by Adam Mitzner
“The doctors are telling me that there’s a good chance that I’m going to be okay,” I said.
That was as much as I was willing to lie. Not a certainty, or even a very good chance. Just good. Which, of course, was still untrue.
Charlotte was mollified by my response. She had her usual smile back, and she gave me a hug.
“I’m sorry that you’re sick, Mommy,” she said.
I knew Ella would not be so easily soothed. At fifteen, she was old enough to understand that her world had just changed and would never be the same again. But she followed her younger sister’s lead and put her arms around me, pretending to believe what I’d told Charlotte.
Clint left for work shortly after. He offered to take the day off, but I told him that it was important he set the example of everyone doing their jobs as usual, which in his case was working around the clock.
When I went into Ella’s room, I found her on her computer. She startled at my presence, as if viewing a website we would not allow. I knew she was doing her own research about cancer survival rates.
“I thought you might have some questions you didn’t want to ask in front of Charlotte,” I said.
Ella looked at me as if I hadn’t said anything. Her blankness was so complete that I was tempted to ask if she’d heard me, but of course she had.
Finally, she said, “What stage is your cancer?”
I had vowed to treat her like the adult she was becoming. I wouldn’t sugarcoat or evade the truth.
“Four,” I said, as even-keeled as I could utter the word.
I had always thought that Ella was much more like me than Charlotte. Some of that was because she bore such a striking resemblance to me. If it weren’t for the advances in photography and fashion since the 1970s, I would have had a hard time discerning whether my high school pictures were of me or her. Her performance last night had further proven what I had long known: that, in addition to my face, Ella had also inherited my singing voice. But when I looked at her now, I saw nothing but Clint. The way he could bore into my thoughts with his intelligence, almost as if it were truth serum.
“I’ll do the whole living-my-life thing like you said, Mom, but only if you promise me something.”
“Anything,” I said, and the moment I did, I prayed that her request would be something that I could actually grant.
“Promise that you’ll tell me when you know that the end is near,” she said, sounding so much more grown-up than she had been just a few minutes earlier. “You don’t have to tell Charlotte, and I won’t either. But I need to know. Otherwise, I’ll go crazy. Every day I’ll be worried that you know you’re about to die and you’re not telling me.”
“I promise. I’ll tell you as soon as I know.” Then I added, “If it comes to that, which hopefully it will not.”
It wasn’t the only promise I made regarding things I’d need to do when the end was near.
The other I made to myself. But it would have to wait. And I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to see it through.
21.
The first week after chemo, my hair was still in place, and I allowed myself to think that I might be one of the tiny percentage of chemo patients who did not suffer from that side effect. That hope lasted only until the next day, when the first clump came out in my hand in the shower. The following morning, my pillow resembled the remnants of a shedding black Lab.
I contemplated waiting for the girls to come home from school and having them help me shave my head, as if it were some bonding activity, like giving each other facials. But it wasn’t that, and no amount of pretending would make it anything other than it was—a sign that I was dying. So I stood alone, looking at my old self for what I knew might be the last time. From now on, the image that stared back at me wouldn’t be me, but a shell of who I once was. Maybe, if I was lucky, if I was in that 25 percent that I now considered to be a more exclusive club than those who had walked on the moon, I might once again see myself in the reflection. But if I was in the other group, the 75 percent chemo could not save, this was goodbye to that person. Even though the Anne Broden captured in the reflection now wasn’t healthy, at least she didn’t look sick, and in a moment, that would not be the case.
The only lefty scissors in the house that I could find were Charlotte’s. Smaller than my hand, with a bright-green handle, the ones she used for her art projects. I thought about doing it in stages: cutting my hair first to shoulder-length. Then into a sporty chin-bob, and finally an adorable pixie, like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. But without further thought, I brought the scissors to the roots on the top of my head.
It took less than five minutes. It reminded me a bit of those films they show at the end of the evening news when a building is demolished. How the structure comes down in seconds, even though it took years to build. This felt the same, except I was that structure.
I visited Dr. Goldman’s for my biweekly testing like clockwork until mid-February, when his weeklong vacation in Aruba through Presidents’ Day meant it would be three weeks between appointments. The last time I had seen him, he’d said that my cancer seemed to be receding, but we’d need more time to know for sure.
“It’s good that we’re skipping a week,” he’d said. “I should get a clearer indication of where things stand when I get back.”
On my next visit, Dr. Goldman entered the tiny exam room sporting a deep tan, the tip of his nose already peeling. I asked if he’d had a nice vacation. He said he had, then looked down at my chart.
It had become something of a parlor game with me to try to discern what Dr. Goldman was going to say, given the look on his face. I had previously assumed that I either wasn’t very good at it or that the man had a world-class poker face.
The instant his eyes met mine again, however, I knew that my assessment had been wrong. This time, I knew exactly what he would say.
