“Meg?” my mother said. She sounded depressed.
She plunged in, no small talk. “So we got the test results back. The cancer has spread into two of my vertebrae as well as the hip bone. And the tumors in the liver and lungs have grown.”
“I am so sorry,” I said. I sank down on the porch steps, having gotten outside somehow, away from the flowers. But my “sorry” felt a bit like a lie. Did I want my mother to die? No, I did not want my mother to die. But I couldn’t stand this pain and sickness. And I couldn’t stand trying to comfort her. Mainly, I was in disbelief. I couldn’t feel a thing yet—not even sorrow. “Dr. Mears says that there is nothing left to do. There are no other drugs. So we are going to stop treatment now. But he and Susan, my nurse, are going to look into experimental treatments.”
“How do you feel?” I asked, not knowing what to say, what my new role was. Was I still her child? Or her supporter? We had not yet moved into our new positions.
“Well, I feel bad,” she said, half laughing. Hearing the disappointment in her voice turned my middle into a lake of curdled pain.
The masseuse was signaling me. “Mom?” I said. “I’m sorry but I have to go. Can I call you later?”
“I have to call Eamon, anyway.”
I asked her what she was going to say.
“I don’t know. I want him to stay in school. I don’t want him to come home. It’s his last year in college. He just got cast as the lead in his play. I want him to have that.”
“OK,” I said. “But . . . but I think he might need to have this, too, to be part of what’s going on.”
A little door in my mother clicked shut. “Not yet,” she said.
“OK.”
“Talk to you later,” she sighed.
“Yes,” I said.
I had gone dead inside. Psychiatrists, I read later, call this “numbing out.” When you can’t deal with the pain of a situation, you shut down your emotions. I knew I was sad, but I knew it only intellectually. I couldn’t feel it yet. It was like when you stay in cold water too long. You know something is off but don’t start shivering for ten minutes.
On a hazy October morning a few weeks later, my mother and I drove down to New York-Presbyterian Hospital in the near dark, listening to traffic reports like all the other commuters. We were enrolling her in an experimental treatment program of carboplatin and E7389 run by a Dr. Hershey, whose name brought candy inappropriately to mind. It was a last-ditch effort. I thought, mordantly, that the creeping cars around us were like souls wandering in Hades. My mom was quiet. I worried that she resented my constant fussing about what she was eating and whether my father had given her the right pain medication, but when she called school to check in—as she still did every day—she told her colleague Tundé that she was in the car with her “lovely daughter.” Funny how much that meant to me.
Though I’d often picked my mother up after her chemo treatments, I’d never seen one take place. It is a brisk business. Needles and bags are hustled into place with efficiency, as if it were not poison that is about to be put in the body. The nurses were nice, speaking with humor and frankness, though they’d just met my mother. As the drugs slid up the IV into her arm, we watched stolid barges plug up the Hudson like islands, water silver in the haze. I read poems and she asked me about poetry.
“I don’t really understand it,” she said. “I never have. Do you think you could teach me to read a poem?”
“I do,” I said.
That weekend, my friend Karen came to stay with me; I needed distraction. I felt everything had suddenly cracked like a window hit by a baseball, and it was only a matter of time before it caved in, leaving little pieces on the ground. I had just begun teaching two college writing seminars, and working part-time as a coeditor on the launch of a Web magazine backed by Slate, and I was telling her about the project. Theoretically I’d be working on it only three days a week, from wherever I wanted. But I was worried about pulling my weight and still being able to help my mother.
Karen and I were talking and window-shopping when my mother called, uncharacteristically weeping. “I need your help, Meg,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I feel I am losing my way as a mother.” She sounded a little hysterical, like a child. “Just slow down and tell me what happened,” I said. “Eamon has been asked to leave Colgate. They found some drugs in his room. I don’t know what to do, I can’t believe they would do this at a time like this.” Then she gathered herself, and sounded like my mother again. “Don’t they understand that he’s a kid whose mother is”—she paused—“a kid who’s going through a really difficult time? I need your help.”
“I’ll help,” I said. “I’ll call Eamon, I’ll talk to Colgate, we’ll figure it all out, it will be OK,” I said, too weak not to want to pretend it would be.
“Your father just can’t take this right now,” she said, a catch in her throat. “He can’t. And I just feel confused.”
“It’s OK,” I said, fruitlessly, pushing the hair out of my eyes, “it’s going to be OK.”
A week later, on a chilly October day, I was having a drink with a friend when my phone rang—
“Meg?” Isabel said, with the special anxiety that nudged my heart to the side.
“What’s wrong?” I said. I pictured my mother in the emergency room. I pictured her with blood at her mouth, hemorrhaging from her lungs. She had had her experimental treatment that day. Something must have gone wrong. Or maybe it was my father. I pictured my father—my increasingly gaunt, haunted father—being treated for exhaustion or a stroke.
But Isabel told me that my mother had fallen on her way to treatment and seemed fragile. Could I go up to Connecticut the next day to be with her while everyone was at school?
When I arrived the next morning, my mother was lying in her usual spot on the couch. She looked drawn; she had an afghan at her feet, and the dogs, Huck and Ringo, were beside her. They leapt up, tails wagging, when they saw me, knocking over a glass of water with their large, baffled clumsiness. “Hi, Meg,” she called out. Her voice was weak.
