Wild and Precious Life

by Deborah Ziegler

  All four of us excelled in school. We toed the line for the most part, living in terror of our mother’s wrath. And there was always Daddy, a sleeping volcano that Mum could turn on and off with a good tongue wagging. Often my mum said, “When you children move out, I’m divorcing your father and never looking back.” Once all four children were out of the house, Mum still grumbled about divorce, and Daddy even once stunned her by saying, “Let’s do it.” However, faced with the prospect of living alone, Mum decided to stay. It was a shock to find out that when push came to shove my mother was, as Texans say, “All lime and no tequila.”

  As I faced life as a single mother, it was good to remind myself that living with two screaming, fighting parents hadn’t been a walk in the park. Though Brittany had only one parent, at least she wouldn’t live on pins and needles, as I had.

  Growing up, I’d ridden horses and spent summers barefoot, chasing fireflies in the long evenings. All of this made me who I was, and in turn it shaped Brittany. My daughter called me “Momma” because my daddy called his mother “Momma.” I had a deep sense of family obligation and loyalty, something instilled in me by my father’s parents, Okies who would stay put and hunker down in the face of triple trouble: drought, wind, and economic depression. Britt and I put our drinking glasses mouth-side-down because that’s how my family did it in the Dust Bowl.

  Sometimes I felt a bit prickly and unable to express an emotion (behavior I’d watched my mother struggle with). And was it a British obsession that caused Mum to constantly wish aloud that her stout-legged and full-bosomed girls had been born to be “reed-thin, willowy, or lean,” like her? Brittany’s Nanna, Iris, laughed at the oddest things, including the misfortune of others. And surely Brittany and I had acquired our freakish devotion to the hunt for and acquisition of a good bargain from Iris. My daughter and I had the best and the worst of the Okies and the Brits to draw from—an interesting combination.

  One day, four-year-old Brittany stood watching me attempt to dig with a trowel around our broken sprinkler. We had settled into our new home. We’d brought our rescued dog, Heather, with us. Determined to make life seem much like it had been before the divorce, I wanted to turn the backyard into a green oasis, where we could play croquet and kickball. Brittany would run and play here with our dog. She wouldn’t even miss her father.

  “We need Daddy,” she said, her little face solemn.

  “No, Sweet Pea, what we need is a proper shovel.” I stood and wiped my muddy hands on a rag. “We just need the correct tools and a little advice. Let’s go to the hardware store.”

  Brittany sat in the seat of a gigantic cart at the store and listened as I explained what I thought the problem was.

  “We really need a daddy,” she said again. “Could you come and fix it for us?”

  I smiled at the older gentleman who was assisting us. “Brittany doesn’t know that mommies can fix things just as well as daddies.” I gave him a prompting look, hoping he’d pick up the thread.

  “Well, sizing your mom up, I’d say she has as good a chance of fixing it as I do.” He smiled at Brittany. “And if she has any questions, she can come back for more advice.”

  We left the store with a big shovel, a pink tool kit, PVC pipe, and glue.

  This time, Britt watched while coloring in her coloring book. When I’d followed all the directions and glued the pipes in place, I left the hole and scooped her up for a shower.

  After allowing time for the glue to dry, I turned the sprinkler on and watched for leaks. “Look, sweetie,” I crowed. “I fixed it!” I filled the hole with dirt and pressed it back in place with the shovel.

  “Mommy, you did it!” Brittany danced around me as I patted down a chunk of sod.

  I didn’t like the job that the gardeners were doing on my small yard. I was paying them money I could ill afford, and they were at my house for less than five minutes. Three men jumped out of a truck and it was mow, blow, and go.

  One Saturday I decided I would do my own darn yard. So Britt and I went back to the hardware store and got a new electric mower, a weed whacker, and an electric hedge trimmer. Over the next few weeks, the fireman who lived across the street would sit in his garage and have a beer with his buddies on Saturday afternoons while watching my efforts. I was sure he was amused by my gardening routine, but I just waved at them and continued working.

