a sense of humour about it.”
In another scene, Mom, probably in her late teens, is dancing for the camera. She has a long-stem rose between her teeth and is twirling around outside on the grass, looking free and happy.
“Good moves, Mom,” I said. “You’re gorgeous.”
“You are so beautiful,” Josh added.
“Too bad I didn’t think so,” Mom said, her voice heavy with regret. I looked over at her, wondering what exactly was going through her mind as she watched her younger self. Mom was obviously processing something internally that we didn’t quite understand.
* * *
—
JOSH AND I made plans to go out for dinner together. We hadn’t had any one-on-one time in a while. Before heading out to meet him, I opened Mom’s door to say goodnight. She was sitting in bed reading the Shambhala Sun, her favourite Buddhist magazine. The new issue was all about “The Dharma of Death.”
“I’m reading about killing myself,” Mom announced nonchalantly.
I gave her a long look from the doorway.
“Don’t worry, I haven’t started yet,” she said.
I met Josh at a neighbourhood Italian restaurant. Over matching bowls of seafood linguine, we talked about what life might be like after Mom was gone.
“I know that Mom is your person, just like Melissa is mine,” Josh said. “She’s the one you talk to when you’re sad and need compassion and understanding, and she’s the first person you call when you have something to celebrate.” He put down his fork and leaned in closer. “I want you to know that you’ll always have me. I adore you. I can never be what Mom is for you, but I want you to know that you’re never alone in life.”
As uncomfortable as Josh’s earnestness made me feel, his words were a balm. He looked me in the eyes and smiled. “You are my gift.”
I smiled back. I knew exactly what he was referring to. Mom had told us how, when I was born, she’d told Josh that I was a present for him. As the story goes, Josh was less than thrilled—I’m pretty sure he inquired about the return policy.
I’d built up a grudge toward Josh, feeling like I’d fought for Mom on my own. But in that moment I started to let it go. Josh was a good brother. I was lucky to have him. As people go, he and Teddy were pretty great ones to be stuck with.
That night, Josh and I decided to sell Mom’s apartment. It seemed crazy that in the midst of everything we were adding real estate into the mix, but her place was just sitting there. And, honestly, I couldn’t bear the thought of having to deal with it after she was gone. I figured it would be easier to say goodbye to the Hemingway while I at least still had Mom. Besides, I was afraid that if I ran out of things to do, I’d fall apart.
I began going over to the Hemingway in the evenings after Mom went to sleep to get the staging in order: packing, painting, organizing her belongings. One night Molly, Nicola, and Anya came over to help me pack Mom’s many pieces of art in bubble wrap and sort her books and other sentimental possessions into boxes. (Josh was charged with carrying the boxes down to the storage room and disassembling the infrared sauna.) We sifted through Mom’s clothes, saving signature pieces for friends who might want them and gathering the rest for Goodwill. But as I sat down on the carpet in front of her closet, I hesitated. What if she recovers and all her stuff has been given away? It was a strange thought that took me by surprise. She wasn’t going to get better. Why would I even consider she would? As much as I intellectually understood she was going to die, it was still hard to believe. I guess I had some magical thinking going on too.
I told myself that if Mom pulled through we’d be so overjoyed that the lost clothes wouldn’t matter. She’d buy a whole new wardrobe! We could go shopping together! It was a nice fantasy to indulge in for a few seconds, before the closet shelves came back into focus. I grabbed Mom’s blue silk pyjamas and, wincing, threw them into a black garbage bag. I felt like I was killing her before she was even dead.
* * *
—
I WAS DOING my best not to think about Mom’s past choices and just be in the present. One of her favourite sayings was “You can be right, or you can be happy.” So I was trying to be happy with her. But I was perplexed by how she could approach death with such conscious awareness yet still be unaware of what an unreliable witness she’d been—and still was.
She’d say something like, “I wish I had the type of cancer where you can still walk around and do things.”
I’d raise my eyebrows. “What do you call the past five years?”
One morning I overheard her talking to a new naturopath over the phone. She was telling the same old story about her diagnosis, including how she’d be stuck with a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. I hated this part of her—this thing that had led to her dying. How could she continue to be so disconnected from reality? THE JIG IS UP, goddammit.
It gnawed at me for a couple of days. I tried to let it slide, but I had a compulsive need to correct her. Was it the journalist in me wanting to keep her honest? Was it my own need to set reality straight? Or was it perhaps a desire to minimize the distance between us, to bring our perspectives to bear on the same truth so that we could finally come together on the same story? We were close in so many ways, and yet our lack of shared reality would always be a wedge.
And so I had a relapse. “This isn’t to get into a fight or anything, but I still get frustrated and confused when I overhear you telling the naturopath, for example, that it was ‘a hundred percent for sure’ that you’d end up with a sac. You know that’s not true.”
