Later on that afternoon I was sitting on the couch reading to Julie. I had my arms round her and she was snuggled up to me: I was shattered, and she was glad to have her mummy to herself for once that weekend. Before I knew it we were both asleep.
‘Wake up, Julie,’ I heard Aquinas whispering a little later on. ‘Time to go to the party.’ I opened my eyes, remembering that Julie did indeed have a birthday party to go to. That was good – it would get her out of the house to do normal kiddy things. I forced myself to get up, and Grace and I took her down the road to her friend’s house. When I picked her up a couple of hours later it gladdened my heart to see her racing around the garden with a dozen other excited five-year-olds, splashing through a paddling pool and trying to catch hold of bubbles that an older brother was blowing. This was what she should be doing, and this is what I needed to hang on to for her – sunny days of uncomplicated happiness, free from the shadows that were crowding in on the rest of us.
When Gerard came back after work, bringing his mother with him, we were all ready for something to take us out of ourselves. It was a balmy evening and we all drifted outside with our food and drinks, enjoying the warm weather. We opened bottle after bottle of wine, hardly noticing how much we were drinking. Sarah and Richard were talking together, united and friendly for once. Deirdre’s son Terence was there too, enjoying the craic with the two of them. We were all trying to have such fun, and indeed at times I felt almost elated, yet this was anything but a normal family gathering. I sensed a kind of urgency amongst us, a desperate need to feel happy and excited, a need to deny and forget the awful truth that was only just dawning on us. It wasn’t like me to drink – a glass of wine with a meal was all I ever had – but once I had started in earnest that night, I couldn’t stop. At one point, sick with wine and emotion, I stumbled into the toilet. Overwhelmed with sudden misery, I started sobbing. Deirdre must have heard me, because I remember her suddenly being there and putting her arms around me.
‘I must have done something terrible in my life to deserve this,’ I said through my tears. ‘It is so unfair. The first time it was easy to be brave, but now I’m just so dreadfully weary of it all. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.’
‘You will because you must. You’re a survivor – you’re so much better than I am at dealing with setbacks.’
‘I might die, Deirdre.’ She was silent, and I saw tears welling up in her own eyes.
‘Don’t even say that. It’s not going to happen.’ I was her baby sister, and it was unthinkable that I might disrupt the natural order of things by getting a fatal illness before my older siblings.
‘I just feel so tired, so worn out. I don’t know if I have the energy to fight this.’
Deirdre had been to hell and back in her own life and I knew she understood that feeing of impotent fury at the cards life had dealt me. Her husband had died very suddenly at the age of forty-two, completely without warning. It had devastated her and her son, and it took them years to recover from the loss. Sometimes, even now, I suspect she has not yet recovered.
‘Listen, I know you, you’ll know how to cope. I’m worried about the rest of us, watching you, feeling helpless. You’re tough, Bernadette. I know you can do it.’ She buoyed me up as well as she could, until I felt able to go back outside.
I found Aquinas talking with Anne. ‘No one else seems to have so much tragedy in their lives. Look what has happened to us: our Dad, my baby, Deirdre’s husband, Frank’s two wives. What’s going on? Why us? What else are we going to be hit by?’ Then Gerard broke in:
‘I know it looks like that, but I think if you dig a little you will always find something fairly awful in everyone’s lives. It’s the way people deal with it that counts, I think.’ He drew me away a little, not wanting me to be affected by the idea that we had been singled out for destruction by an angry and indiscriminate God.
‘We were doing so well, we were all so happy.’ I was almost shouting the words. ‘This is twisting my mind up, this second cancer. I’m so angry I want to break something.’ I kicked a wooden chair and hurt my toe. I was as bitter as hell.
‘I know, Bernie. I feel it too. I don’t know what to say to make it better for you. All I can say is that I really feel we can get through this, you know. We’re both strong, and whenever you’re feeling weak I’ll be even stronger for you. You know I’ll always take care of you, whatever happens.’
He was such a rock to me, I could fit my complaints about him onto the head of a pin. Of course we’ve had our ups and downs just like any couple, we’re not perfect, but I do feel so incredibly fortunate to have Gerard in my life. I don’t know if he will ever know how much he did for me over the coming, terrible months. Sarah came over. ‘Mum, I hope you don’t mind, I told my friends.’ Christ, she had loads of friends. Did the entire village know by now?
‘Oh. Who?’
‘Um, Ciara, and Emily, and Jessica. Is that OK?’
I nodded. Of course I minded, but I understood. Her mother had cancer, she needed to talk it through with her friends. It was no secret, and that was important. This must not become a taboo subject.
The evening wore on, and we all got completely plastered, each one of us using alcohol as a way of blotting out reality. I can’t remember going to bed; in fact I think Ger carried me upstairs that night.
The last thing I remember is sinking under the covers and craving the sweet oblivion of sleep. If only I did not have to face a tomorrow.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Battle-Stations, Mum!’
I woke up the next morning with a throbbing head. It hurt to open my eyes and my mouth felt like a small furry animal had made a nest in it. I groaned: I had not been hung over like this for many years, and now I remembered why.