  The long orange mower cord was a pain in the butt. I had to learn how to whip it hard enough so it would jump the mower and land on the other side, each time I made a turn. There was also a learning curve in using the weed whacker as an edger without hitting the cement or brick. Every time I hit the stucco of the house, I bent over to inspect the damage I’d done.

  I afforded further amusement for my audience across the street when I tried to edge the privet. Sizing up the task, I climbed on top of my cement block wall and began swinging at the hedges with the electric trimmer. This made me feel like a genuine badass, but this was also when I heard the most laughter coming from my neighbor’s garage.

  The fireman’s wife came over to chat one day while I was watering, and mentioned that her husband had asked why she couldn’t do their yard. “After all,” he told her, “that woman has a full-time job and a kid. You’re a stay-at-home mom.”

  I laughed. “Well, I bought all these tools in a fit of exasperation with the gardeners. To be honest, with each passing week, I’m finding it harder to remember what was so bad about them.”

  Actually I kind of liked mowing. Unlike housework, the yard stayed nice for a few days. I could drive home with Brittany in her car seat behind me and admire the fruits of my labor. I did my own yard for several years, until I was promoted to account sales representative and made enough commission selling semiconductors that I could afford a gardener again.

  A light breeze carried a faint, pungent odor of moist earth. Standing in our backyard, Brittany lifted her face to the sky. “Mommy, I think it’s raining,” she whispered in wonder.

  The dainty dusting of freckles across her snub nose twisted at my heart. She didn’t think her coppery splotches were cute, but I adored the way they accentuated her green eyes. I’d told Brittany her freckles were where angels kissed her nose while she slept, but she didn’t buy it.

  Tilting my head back, I felt drops. A slow smile spread across my face. Southern California was in its fourth year of severe drought; the ground was parched, the grass browning in patches. Would this bring relief from the relentless heat?

  The drops began to fall faster. I lifted my arms to embrace honest-to-God rain, and blinked as a drop caught me squarely in the eye. Brittany began to spin in a slow circle. She stopped and stuck out her tongue.

  “Rain tastes good!” she called to me.

  “It smells good, too,” I said.

  “Raindrops keep falling on my face,” I improvised from the Butch Cassidy song, “and just like the mom whose feet are too big for her bed . . .” I grabbed Brittany’s hands and began to swing around with her. We spun as I sang, off-key, the words of “Singin’ in the Rain,” inserting Britt’s name in the lyrics to make her laugh. We slowed to a stop, grinning into each other’s dripping face.

  I strummed an imaginary guitar and sang Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night.” Britt took up the beat clapping. We did our best rendition of strumming air guitars while we butchered the song, getting soaked to the bone. Brittany’s eyes sparkled and her ears peeked through ropes of damp brown hair. We ran to the porch, the air redolent with the tropical odor of white jasmine. Britt shivered in delight.

  I drew her toward me. “Time to get out of these wet clothes,” I said, pulling her shirt over her head.

  “Momma, we’re outside!” She held the dripping shirt in front of her narrow chest.

  “So?” I pulled off my wet shirt and wrung it out. “We’re going to strip down and go indoors.” Glancing at our high cinder-block walls, I kicked off my tennis shoes. “This backyard is totally private.”

  I cro
uched to untie Britt’s wet shoelaces. She kicked off her shoes, and I helped her step out of shorts and panties that were plastered together.

  My little naked jaybird ran into the middle of the yard and spun in circles, face up to the sky. Before running out to scoop up her slippery happiness, I stood watching the rain kissing my little girl.

