“Oh, don’t worry,” Aaron said with a grin. “Mina’s more than capable of handling him. Wait till the workout starts. He’ll quieten down then.”
He was right. To this day, Mina remains the only person I’ve ever known who could make Pat Conroy shut his wisecracking mouth and get down to business.
Chapter 17
When Everything We Do Isn’t Enough
Little did I know when I launched my plan for healthier living that I’d end up having not just one opponent but two, and both would go into it fighting me every step of the way. No sooner had Pat gotten on the path toward better health than I turned my attention to Nancy Jane, as if she didn’t have enough to worry about. For two years after Nancy’s diagnosis, I made the trip to Alabama on a fairly regular basis, often to pick my sister up and head somewhere looking for a new treatment approach.
Nancy Jane had survived her first year much better than anyone could’ve imagined, and her doctors were cautiously optimistic. I constantly researched doctors and clinics in order to find help. We’d go to any that offered a shred of hope: specialists at the Mayo as well as clinics in Mobile, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and Lexington. Each trip, Nancy Jane and I drove along singing “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz.” There’s no cure for carcinoid, the kind of cancer she had, but it’s manageable. Slow growing, it doesn’t respond to conventional treatment. Good news, she wouldn’t lose her hair; bad news, chemo doesn’t work. My sister’s only hope was to stay alive long enough for a treatment to be found.
Nancy Jane was always up for a trip, and we’d traveled together a lot before she got sick. (Neither the Mayo Clinic nor Emory Cancer Center had ever made our list of go-to places, however.) One of our most memorable adventures had been at my oldest son’s wedding in the British Virgin Islands. We swam with dolphins one day then found ourselves swimming with a shark the next—though not for long. No one’s ever seen a crowd of swimmers clear a beach like we did at the appearance of that dark, finned shape, at least five feet long, in the turquoise waters of St. Thomas. The shark wasn’t our only scary adventure in the islands. On a lark, Nancy Jane and I had decided to go native one evening and hired a car to take us to an isolated nightclub, high atop a mountain, that only the locals knew about. Some kind of festival was going on with dancing, drinking, and a pig roast. We hadn’t told anyone in the wedding party, so they wouldn’t talk us out of it. When the car we’d hired broke down on the way back, the driver disappeared to look for help and didn’t return for an hour. Suddenly two southern girls found themselves up the proverbial creek without a paddle, and we realized our foolishness.
“Think we took immersing ourselves in the local culture a tad too far?” Nancy Jane drawled as we peered out of the rattletrap, broken-down car with only a sliver of moon illuminating the vast darkness outside.
“Looks that way,” I said. “Mainly I feel bad for Jim and Liz, having their wedding ruined by the disappearance of the groom’s mother and aunt.”
“Jim’ll forgive you because you’re his mama,” Nancy Jane offered helpfully. “But Pat won’t. He’ll call us dumb Alabama hicks for getting ourselves into this mess.”
“He’s not doing my eulogy. No telling what he’ll say.”
Nancy Jane was more pragmatic. “He won’t get the chance. They’ll never find our bodies.”
An isolated mountaintop on St. Thomas would’ve been preferable to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where we found ourselves on our first stop at Adventures in Cancer-Land (Nancy Jane’s humor, not mine; I like to think I’m not quite that morbid). Although we always started out full of hope and good cheer, we rarely returned that way. Nancy Jane was so determinedly upbeat that it shamed me when each disappointment hit me so hard. So many times, I’d rave to her about a new clinic, how great they were and how much hope they’d offered, only to dissolve in helpless tears as soon as I got back to South Carolina. I knew it wasn’t her I was trying to convince; it was me. Every time I returned home from one of the quests, I’d find Pat waiting for me, hoping to hear that we’d finally found the Wizard. He’d take one look at my face and hold out his arms. During those times, a shoulder to cry on was the only thing he or anyone else could offer.