“Well maybe there was a three percent chance I wouldn’t have,” Mom replied. “I remember Feinberg went over to his desk and pulled out pictures of pretty women with sacs, one in a bathing suit and one in a prom dress, and said, ‘See, you can still live a fabulous life! You can wear a sexy dress!’ ”
I remembered that. I was there when he presented her with the fashion spread; it had been interesting to see all the clothing options. But I also remember—and had it documented in my notes—that Feinberg had said there was only a five percent chance she’d end up with a permanent bag. “I think he was just trying to reassure you that even the worst-case scenario wouldn’t be so bad.”
“I don’t know. I just believed it,” Mom said grudgingly.
It was the first time she’d admitted that what she believed may not line up with the facts. And now she had that scared-deer look again—a look I’d come to know intimately. Her own words had gotten to her.
“So that’s it. That’s the end of the comments,” Mom said, abruptly ending the conversation.
One afternoon after she’d finished her session with Mom, Elizabeth the death doula knocked on my bedroom door to see how I was doing. “My job is to tend to the dying person, but also what’s around that person,” she explained. Elizabeth said she was moved by how Mom and I related to each oth
er so easily. “It’s really beautiful. I see that you’re doing everything possible for your mom. You’re at her beck and call, wanting to get every moment in with her,” she said.
I liked and trusted Elizabeth, so I decided to fill her in on the E! True Hollywood story. She wasn’t surprised to hear there was a larger dynamic at play. “You have a tremendous connection. I see the depth of love you have for each other. So in the midst of all that love it seems inevitable that a pile of questions come to mind. How can you clearly love someone who means so much and also be so angry at them for their decisions? What do you do with that anger? How can someone who loves you so much make decisions that would hurt you so much?”
Elizabeth was concerned about me getting the professional support I needed to tackle those questions. “The thing is that anger and grief can be a pretty toxic combination that creates a lot of extra agony down the road,” she said.
“I’m not angry at Mom. I’m angry at the situation,” I insisted. (That was my story, and I was sticking to it.) “I’m angry at the circumstances that allowed her to end up here.” I could be mad at her so-called healers, at whatever had compelled Mom to reject medical help. But I couldn’t allow myself to be mad at her. In her final days, I needed to preserve our good relationship.
* * *
—
LIVING WITH MOM, each week folded into the next. In her dying world, there was no difference between the days of the week. The usual markers—Mad Men on Sunday, hockey on Monday, chess on the weekend—no longer applied. Now the passing of time was marked by other things: another worse stage of Mom’s illness, new flowers in season (tulips were done; we’d moved on to peonies), how many friends were still owed a goodbye, how many pieces remained in her jewellery box. She was deteriorating faster than any of us had expected. At the rate she was going she wouldn’t make it to the end of the lease, maybe not even to the end of summer.
Meanwhile I kept busy, tackling one task after another. Pulling off a good death for Mom was the most important thing I’d ever do in my life. I may have been hanging out with her on the edge of death, but with such a clear sense of purpose, I’d never felt more alive.
Teddy praised me for how well I was taking care of Mom. And Mom’s friends all remarked on what a “good daughter” I was. Their acknowledgments were nice to hear, even though the description made me cringe. (If anything, I identified more as a dutiful son.) I knew I was doing a good thing, but it certainly wasn’t out of obligation. It’s not as though I have a caretaker personality—I can barely keep my plants alive—and Mom never guilted me. She trusted that I didn’t do things I didn’t want to do. In fact, I think that’s why she allowed me to help her in the first place. (That, and I just kept showing up with gelato.)
Josh too was grateful, since he could continue working and being a present father and husband. And yet he told me he felt pushed away—that he wanted to visit more often, but Mom didn’t want him over more than twice a week. In retrospect, I think she didn’t know how to be in his company without feeling she had to take care of him. In contrast, Mom saw me as self-sufficient. It had taken me months, if not my whole life, to prove I required nothing of her. I was safe; everyone else was a threat.
In the evenings I’d go through my usual routine getting Mom ready for bed: close her blinds, plug in her phone, and place a bottle of cold vanilla Ensure in a frozen drink sleeve on her bedside table. It would keep it cool, how she liked it, for a few more hours. Then I’d clean out her vape and repack it with a couple pinches of weed from her jar.
One night she offered me some. Why not? I might as well try to relax a bit. I sat down next to Mom as she clicked on her vape. Once it was heated up, she took a pull and then plugged her nose to hold the vapour in her lungs. It was adorable, like a kid in the swimming pool. We chatted for a bit, passing the vape back and forth, and then I got up to give her a hug.
“Goodbye,” she whispered in my ear.
“No, Mom,” I said, laughing. “It’s just goodnight, not goodbye.”
“Oh, right.” She laughed. “Goodnight, darling.”