  Brittany took a kindergarten readiness test at her preschool because her November 19 birthday was referred to as “on the cusp.” She could go on to kindergarten the following fall and be one of the youngest in the class, or she could stay in pre-K for one more year and be one of the oldest. The man who did the testing classified Brittany as gifted and talented. He said the first grade curriculum would be easy for her. However, he suggested that I consider whether I wanted her to be the youngest in her class. She was considered premature at birth, which he said was somewhat important in evaluating readiness. I also knew that she was emotionally needy due to the divorce. Ultimately I decided to give Brittany the advantage of being one of the older students in her class.

  As a preschooler, Brittany liked continuity. When her daily schedule changed, it threw her off-kilter a bit. I tried to provide structure by having Brittany cared for by women whose children were in Britt’s classes. That way, she would go home with a friend until I picked her up after work. Britt was blessed to be cared for by two very kind women who could give her the love, attention, and security she needed to grow strong and independent.

  Brittany’s preschool and elementary school were aware of the absence of Britt’s father and of her deep attachment to Mary Poppins. The teachers would pull Britt into their laps and read a book if she became anxious.

  Books provided solace for Brittany at school and at home. At the top of the list were Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, any of the Amelia Bedelia books by Peggy Parish, and Matilda by Roald Dahl. With the help of her excellent preschool teachers, I was able to guide my daughter gently through the worst of the divorce by giving her plenty of cuddling, attention, and a way to escape into books.

  6

  Promises

  January 5, 2014, Transferring to UCSF

  Promises and Pye-Crusts . . . are made to be broken.

  —Jonathan Swift, “Polite Conversation,” The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift

  The next couple of days at the community hospital were tense because now we just wanted out of there. We were waiting for our request for transfer to the Brain Tumor Research Center (BRTC) at UCSF to be processed. We were asking the BRTC to accept Brittany as a patient, and to find an open room for her. U.S. News & World Health Report rated UCSF fifth best in hospitals for adult neurology and neurosurgery. None of the four hospitals that rated higher were geographically close. For now, until we could get the pressure lowered inside Brittany’s cranium, UCSF was the absolute best place to go on the West Coast.

  Dr. Mitchel Berger was director of the BRTC. A Harvard-trained, nationally recognized neurosurgeon specializing in brain tumors in adults and children, he also had extensive training in intra-operative mapping of the brain. UCSF’s BRTC was rated highly for advanced technology with imaging done with a 3-Tesla MRI, which had superior imaging capabilities. Edward Chang, an associate professor in residence of neurological surgery, was the admitting doctor. Dr. Chang had done significant work in trying to gain understanding of the speech mechanism of the brain, which Brittany’s tumor was invading.

  Dan and I had been trading off nights ever since Britt was admitted to the community hospital.

  “You can’t do this by yourself, Dan. We need to become a team, sharing and dividing responsibilities,” I’d said to him.

  Looking exhausted, Dan had agreed.

  “We’re in for a long haul,” I’d said, worried that he felt he needed to handle everything. “We have to keep our strength up. We need to double-team this.”

  On the last night at the community hospital, it was my turn to stay with Brittany. Since her doctor’s abrupt and clumsy diagnosis and his disrespectful introduction to Dr. Berger, Brittany’s mood had naturally sunk. She had been told she had a fatal tumor, and that the only person who might attempt surgery was “really out there.” How had he expected that description to leave her with any enthusiasm or trust?

  Brittany spiraled into a dark and hopeless place; an understandably angry place. Where else do you go when given zero percent chance of defeating a cancer that is strangling your brain? This gaping maw of terror was worst after dark. We’d wake up in the middle of the night and have circular conversations, me firmly holding on to hope, Britt repeating the things that she had learned about her disease from reading. We’d lost the battle with Brittany over reading on her laptop. She was furious that anyone would even think of trying to stop her from researching her condition.

  In spite of what was a perfectly understandable reaction on her part—anger at the diagnosis and terror about the future—I couldn’t understand why Brittany had gone directly into acceptance mode. What happened to the other stages of grief, denial and bargaining? I wanted to fight. I wanted hope. I wanted a miracle.