“The cancer has spread,” he said. Then, without letting the import of the words set in, he destroyed whatever optimism I’d clung to. “We could switch to a different protocol, but I don’t see any reason to believe it would be more successful.” And then, to seal my fate, he uttered the words everyone else had said to me, but which he had thus far resisted: “I’m sorry, Anne.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
The question was rhetorical. I knew what it meant—that my dream of seeing Ella graduate from high school, or at least attending her Sweet Sixteen, would not come true. I likely wouldn’t be around for Charlotte’s tenth birthday in August. In fact, the odds were long that I’d survive to the end of the school year.
Dr. Goldman took the question literally. “We’ll stop the chemo. You’ll feel better in the short term, maybe as soon as a week. And your hair will begin to grow back.” He smiled, as if regaining some of my hair were consolation for losing my life, although I suspect it was more out of force of habit than any belief on his part that it was a silver lining. “In the longer term, however, it means that the cancer will spread until it overwhelms your system and ends your life.”
When I’d first received news of my condition, I became woozy and unfocused, unsure where I was or what had just happened. I didn’t remember a single word my original doctor said after “stage-four breast cancer.”
This time, my reaction was the opposite. Rather than the world falling out of focus, everything slowed, and I could see with sharpened clarity. I was going to die. Soon. It was a fact. There was nothing I could do about it.
“How long is the longer term?” I asked.
Up until this moment, Dr. Goldman had refused to provide me with a definitive answer to this most crucial question. Like a politician, he’d offer me statistics and ranges, none of which provided any useful information. But, as Ella had done with me, I’d made Dr. Goldman promise that, when the end was at hand, he’d tell me what I needed to know.
Giving credit where it is due, he kept his word.
“Two to three months, give or take,” he said softly bu
t with conviction. “You should be fine for the next month, during which you’ll be feeling better than you have in some time. Enjoy this period. When the fatigue begins to set in, that will be the beginning of the end. Sometime during the few weeks after that, you’ll begin to have difficulty eating or drinking. Some patients tell me that they begin to lose interest in anything having to do with the outside world, and some report that they no longer want to see friends, or even family. That’s when life expectancy becomes measured in weeks. At some point, you’ll be sleeping most of the day, and that’s when you only have days left. And, I’m sorry to say, the last few days, you will not be yourself at all. You’ll be largely uncommunicative, and some patients appear to be suffering from delusions. That said, you should be able to recognize loved ones right up until the very end.”
I returned home from the doctor as if I were already dead. How could I tell Clint—and Ella, if I planned to keep my word to her—that I had two, maybe three, months to live? How could I not tell Charlotte?
I was cursing my decision to endure chemo in the first place. But like so many times since my diagnosis, I stifled the thought, realizing that wishing I could go back in time and do things differently wasn’t a productive use of the little time I had left.
When the girls were babies, I always recorded their firsts. Teeth, words, steps, and birthdays were memorialized in the baby books I kept for them. When later firsts arrived—days of school, camp, ballet recitals, subway rides alone—the events might be captured with a photograph, but the true repository was my memory. There were some lasts too, of course, but they always were either acts of abandonment (piano) or the natural progression upward (lower-school graduations). Never an end to something that anyone wished would continue. And now, my entire life would be consumed with lasts. Worse still, no one would know that these events were lasts, except in hindsight.
Clint arrived home a little after ten. As soon as he entered the bedroom, he smiled broadly, which had become something of a habit of late. It sometimes made me feel as if he were expecting me to be dead and was pleasantly surprised that I was still breathing.
At least tonight I knew that wasn’t the only reason for his happiness. It was my attire that had lifted his spirits.
I was wearing lingerie.
Even with my baldness, I still looked good in lingerie. In fact, chemo’s one positive result was that I had lost ten pounds.
“Where are the girls?” Clint asked.
“Ella’s sleeping at Sydney’s, and Charlotte is at Olivia Lubins’s birthday party. They’re going to see Finding Nemo.”
“How many times is that for her?”
“Three.”
“Three times,” Clint said with a sly smile. “I think that’s a worthy goal, don’t you?”
Over the years, I had heard from others who knew Clint from a work setting that he was one cool customer. The type of man who was methodical in his thinking, no matter how inflamed the passions around him. He liked this image of himself, I think. The commander keeping his head while everyone else loses theirs.
I knew that it was an act. Perhaps that’s unfair, as act denotes subterfuge. More accurately, it was a matter of will. He could keep his feelings in check when he needed that level of control, but when there was nothing to be gained by it, he was as emotional a man as I’d ever known. He cried at sad movies more often than I did, and almost anything sentimental about our daughters reduced him to putty.
So far, he had relied on his control to be my rock. When I cried or felt desperate, he assured me that he had not given up hope.
