by Sara Arnell
I knew I had died a thousand slow, painful deaths. I was no longer the woman, mother, friend, sister, or daughter I once was. I didn’t recognize myself anymore. When I tried to be the chill mom, I landed with my head in the toilet bowl. When I tried to be badass, I ended up feeling mean and thoughtless (and was called the same). I wondered why I couldn’t convince the universe to see all my potential and transform me into a new and improved version of myself. “Here I am, universe,” I would say aloud. “Work your magic.” But the universe had other plans. I was a fountain of self-pity, self-regret, and sorrow. I felt sorry for everyone who encountered me in this sad state. All I was putting into the world were forms of sorrow, and that’s all I got back.
“It’s understandable,” people told me, “that you’ve lost your footing. Your life has been turned upside down.” “You’re an empty nester,” I was reminded, like it was a kiss of death that only the brave and strong could survive without emotional trauma or alcohol abuse. But I knew it was more than being an “empty nester” that had me wallowing in self-pity, binging on hard liquor, and acting like nothing really mattered anymore. It was shame. I had failed everyone around me. I started almost every sentence with the words “I’m sorry.” I ended almost every sentence with “I’m sorry.” And I was sorry from start to finish, every day, for everything I said or did. How had I gotten here? It was time to trace that path and to figure out how (or if) I should go forward.
Chapter 2
How Did We Miss an Eighteen-Pound Tumor?
“Mom. I have a terrible pain in my side. I’ve had it all day, and it’s getting worse. I think I need to go to the hospital,” my older daughter had texted.
It was fall of 2012—more than two years before the New Year’s debacle—and I was in class at Sarah Lawrence College, working part-time on my master’s degree. I left the classroom to respond to her 911 text. “I’ll meet you at the emergency room. Can you drive, or are you in too much pain?” I asked.
“I can meet you there.”
I walked into the emergency room entrance and saw her waiting nervously. I grabbed her hand, and we walked up to the front desk. I told the nurse on duty that we thought she was having an appendicitis attack. We had diagnosed this based on a Google search of “pain in lower right abdomen” and the fact that my younger daughter had had her appendix removed several years prior and the symptoms seemed the same. We were quickly taken inside and given a room. She changed into a hospital gown and we waited.
“I’m really scared,” she said. “I need a hug.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, while holding her tightly. “Getting your appendix out these days is a breeze. They do it with a laser. You won’t even have a scar.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry.”
The ER resident on duty came in after a few minutes and examined her. She told us they wanted to do an ultrasound to confirm that it was appendicitis.
“It’s all going to be fine,” I called out as she was wheeled away.
About thirty minutes after she was returned to her curtained-off room in the ER, the resident walked in and went directly to her. The doctor followed in slow motion, approaching my daughter’s bed like a zombie, arms extended and head tilted to one side. She touched my daughter’s shoulder and began rubbing it.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said.
My daughter and I burst into tears. We had no idea what she was “sorry” about, but we knew it couldn’t be good. The doctor looked like she’d just seen a ghost—one that was living inside my child’s body.
“What,” I said, “what did you find on the ultrasound?”
“It’s quite a large mass.”
“What do you mean?”
“She has a large mass on top of her ovary.”
“How large?”
“It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen.”
The doctor told us that my child needed surgery right away. I caught my breath and called my ob-gyn at NYU Hospital. I wanted him to look at the ultrasound and get his opinion before we made any decisions on surgery. I put him on the phone with the doctor, who informed him what was going on with my daughter. He told us to relax for the night, if possible, and to meet him the next morning at the hospital. He would put together a team of specialists and a top-notch surgeon, and the operation would take place the following afternoon.
My daughter had more tests and more ultrasounds, and all anyone could tell us was that the mass was very large and that they would know more once they began to remove it. They had an oncology team on standby, in case it was malignant. They were prepared for the worst. The doctor told us to go get something to eat and that he would be back to us in about four hours.
“Chinese food?” I asked my younger daughter, sister, and a few friends who had joined me at the hospital. We crammed into the elevator and emptied out onto First Avenue in search of lo mein. It was a cool but beautiful evening, and I felt bad for enjoying the feeling of the fresh air on my face. We sat at a big table in the window of the nearest Chinese place and small-talked about school and pets and things that had little connection to what was happening at the hospital a few blocks away. We all knew we were just there to pass time. When we couldn’t drink any more tea and had run out of anything more to say to each other, we trekked back to the hospital’s waiting room, leftovers in hand. That’s where the surgeon found us six hours after the operation had begun—with empty take-out containers scattered around us like fallen heroes. He was smiling.
“She’s fine and in recovery,” he said. They were the most beautiful words I’d heard in a long time.