  I was firmly in the land of denial, where I stubbornly imagined that we’d find a solution. Gary was furiously researching, even calling doctors in other countries. We were working on a plan.

  “I’m toast, Momma.” Brittany continued, “I need you to get that. I have a giant tumor that is going to kill me in the most horrible fucking way if I don’t do something about it.”

  “No one has said you’re going to die in a horrible way.” I tried to placate her. When she spoke this way, I felt like I was being stabbed in the gut.

  “Don’t you get it? Have you read anything about this? It’s what they haven’t said that we need to fear.” She cracked her neck, holding her head with her hands and jerking it to one side. “Haven’t you noticed no one wants to talk about it? Hell, this doctor can’t even talk about it. He barely got the diagnosis out.” Britt jerked her head in the other direction, eliciting a second loud crack.

  I grimaced. “Please don’t do that. It can’t be good for your poor head.” The sound of her neck cracking made me nauseous.

  “God, Momma! Cracking my damn neck didn’t cause a brain tumor. Who cares what it’s doing to my vertebrae? It doesn’t matter if my bones are crumbling to dust, because that’s all I’m going to be in less than a year. Dust.” She cracked her neck twice more.

  Pain knifed my heart. I breathed in tiny fearful wisps of air. My head itched, and I felt fiery bumps along the nape of my neck. Golden fluid seeped from an open blisterlike sore on my left cheek. I feared it was contagious impetigo. Who knows where I could have picked up staph bacteria—my dad’s memory care facility? On the airplane, or here at the hospital? I definitely didn’t want Britt getting it. All of this was easier to think about than what my daughter had just said.

  “We aren’t giving up, darling. Gary will leave no stone unturned. We’re getting out of this incompetent hospital, and we’re finding someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about.” I scratched the burning bumps until my fingertips came away stained with blood.

  “My neck, Momma. It hurts so bad.” Brittany sighed and leaned back on her pillows.

  I washed my hands with warm water.

  “Lie straight, baby. I’ll give you a massage.” I slid my hands under Britt’s neck, and using firm pressure searched for knots, trying to relieve the endless pain. Pain that interrupted every conversation. Pain that pinched her brow. Pain that glazed over her eyes. Pain that robbed her of empathy. Pain that deprived her of sleep. Pain that she had borne for almost a year.

  “You have to help me establish residency in Oregon. We have to move fast. I don’t have much time.” Her voice was soft and small.

  Finding a knot, I applied pressure. I massaged her almost in my sleep, as I’d done so many times. I used my thumbs to knead the knots while Brittany asked me to make her promises that I didn’t know if I could keep.

  “Promise you won’t let me suffer, Momma. Please don’
t ask me to lose my sight, hearing, and speech. The pressure inside my head’s so bad. It feels like it’s going to explode.”

  My daughter’s beautifully shaped head was loose and heavy in my hands as I gently manipulated it this way and that. “The prognosis isn’t good,” Brittany continued. “Primary brain cancer is rare, so research isn’t funded. They don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. If I had any other kind of cancer, it’d be better. I have the worst damn thing you can get.”

  I listened to my logical daughter as I massaged the muscles on either side of her spinal column. If only I could heal her by sending love through my hands.

  “A primary tumor like this is an outlier. It’s not curable. It’s a death sentence.” She rolled carefully to the side and bent her slender neck as I pressed the heel of my palm between her shoulder blades and made long deliberate strokes.

  “You heard that asshole doctor. This monster tumor isn’t going to stop. It’s going to change grades, and stage four brain cancer is cruel. I’ll be paralyzed. I’ll lose my memory. I might not even know who you are anymore.” There was a sad hiccup in her voice. “I’ll lose everything that makes me who I am.”

  I listened, but every cell in my body screamed no. It took all my willpower not to shout it out loud. Everything I’d learned from my mother, father, grandparents, and early church training flooded my mind. Childhood lessons, imprinted in my brain and drummed into my very corpuscles, made me reject what I was hearing.