‘Water … orange juice,’ I croaked at Ger, who wasn’t in much better shape himself. What a night we’d had – much of it was a blur now, but I knew I’d never felt so happy, or so wretched, at any one time. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Charles Dickens’ well-worn phrase now had a new meaning for me. I swallowed a glass of water and shut my eyes again. Go away, day.
Richard popped his head around the door. ‘Mum? Dad? You two all right? I’m just getting Julie her breakfast.’ I sat up and smiled at him, much as it brought a searing pain to my temples. Richard was such a great son, I thought. We were so lucky he seemed to have bypassed the much-dreaded stroppy teenager phase and cruised straight through to responsible young man. And at his age he had the capacity to shrug off a night’s drinking more easily than us.
‘Will I get you a bit of breakfast?’
‘Er … no thanks,’ mumbled Gerard. ‘We’ll be up soon and we’ll be going to Mass in an hour so could you make sure everyone’s up and ready? Thanks, Rich.’ Richard nodded and disappeared. Ger sank back into the pillows and massaged his temples. ‘I feel like I’ve been poisoned.’
‘You have! Think how toxic alcohol must be if it makes you feel this bad. I think our bodies are trying to tell us something.’ How I hated feeling like this. I had to get ready to face the day. The second day, as I thought of it. It was now forty-eight hours since my diagnosis and it was starting to sink in properly.
Later that morning, at Mass, I knelt with my family in our usual place. I was trying to concentrate on the reading, but the priest’s sing-song voice washed over me, the smell of incense was soporific and my mind wandered. I remembered going to Mass as a child, every Sunday without fail – my mother was very devout. It was a special outing for us kids: having worn our school uniform all week we would wear our best clothes to church and try to behave as quietly and sensibly as possible. Half the town would be there – it was the kind of place where everyone knew, or thought they knew, everybody else’s business. We were friendly to our neighbours and played in the street with the local kids, but nobody really knew our business. We didn’t wash our dirty linen in public, my fiercely proud Mum would say, not us. They would not have known
how alone she felt with a houseful of growing kids and a husband who drank too much; they would not have known the reasons that drove my dad to drink most of his wages, or indeed why his own father had behaved in the same way. Only she and God knew the truth.
Dad went to a different church in the middle of the town, near to where he grew up. Sometimes, if I was lucky, he would take me with him. ‘This is my youngest,’ he would say, showing me off to his friends. And I would swell with pride as I sat next to him, admiring his smoothed-down hair and clean jacket – even if the big hands that held mine were rough and grey from the building work he might have been fortunate enough to have been given that week. I used to ask Dad if God was watching me all the time, or only when I was in church. ‘All the time, lassie, all the time.’
As we all stood up to sing the offertory hymn, Julie standing up on the pew itself, I glanced sideways at my sister Deirdre. Did she believe now as fervently as we all did as children? Back then we lived in terror of hell-fire and damnation, but of course we never did anything that could be classified as a mortal sin. I used to trail off to confession with her on Saturdays, prepared to confess my regular sin: ‘I stole the sugar.’ I knew it was definitely a sin because my mother had told me so. Once I used a bold word and Mum frightened the life out of me by telling me it was a mortal sin. We lived our lives on simple precepts: Do as you would be done by. What goes around comes around. Tell the truth, help others, serve God. I knew that if I was good I would go to Heaven. If not, the Other Place. God could be fierce and vengeful, so I did my best to stay on the straight and narrow.
Well, I thought bitterly, my anger of the night before starting to resurface, I had probably not lived an entirely blameless life but I hadn’t done anything to deserve such a bad deal. All I wanted to do was raise my little family. I wasn’t a bad person and nor was anyone in my family – were we all being punished for crimes we hadn’t committed? Deirdre was singing her heart out next to me. She couldn’t have been a better person, and look what God had brought down upon her head. I remembered once telling our priest – who had innocently come to the house on a duty visit – that I wasn’t so sure I believed in Heaven and Hell. My mother was ready to kill me, and that priest was out of the house before giving me an answer. ‘That’s funny,’ I had said to her as he disappeared through the door, ‘I thought he was supposed to know about this stuff.’
Perhaps, I thought to myself as we all drove back home in silence that day, my fourteen-year-old self had been right to question it all. At that moment it truly felt as if I was existing in a Godless universe. There was no guiding providence, no purpose, no point. All we pitiful humans had was ourselves. Then nothing.