He told us he had removed an eighteen-pound tumor along with one ovary and a fallopian tube that had been completely enveloped by the mass.
He said he was able to get the tumor out in one piece, which was a massive feat—pun intended—as he didn’t want any fluid from the tumor to leak into her abdominal cavity.
He said it was the largest tumor of its kind that he had ever removed.
He said that it took a little longer to get her to recovery because they had a group of residents come into the operating room to see him remove the mass in one piece.
He said they also had a photo session with the tumor and sent me a text of it on a surgical table with a dollar bill next to it for scale.
“Eighteen pounds,” I repeated in complete shock. “That’s bigger than the turkey I cooked for Thanksgiving.”
How could we all have missed an eighteen-pound tumor? How could we not see it externally as it encircled and crowded her organs? How long had this thing been growing inside of her? What kind of a mother would fail to notice something like this? I chastised myself for not sensing that something was wrong with my daughter. Every time I told someone that she had an eighteen-pound tumor removed from her abdomen, I got the same response:
“How did it get so big before you discovered it?”
“You couldn’t see it? There wasn’t a lump or anything?”
“Wow. How long was it growing before you noticed something was wrong?”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“It didn’t show,” I said.
“She was in pain, so we went to the ER,” I said.
Rationally, it all made sense. There was no way I could have known, but emotionally I felt like I had let her down. I felt out of touch with my role as a mother and a caregiver to my children. I was so absorbed in my own issues—changes at work, unshakable sadness, dwindling confidence—that I missed an eighteen-pound tumor. No one should miss an eighteen-pound tumor, I thought. If someone told me this story about their daughter, I would have had all kinds of judgments about their parenting, awareness, and motherly love. For months after the extraction, I would punish myself (and everyone around me) with my embarrassment. “How are you doing?” someone might ask. “Well,” I’d say, “my older daughter had a tumor rem
oved from her abdomen that I never noticed. It was the size of a roasted turkey that could feed a family of ten with plenty for leftovers.” No one stuck around to hear more.
On the day of her last appointment with her doctor—nine months after we first went to the ER—she was given an “all clear” and released from his follow-up care. The incision was healing fine, and there were no signs of malignancy.
“Go live your life” were the final words of advice from the surgeon. We got in the car and drove home.
“I’m moving to San Francisco,” my daughter blurted out as I maneuvered the twists and turns of the parkway.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean I’m moving. The doctor said to go live my life, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Wait. I don’t understand. When did you decide this? What’s going on?”
“I’ve always wanted to go to San Francisco.”
I wanted to pull over on the side of the road and look her in the face so she could explain to me when this cross-the-country plan was hatched and what she intended to do once she got there. I wanted to complain that I’d just nursed her back to health for nine months and that she couldn’t just leave. I wanted to tell her that her sister was leaving for college soon and that I never thought she would leave New York—that she was “too New York” to leave. I needed to tell her that I was sorry that I missed the eighteen-pound tumor and that I would pay more attention from now on. I wanted to tell her not to leave me.
We didn’t talk the rest of the way home. She said she had to start packing, book a ticket, and find a moving company. She had some appointments with realtors set up. I didn’t understand why she had kept this a secret from me. I told her I felt betrayed.
“I knew you’d freak out, and I was right.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because that’s what you do.”
She laughed and shook her head when I told her how shocked I was that she saw me this way.
There’s something that happens to my oldest child when she faces uncertainty in her life: she becomes very certain about certain things. It took her three days to pack up and move to San Francisco. She took her guitar with her and said she was going to find work as a musician.
“The tumor was a sign, Mom,” she told me as we pulled into the driveway. “I need to go do things that make me happy.”
It took me a moment to realize that what I was feeling was jealousy. I wanted—needed—a moment of realization like this. She was so sure. I’d kill to feel this way, I thought. At work I was making decisions all the time, but I never felt sure about any of them. I felt they were safe or logical or necessary or helpful but never completely without question. I wanted to feel so deeply and passionately that my own decisions were right and good. I wondered if there was a recent sign—a metaphorical tumor—that I had missed. Did I gloss over a moment of adversity that could have catapulted me toward big, passion-driven changes in my life? Would I get another chance? Would I recognize a sign or signal, even if it knocked me on the side of my head? Could I ever feel the kind of certainty my daughter now felt? I wished I had a tumor too, something that could be removed from me and change my life.
“I should have moved to Paris when I was about twenty-five,” I blurted out to her as I walked into her bedroom after we got home from that final doctor visit where she’d been given a clean bill of health.
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to. It was a thought I had again and again about living there and being a writer. I wanted to have fun.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“I was scared,” I told her. We stood looking at each other. I realized I was just as scared in that moment as I had ever been.