After our first time that night, while Clint and I lay naked in the dark, basking in the afterglow, I told him what Dr. Goldman had told me. I knew that meant there would be no second time, much less a third. In fact, I doubted we’d ever make love again.
It was a last.
22.
I decided I’d tell Ella, but not Charlotte. At least not right away. When the end was nearer, Charlotte and I would have our discussion. Clint concurred with the decision, but even as we were reaching it, I could imagine a grown-up Charlotte telling Clint that she never forgave me for not telling her sooner.
My original plan was to tell Ella first thing Saturday morning, so that we’d have the entire day to be together to act like a normal mother and daughter. But at breakfast, Ella told me that she had made plans to meet up with some friends in Brooklyn.
“I’d like you back by five,” I said.
She pouted. “Really?”
“Yes, really. I’m going to make stuffed shells tonight, and I’d like us all together when it hits the table.”
She didn’t answer, which meant that she had agreed to my demand. After all, stuffed shells were Ella’s favorite. The things mothers do that they think will comfort their children. Pasta filled with cheese would not be adequate reparations for Ella losing her mother.
I had read everything I could about how to share this news with teenagers, but it was all the usual stuff—be direct, don’t lie or overpromise, provide enough detail for them to understand, but don’t overwhelm them with information, let them lead the discussion, and then give them time to process what you’ve imparted. None of it gave me much insight as to how to phrase the concept that Mom would be dead in two months and Ella would live the rest of her life without me.
By midafternoon, Charlotte was rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, her activity of choice whenever I limited her television watching. It must have been her third time through the Potter books, and I had told her that when she finished this go-round, she needed to start something new rather than go back through the series. My most recent nominee was The Golden Compass. Charlotte wouldn’t hear of it, however. She had similarly rejected my earlier suggestions of Anne of Green Gables and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. “Want me to read some to you and then you can read some to me?” I asked.
Charlotte’s face lit up. It was something I had learned from Ella—no matter how old kids get, they love to be read to by their parents.
I had read the Harry Potter books too, always within the week that they came out. Among many more important things, my worsening prognosis meant I would never know exactly how Harry defeated Voldemort in the end, assuming of course that good triumphed over evil in the wizarding world.
For more than an hour, Charlotte snuggled against me, her body in a ball as if she were a lap cat, while I read. At times I assumed she was daydreaming, or full-on asleep, but whenever I missed a word, she was quick to pop up and ask me to reread the sentence.
As I read, I thought about what price I would be willing to pay for more time. This was a normal part of the process of bargaining that comes with grief, or so I’d heard. The truth is, I would have sold my eternal soul to the devil for more time with my family. But how long? To see my grandchildren and die at a ripe old age? In a heartbeat. Until the day after the girls got married? Yes, of course. Until college graduation? That too. High school? Yes. Eternity in hell for one more year with my loved ones? Even that would have been a fair trade.
Ella came home a few minutes before five.
I had been in the kitchen but came out into the hallway when I heard the front door open. In the time it took me to wash the cheese off my hands, however, Ella had already escaped into her bedroom, and I instead found Charlotte parked in front of the television. Even though we had a perfectly nice sofa, she liked to sit on the rug with her chin propped on her fists, elbows on the ground. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius was on.
“Was that your sister I just heard?”
Her attention didn’t break from the show. In another life I might have said, Earth calling Charlotte, but this time I decided to get down on the floor beside her, even though it took a fair amount of energy for me to do it and getting up would be even more difficult. Luckily for me, I reached the floor at exactly the same moment that the show ended, which caused Charlotte to smile at me instead of the screen.
“How’s my baby girl?�
�
“Good. How’s my baby mommy?”
She giggled after saying that, as she always did.
“She’s good too. What’s on after the boy genius?”
“SpongeBob.”
That settled that question, at least. Charlotte wouldn’t budge from her spot in front of the television for the next thirty minutes.
“Enjoy your time at Bikini Bottom.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She had just started calling me Mom, yet another sign my little girl was growing up. Then again, Ella had jettisoned mommy by the time she was five. I kissed my younger child on the top of her head and breathed in her sweet scent, just as Patchy the Pirate asked that age-old question: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
The few minutes I’d spent on the rug with Charlotte had been long enough for Ella to power up her iBook and stare at the screen as if it held the secrets of the universe. The hours she spent alone with that device made me long for the days when the television was her best friend, because at least then I knew what she was looking at.
“What are you doing?”
“Homework.”
“What did you and your friends do today?”
“Nothing too much. Just hung out.”
That was about as much small talk as I was going to be able to accomplish before losing my nerve. I took a deep, cleansing breath.
“I need to talk to you, Ella.”
Ella’s face went blank. Her complexion lost whatever little color her usually pale skin would allow. Her eyes began to fill.
When Ella was born, the nurse who handed me my daughter for the first time said, “Here you go, Mama. I think you have a very old soul in this precious baby girl.”