Although Nancy Jane was willing to keep looking for the elusive wizard, she was less cooperative when it came to the other aspect of her well-being, nutrition. After my struggles with Pat, it was déjà vu. Every doctor we saw had stressed the importance of nutrition and set her up with a dietician. With her digestive system so compromised, it’d take a lot of trial and error to see what she could tolerate. The problem was, despite her dire situation, my sister was as resistant to healthy eating as my husband had been. Not being much of a cook, she was fine with fast foods or takeout. But now, nutrition had literally become a matter of life and death. Processed food, I told her, was full of preservatives that she could no longer tolerate. Nancy Jane just groaned and rolled her eyes.
Over time the situation became even worse. Eventually, it wasn’t my sister’s resistance to healthy choices that caused the biggest problem. Because her weight loss and compromised digestion made nutrition impossible to ignore, she finally listened. But it’s one thing not to want to eat a certain thing and altogether another not to be able to. Finding food that she could tolerate was an ongoing battle, one I never gave up on. Things had gone so well the first year that we weren’t prepared for the decline in the second year. Nancy’d gone back to teaching, but it’d become more difficult and she’d reluctantly applied for disability. The only thing that kept her going was her faith and determination. She fought every day just to be able to live a normal life, something the healthy take for granted. Whenever I was with her, I came away with a different perspective on my petty gripes and complaints.
Pat was a great help in keeping Nancy Jane’s spirits up. He’d call and sing some ridiculous song he’d make up to make her laugh. “Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” became “Don’t cry for me, Alabama. The truth is, I never loved you. You lost to Auburn, you lost to Notre Dame; you’ll never win another football game.” He sang equally ridiculous songs about her ex-husband, as well as the principal at her school who was giving her a hard time. Instead of supporting a career teacher determined to return to teaching despite a major illness, Nancy Jane’s principal seemed equally determined to force her to quit. I only saw my sister cry twice during her long battle, and the first came after a call from the principal.
A few days after school started, the principal called to express her fears that parents might complain about their kids having a sick teacher. Since Nancy Jane had been named Teacher of the Year more than once, the woman’s concern was not only ludicrous, it was the worst kind of insult to throw at a dedicated professional. Nancy assured the principal that the minute her illness affected her teaching, she’d leave. Putting down the phone, she covered her face and tears rolled down her cheeks. Maybe she should just give up, she said. Beckie and I were visiting that day, and our reaction was fast and furious. The only thing that kept us from storming the principal’s office was Nancy Jane’s pleas not to make things worse.
When I told Pat what had happened, he called Nancy immediately. “If you need me to go to battle with your principal, just say the word,” he told her. “I wrote the book on it.” Nancy laughed, but Pat was dead serious. After hanging up, he asked me to contact my sister’s teacher friends. He’d met them several times and declared them the sassiest bunch of good old girls he’d ever seen. “Nancy Jane won’t tell me if she’s harassed again,” he said, “but those girls will. Tell them to call me if anything else happens.”
From the first time they met, Nancy Jane had been a great source of story for Pat, the obsessive story collector. She had a self-deprecating wit that he appreciated, and he’d egg her on to tell even more tales of the myriad ways she’d embarrassed herself in all sorts of social situations. The story he loved best, though, was when I’d been the one embarrassed, not her. When Nancy Jane wa
s four years old, I’d been charged with making her behave one Sunday during morning worship service at our church. Daddy was home sick, my sister Beckie was at a friend’s, and Mother was in the choir. We had communion that Sunday, and Mother had forgotten to give me instructions on what to do with my little sister. Sure enough, the call to communion came and Nancy Jane tagged along with me to kneel at the altar. In the Methodist church, children were supposed to stay in their pew. When the preacher got to me with the tray of tiny communion cups, Nancy Jane grabbed one before he could stop her. After slurping it down and smacking her lips, she stuck her tongue in to lick out all the grape juice. Because I glanced up to see if anyone had noticed, I missed the moment when she snatched a wafer from the tray in the preacher’s other hand. When we got back to our pew, I saw to my horror that she still held the wafer. Oh God, I thought. The body of Christ—my sister’s holding the body of Christ in her grubby little hand.