Chapter 3
Spring 2013
“Well,” I said at our morning staff meeting, “a year and a half ago Ad Age magazine called me an unlikely CEO when I was appointed to run this legendary advertising agency—you know, being female, promoted internally, first C-suite title for me—and they may have been right on paper. They also said I was up for fighting a good fight during our moment of crisis and, in this, they were absolutely right.
As I look at you, I see a team of unprecedented talent and determination, and I have no doubt that we will continue to break new ground in advertising. We have won business and we have lost business. We are at a critical turning point in the life of this agency, and we need to fight the good fight harder than ever now. Our situation should be looked at as both an opportunity and a catalyst. We’re all in this together, as we have always been.
Most of you’ve been here long enough to remember that after one particularly grueling all-nighter, our presentation flew out the back window of the car while on the way to the meeting and littered Eighth Avenue with pages of ideas and designs—which I’m sure would have won us the business, if we actually presented the work, instead of losing it.
We’ve experienced some crazy times and have the stories to prove it! We traveled the globe to consult, create, and contribute our work and ideas to some of the world’s most beloved and successful brands. If a company wanted to make style a substantive part of their identity, they called us. So what that we moved from the so-called penthouse to the ground floor! We’re more than our surroundings and view. We’re more than the decisions that were made for us. We’re more than the cost-cutting that we had to go through.
Yes, we lost a lot of business—it’s the nature of agency life. Yes, we have to save as many accounts as we can—and grow them. Let’s remember who we are, what we have done, and what we know we’re capable of doing. We have a lot to do in order to achieve our goal for growth, and I commit to doing everything in my power to stay focused on that goal. You know who you are, and I do too. Let’s review what we’ve got going on. Remember, there are sharks in the water, circling.”
We had just pitched and won a new piece of business that we needed to discuss. The job was to help a well-established brand develop new, innovative product ideas. We didn’t get paid what we deserved, but we weren’t in a position to walk away from the work. “We can nail this and then get more work from them,” I said, “but first someone has to manage the client”—the one who’d called the account director and asked for more creative ideas than we had agreed to in our contract, before the ink had even dried. He wanted too much, and he knew it.
He knew we were operating a shifting business that couldn’t afford to lose an assignment.
He knew we had some of the best talent in advertising working here.
He knew he could push us and get what he wanted.
He knew we needed to sacrifice our value to prove our worth again.
He knew we had to show quarterly improvements.
He knew we needed to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
He knew he had us over a barrel.
I thought of the TV show Mad Men and what agency boss Roger Sterling said: “Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face.”
“He’s taking advantage of us,” someone said.
“He’s being a jerk,” someone else said.
“I’ll take him to lunch,” I said.
I picked a restaurant that I thought would wow him, reassert our style, and give him confidence in the business. We had a good talk and came to an agreement as to how we would move forward in a way that was fair to both of us. I wasn’t happy, but I knew we could make it work.
“Fake it till you make it. Again,” I said to myself.
A few days later, he called the account director once again and asked for another round of creative ideas. This broke our lunch pact. I felt the inevitable slap, just like Roger predicted.
Chapter 4
Levon Helm Is in the Hospital
“Levon Helm is in the hospi
tal,” my mother called to tell me. It was the spring of 2012. She read it in the local paper. He was the drummer for The Band, the sixties group that backed Bob Dylan before they went on to record their own hits. The Band was famous for an album called “Music from Big Pink,” released in 1968. “Big Pink” was the nickname for the pink-colored house they rented in West Saugerties, New York. I knew all this because I grew up in Saugerties. This was legendary stuff.
I took my daughter to see Levon play at his performance space in Woodstock, New York, about a year prior, while struggling to connect with her during my new, elevated role at work which was taking up much of my time, energy, and thoughts.
…while trying to prove to her that things were already changing for the better.
…while trying to show her that my new role was not an anchor.
…while trying to show her I’d still have time to do things with her.
We both loved listening to music from the sixties and frequently connected on this topic. It’s a perfect thing for us to do together, I thought—an experience we can share and reminisce about, again and again. After we saw the concert, we entered true fandom. We started listening to music from The Band. We bought a photo of The Band by Norman Seeff and hung it on our kitchen wall so we could see it every day. We even decided to get away for a weekend and rented their old house, the one called Big Pink. I slept in the room that had been Garth Hudson’s. My daughter slept in what we were told had been Levon’s room. The night we went to the concert, one of the security people said that it was going to be a great show, that Levon’s voice was good tonight. My daughter looked to me to translate. “He had throat cancer a few years ago,” I said.
“What hospital?” I asked my mother, focusing back on the conversation at hand.