As I lay in bed stoned, staring up at the ceiling, images from the past few weeks floated through my mind. I was starting to see some patterns, connecting some puzzle pieces. Suddenly it was so obvious. The biggest piece of the puzzle—had I been staring at it the whole time? Mom spoke openly about so many personal things: her insecurities, her anxieties, her dating life. But there was one thing she never talked about. With anyone. Her best friends didn’t even know. I didn’t find out about it until I was a teenager. And even then I’d never really understood why it was such a big deal.
But I knew it was a big deal to her. So although it wouldn’t be easy, I resolved to ask her about it. As I drifted into a weed-induced fog, I told myself not to forget.
The next morning, my revelation passed the sobriety test. I was nervous as I broached the subject over our coffee and kombucha. With time running out, all topics were on the table. And my recorder gave me added permission.
“I have another question,” I said. “I’ve been noticing a bit of a theme: the times we’ve been looking at old photos of you, the old family movies. We comment on how gorgeous you were when you were young, and every time you say you wished you’d known how pretty you were.” I had to spit it out. “I get the sense that the nose job was a huge trauma for you.”
“It was,” Mom said without hesitation. “It was like a rape. I felt mutilated. I didn’t want it.”
I’d never heard her talk about it like that, in those words. When Mom was sixteen, her parents sent her to get a nose job. As far as they were concerned, it was just what Jewish girls with Jewish noses did back then. Her mother felt happier and more confident after she’d had one. Her dad told her he’d started putting away money when she was born so that he could give her the gift of this operation. It wasn’t a discussion. They thought they were doing her a favour.
I could sense from the few times she’d talked about it in hushed whispers that it had caused her a lot of grief. She hated her new Gentile-looking nose. She ended up getting two or three more surgeries over the years to try to make it better. (There was a small indent that no one else would have noticed, but it bothered her.)
“I think it was about confidence. I think I was beautiful rather than pretty, but I just felt like there was this little thing in the middle of my face. And it did feel like a rape. And on top of that, they sent me to a school without my closest friends. It’s like I was completely unmoored.”
“I don’t know if you’ve thought about it, but how much did that inform your decision not to get the surgery for your cancer?” I asked.
“It probably did. I’ve thought of it. I was really scared. I haven’t had good experiences in hospitals. I was kind of brutalized when I had Josh, too. And then there’s my elbow. It wasn’t conscious mostly, although I certainly thought of it—but yeah, I’m sure it did.”
Mom was being honest with me and herself. In times like this, I felt closer to her.
“Yeah, I think it goes beyond being conscious,” I said. “Just like if somebody, as you said, took away your body, like being raped, and did something that left you feeling mutilated and traumatized—”
“—in the middle of the face!” Mom interjected loudly.
“You might think, ‘Never again am I going to hand over my body to somebody to do something that I don’t want.’ ”
“I’m sure I did. I didn’t think those exact sentences, but I’m sure I did. Because I did think things like, ‘Once they get you, they’ll keep doing stuff to you.’ You know, ‘They’ll give me chemo when I don’t want it.’ I have very little trust.”
I was beginning to understand just how deep Mom’s distrust and need for agency went. And although I still couldn’t exactly articulate it, I was sensing that the injury went further back than her bad medical experiences, that the operation was ju
st the tip of the emotional iceberg.
“My dad never told me I was pretty when I was growing up, and my mother would say, ‘You’re so beautiful, if only you would do this, or do that.’ That’s more crucial than the nose job. There are people who have way worse nose jobs than me who are very confident. A lot of it has to do with your self-image as you’re growing up. Barbara was the cute one because she had a smaller nose. I wasn’t.”
I felt a burst of compassion in place of my usual frustration. I was starting to understand just how traumatizing the nose job had been for her, and more than that, the underlying message her parents had sent her—that she wasn’t okay the way she was, that she was defective, that she didn’t have inherent value just for being the intelligent and beautiful Jewish girl she was. Perhaps that’s why she always felt she had to sing for her supper. They’d removed only a bit of cartilage, but took away so much of her self-assurance in the process (Mom had mentioned how she lost herself in adolescence). I could see how it had taken her decades to build herself back up from the shame her parents had dumped on her.
Even if the picture was becoming clearer, I knew this was a bigger puzzle than one late-night marijuana epiphany could solve. “I think it was a perfect storm of different things,” I said.
“Of course,” Mom said. “Including my original GP saying that I didn’t have to get a colonoscopy five years before I got one. I wasn’t pushing for it because they do puncture about ten percent of them, so it was easy for me to think that will happen to me.”
Ah, there they were: the false facts and fatalistic attitude I’d come to know so well. Mom had a streak of throwing in the towel before she’d even played the game. It was as if she couldn’t stand to be disappointed, so she didn’t even try.
“You always think things won’t go your way,” I said. “When they first caught your cancer, and the doctors said there was a seventy to ninety percent chance you’d be cured, you never thought ‘I’m going to be in that majority.’ It seems you always assume you’ll get the short end of the stick.”
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