“Nancy Jane!” I whispered. “What are you doing with that?”
“I’m not gonna eat paper,” she said loud enough for the whole church to hear. “What’d you think I am, a billy goat?” When the congregation tittered, Nancy laughed with them, and from the choir loft my mother gave me a you’re-in-big-trouble-missy look. I not only got an earful when I got home, I also got a punishment Mother found even more fitting. Her missionary society took turns cleaning the church, and Mother made me do it in her place. Hopefully, she said, it’d give me time to think about the importance of showing proper reverence in a house of worship. All that, while the true culprit got off scot-free, the little imp.
* * *
The third year of Nancy Jane’s illness brought so many setbacks with her health that I began to lose hope. Although she’d tried to start the school year, she’d simply been too weak; and true to her word, she took a medical leave of absence. I feared that giving up teaching would crush her, but again, I’d underestimated my sister’s zest for life, and her determination to make whatever time she had left meaningful. Her willpower was strong as ever, and she remained active not only in church and community activities but also with her work as an advocate for other cancer victims. If sheer determination can keep that girl alive, I thought, then she’ll outlive us all.
As the illness progressed, dietary concerns were still the main challenge Nancy Jane faced. The extreme blandness of her daily fare began to take a toll on her normally ebullient spirits. Because so much of what she ate couldn’t be digested, she was always hungry. In truth, my sister was literally starving to death. Despite everyone’s best efforts, she simply wasn’t able to get enough nutrients through either diet or supplements. She was wasting away before our eyes, her weight less than ninety pounds. It was during this time, and a couple of years later with Pat’s illness, that I became a fierce advocate of medical marijuana. It seems like the worst kind of sin that if my sister had lived in another state, her suffering could’ve been lessened. It’s a slap in the face that something that could’ve helped her, or others like her, is denied—and not simply denied but something people are punished for. I can only assume that legislators who vote against relieving the pain of sick people have never watched anyone they love die. I’ll go to my grave bitter at the injustice done to cancer victims by denying them a chance to try anything that might help.
The third October after Nancy’s surgery, I took her to Louisville to see another wizard my research had turned up, who held the hope of a clinical trial. The Louisville doctor couldn’t have been kinder or more compassionate, but he wasn’t able to offer any miracles. Nancy Jane’s cancer was too advanced for her to be eligible for the clinical trial. Looking at her chart, the doctor noted that her birthday was a couple of days away. “Get your sister to take you somewhere fun for your birthday,” he told her with a forced note of gaiety. “Kick up your heels and do whatever you want for a change. You deserve it.”
I adopted the same tone as we started the drive back home, though it took all the effort I could muster. “You heard the doctor,” I said brightly. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Just name the place. New York? Miami? Las Vegas? We’ll even go to Switzerland!” It was one of the places we’d been promising ourselves for years that we’d visit.
Gamely, Nancy played along. Her answer surprised and touched me, and I had to blink back tears to keep up the forced cheeriness. “There’s only one place I really want to go,” she said finally. “And we can do it on our way home. I want to go to the Atlanta zoo one more time to see the pandas.” She laughed, sounding for a brief moment like her old self again. “Guess you could say I’m just dying to see those pandas.”
Because she was too weak to walk around, I pushed my sister in a wheelchair and perched her in front of the panda exhibit. To our amazement, on a sunstruck late October day, the exhibit wasn’t the least bit crowded, although normally people waited in long lines to catch a glimpse of the youngest of Lun Lun and Yang Yang’s offspring, two-year-old Po. To our further delight, Po was in full view and cavorted around for almost an hour. For a suspended moment of time, Nancy Jane lost herself in the simple joy of watching the roly-poly little panda play. A group of schoolkids arrived, and Nancy motioned for me to wheel her out of the way so they could see better. We paused for a minute to witness the kids squeal at the sight of the panda cub, and I watched Nancy Jane watch them wistfully. I knew she was thinking of her own students that she’d had to give up. Her eyes shone bright with unshed tears when she motioned for me to push her out, and she waved goodbye to the happy horde of kids, who waved back enthusiastically.