As soon as we got home I took my hangover back to bed for a while, grateful that Anne and Ger were preparing Sunday dinner. I needed some time by myself to think. What was ahead of me? Was there anything I could do? Something, anything, to improve this desperate situation. What did I need to know about it? I had some health books on my shelf which I had studiously avoided ever since that nurse had told me not to read anything. Aw feck it, I thought, I’ve got to start somewhere. I decided I wasn’t going to go through whatever treatment was meted out to me blindly and acceptingly. This was my body, and my mind. I had to find out if there was anything I could do to deal with this. I’ll do what I’m told, I thought; I’m not going to challenge the medical system, but perhaps there are other ways. I was clutching at straws, and I knew it. Where to begin, I had no idea. I picked up one book, almost at random. It was Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil, and it had a whole section on cancer. An hour later I was still reading it, and was already starting to feel more positive. I read about all the different ways I could increase my ‘internal resistance’ and help my body to heal. I read about cranial osteopathy, visualization, herbs, tonics, healing foods, supplements, yoga, and more. I read miraculous stories of ordinary people somehow switching on their bodies’ natural defence systems and recovering fully from fatal diseases. It was as if someone from outside the rigid confines of the medical world might just be granting me a reprieve: maybe I wasn’t bound to die from this thing after all. This book, and many others that I read over the next months, gave me huge hope and encouragement: people do get better. When your back’s against the wall, it’s amazing how you can find a way.
A shout roused me: dinner-time. On my way downstairs I looked in on Richard.
‘Richard!’ I said excitedly, waving the book at him. ‘Listen. I’m discovering that there are loads of things I can do to help myself. It’s all here in this book – I just need to find out what it is going to take for me to boost my body’s own defences.’
He grinned at me. ‘Battle-stations, Mum!’ he said, punching me on the shoulder. He had caught my mood exactly. I was ready to fight rather than take it lying down.
‘That’s right,’ I rejoined, ‘No surrender!’ We went down together, suddenly crazily full of hope.
If the rest of the family were surprised to see us laughing and chatting as we sat down for the meal no one commented on it, but the atmosphere suddenly lifted, as if everyone heaved a collective sigh of relief. I could still not think of anything else, though, and at one point I found myself saying, ‘I’m probably going to lose all my hair.’
‘You’ll have to get a wig,’ said Anne, Ger’s mother. ‘They have lovely ones nowadays.’
‘Oh no, I think if it started to fall out I wouldn’t hide it with a wig or a scarf – I’d go the whole hog and shave the lot off,’ I said. Sarah spluttered into her gravy.
‘Well, it worked for Demi Moore, Mum – she could be your role model.’
‘Yeah, I’d look great in a white T-shirt and a pair of combats.’ Everyone laughed, and I felt as if things were really not so bad after all. We had a happy day after that, and at the end of the day my sisters and mother-in-law left in good spirits.
But I felt drained after that weekend, and wanted nothing more than an early night. I was just thinking about going up for a bath when Sarah got back from Jessica’s house. She had been with her friends and had that look on her face which meant she wanted to talk.
‘Mum, I hope you don’t mind, I told the lads tonight.’ Oh Jesus, I thought, the boys know now. Breast cancer was a woman’s thing, I felt. Now if they met me in the street they would be looking at me, and imagining me without a breast. It was a silly thing, but somehow it mattered. Sarah must have realized I was unhappy about this and tears sprang to her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, I just needed to tell my friends. I don’t know how to deal with this – I’m so frightened for you … Mum, what’s going to happen to you?’ she sat down on the couch and covered her eyes.
‘Sarah, Sarah, love. It doesn’t have to be bad. Come here to me.’ I wrapped her in my arms and spent the next two hours doing my best to talk her around. I told her what I had told Richard two nights before: that I needed her help, that we needed to protect our little Julie, and that I would tell her all I could. All the while she was sobbing her heart out, her head on my shoulder. I knew she had to do this – this was her way, and I felt it was right for me to let her grieve that night with me. I have seen what holding in fear and sorrow does to a person and I wanted her to feel free to let it all out then, at the beginning. I helped her into bed that night, my beautiful girl, both of us spent with crying. I kissed her swollen eyelids.
‘I promise you, Sarah, if you want to come and talk to me about any of this, at any time, I’ll be here to listen. I’m your mum and I love you beyond belief. None of that is going to change just because I’m sick.’
My God, look how I was hurting these two children, and the treatment had not even started yet. I hated to see them so worried and frightened, and to know that I was the cause of their pain. At least Julie had been spared this ordeal.
Two days later I had an appointment with the surgeon – the one who had done the needle biopsy – who was to perform the operation. He was just back from holiday but my oncologist was still away.
‘These guys!’ Ger complained, ‘They’re always jetting off on holiday.’ He came with me that day, but this time I was the one in charge. From all the reading I had done over the past couple of days I was determined not to go in blind, and had come armed with a list of questions.
‘What are we dealing with here?’ I began. ‘I need to know how big this tumour is, and what stage it is at.’ As I carried on, questioning the surgeon about secondaries, and about my lymph glands, Ger raised his eyebrows quizzically at me, as if to say ‘How do you know all this?’ For his part, the surgeon had all the answers at his fingertips, but was flummoxed only by one thing I said:
‘The other surgeon I saw on Friday when you were away said I would need a total mastectomy and a new breast made of back muscle tissue.’ I said this without flinching but I saw him do a double take.
‘Oh no, no. That’s reconstruction, that’s much further down the line. We don’t need to be thinking about things like that at this point. Let’s deal with the job in hand. Put all that out of your mind.’ He was clearly appalled to hear what I had been told, but he managed to maintain his professional dignity as well as making me feel calmer about my prospects.
The Choice Page 10