“You up for one more thing, Tanna?” she asked, and I assured her that I was up for anything. Pointing, she directed me to a place farther back in the zoo where I’d never been. It’d been years since I’d gone to the zoo, and there was tons of new stuff. “The pandas were for me,” Nancy Jane told me, “but this is a surprise for you.”
I started to protest that it was her birthday, not mine, but decided to keep my mouth shut for once. She fretted about me having to push her, and I retorted that it was much-needed exercise for my lazy butt. When we got to the walk-through aviary, I stopped in my tracks and Nancy Jane grinned at my reaction. The aviary, a spacious, screened landscape of rainforest, was full of pastel-colored parakeets who flitted through the trees like winged flashes of light. We purchased a handful of birdseed-tipped sticks and entered expectantly. Suddenly both of us found ourselves laughing in sheer surprise as the parakeets descended on us. They perched on our shoulders, arms, and outstretched hands, and eagerly nibbled our proffered treats. It was a blessed moment of magic that I’ll never forget, and I mouthed Thank you when I caught Nancy Jane’s eye. Despite the deafening chatter of birds, the squeals and giggles of kids, and the constant swoosh of wings, my sister and I maintained a reverent silence as we exited the aviary and started our journey home. Neither of us was ready to break the spell.
* * *
Christmas was on us before we knew it. After much conferring, the family decided to gather at Nancy’s house the day after Christmas for our usual get-together. Her son, Will, having just completed a graduate degree and gotten his first job as a physical therapist, was the perfect one to be with his mother during the holidays. Our October trip to the zoo had been a foretaste of what was to come, and my sister’d been confined to a wheelchair ever since. She couldn’t be left alone, so I planned to stay when Will returned to work. Pat was coming to help out too, after his visit with the girls in Atlanta.
Despite Nancy Jane’s obvious decline, the Christmas get-together was a festive occasion, which she enjoyed without a smidgen of self-pity. Everyone had made an effort to be there. Jake had flown in from California, with Jim and Liz driving up from south Florida and Jason from Birmingham. Nancy Jane was a beloved aunt who never forgot anyone’s birthday.
When the holidays were over and everyone went back to their regular routine, Nancy put me to work. With Ziploc bags, notecards, and pen in hand, we spread out all her jewelry for her to deci
de who’d get what. It could’ve been a morbid task; instead we joked around as we always did. The uglier the jewelry, the more fun we had deciding who’d get it. Pat came down with a bad cold and had to postpone his visit, but he checked in. He asked his sister-in-law what she’d gotten him for Christmas, although he knew full well what the answer was. It’d become a running joke between them. She always gave him the tackiest Bama souvenir she could find, just to hear him groan and carry on about what godawful cheap relatives he had.
I planned to stay with my sister as long as she needed me, though I knew she’d balk. Nancy had pleaded with me to spend New Year’s Eve with Pat but I refused, using his cold as an excuse. So she turned to the national championship football game, Alabama versus Notre Dame, as her trump card. She insisted I go home and watch it with Pat. Knowing I’d protest, she enlisted the help of her friends, and they worked out a schedule to stay with her while I was gone. I agreed to go home for a few days but told her to get used to it: I’d be coming back. I was the only one among the family and friends without a nine-to-five job, and, by God, I’d be back to stay with her whether she wanted me to or not. At the time, I was in the final edits of Moonrise and could work from her house as easily as mine.
I got home January third, exhausted but upbeat. I’d left Nancy Jane in good hands and high spirits. Her teacher friends came to her house with nachos, margaritas, and a movie, then piled on the sofa and floor to eat, drink, and be merry. I called her to say I’d gotten home fine, and that Pat was better and would be with me when I returned after the big game. The three of us would celebrate Bama’s almost certain victory, I said cheerily. In the background I could hear her friends laughing and cutting up, so I cut my call short. My last words to her were “Glad to know that those rowdy friends of yours haven’t settled down. Love you, and I’ll check in tomorrow.” I hung up smiling.
Tell Me a Story Page 27