I got her some of the San Pellegrino Limonata that she liked. She had mouth sores and wasn’t eating much but she still would try lemon yogurt and citrus sodas; the sourness appealed to her. I sat next to her. We talked as I did some work, but she kept drifting off. I wanted to have an unburdening conversation with her. Some part of me was still angry she hadn’t been unquestionably on my side during the divorce, and this frustration had come out on the phone the night before; my father and I had argued about Eamon’s situation, and my mother had gotten on the phone. Sounding confused, she began to cry and said, “You’re both trying to do the right thing. Don’t be so mad at each other.” I stopped and swallowed (how could I deny my mother this?) and yet selfishly, powerfully, I needed her to know that sometimes we were going to be angry at each other; she had a tendency to want to patch things over before they were ready to be patched up. I hated that she always wanted me to be “reasonable.” I wanted her to understand what I felt—it seemed imperative that she should. At the same time, I was haunted by the feeling that my divorce had given her one more cause for worry, and I wanted to know, once again, that I had her love and forgiveness. But she kept slipping into a half-focus. Ringo came over and wedged himself between the coffee table and my legs, his tail nearly knocking over my tea.
“Why must he always do that?” I complained. My mother opened her eyes and laughed.
“It’s true,” she said, bemused. “I mean, why doesn’t he just go under the coffee table?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. This was when I knew something was not right.
The coffee table extended almost to the ground. The dog was a golden retriever. There was no way he could fit in the inch or so under the table. Several times over the past two weeks my mother would forget a word and say to one of us, “I can’t believe I don’t know that word!” Or she would say, “I don’t want to take so much Percocet, I am having a hard ti
me remembering things.” The day before, she’d inexplicably taken a thousand dollars out of the bank. “Your father was so annoyed,” she told me. “I don’t understand why. I just got confused.”
And a week earlier she’d complained that her ear was buzzing.
I called the nurse coordinating the experimental treatment, who mentioned I’d made an appointment for the wrong day. “Didn’t your mother tell you it had to be Thursday?” she said. “I just told her.”
“That’s odd. She normally would remember that kind of thing.” I paused. “To be honest, she seems confused.”
“Confused?” the nurse said. “Or forgetful? I noticed last time she was here she was forgetting words. But that is common when you’re taking as much pain medicine as she is.”
“I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “What is the clinical difference between confusion and forgetfulness?”
“Confusion means she doesn’t understand things, or makes mistakes that don’t have to do with memory.”
“Well, she seems confused,” I reiterated. “And she fell yesterday.”
“Probably it’s just forgetfulness,” the nurse said, too blithely for my taste.
“What are the chances she could have a brain tumor? She seems . . . off,” I said.
“I don’t think she would have a brain tumor with colorectal cancer,” the nurse said. “It wouldn’t present this way. But I will check with Dr. Hershey.”
I was standing in the laundry room with the door closed so my mom would not hear me discussing her symptoms. Her dirty shirts were piled on top of the washing machine.
The nurse called back. “The doctor thinks you should go to the emergency room.”
“What?”
“He agrees that a tumor wouldn’t present this way, but you should check it out. She could have ammonia buildup in her brain due to the tumors in her liver. That would cause confusion.”
I was getting angry. I had no idea what to do. My mother ran a school, for Christ’s sake. She was the boss of many people. She didn’t like to be taken care of.
I went downstairs slowly.
“Where’ve you been?” she said, eating tomato soup I’d brought for her. I sat down next to her and took her hand.
“Mom,” I said. “I don’t want you to be upset.” She gave me a funny look. “But when I got here I noticed you seemed a little confused. I asked the nurse about it. And she and Dr. Hershey think you should go to the emergency room. So I think we should go. Is that OK?”
“The EMERGENCY ROOM?” she said, in shock. “Why?”
“They’re concerned that there might be some ammonia building up in your brain. They also want you to have an MRI just to check everything out and make sure it’s all OK.”
This was awful. Somehow I was the person telling my mother that things were getting bad. That we were now in ER territory. To me this seemed a dangerous new place, a Siberia it would take weeks to cross. No: a Siberia we’d be stuck in for good. Surely they were wrong. She just needed to sit, to rest—
What was I thinking? She was terminally ill. We all knew this was coming. Why had I thought it would be different?
“But I just had an MRI,” she said.
“When?”
“When I had shingles.”
“But you had shingles last year,” I said.
“No I didn’t—I just had them.”
“That was last fall, Mom. It was after my wedding.”
“I KNOW,” she said. But she looked confused. Because she was confused. She sat quietly. Then she looked up and said, “Well, I have been having some strange symptoms. I was telling your father about them. And he kept insisting it was the medicine. But I didn’t know why the medicine would do this.”
“Like what?”
“Like, I would be sitting here looking at the TV with him. And one night I felt like the TV should be over there”—she pointed toward the hallway corner—“like it really was there and the image was just projected here.”
“Hmm.”
“And today Isabel was making an appointment for the blood work for me, and I couldn’t remember what day was what.”
“You mean I was making the appointment for you?”
“No, Isabel. She brought me soup and—”
“Oh,” I said. “OK. Get your coat on, Mom, it’s time to go.”
I called my dad and Liam, who were on the way home, and waited for my mother downstairs. I derived a strange comfort from being able to take her to the hospital. Liam got to see her every day at school. He and she had the same sense of humor. In the face of her pain, he and Eamon both knew how to make her laugh. I could only ask how she felt, or drive her to and fro.
Where was she?
“Mom!” I shouted and bounded up the stairs. She was drifting along putting clothes away.
I’d insisted that her doctor call the ER ahead of time, so we were whisked into triage like VIPs. When the nurse asked Mom questions, she gave answers that weren’t accurate. I shifted to and fro and made faces. How do you interrupt your mother and tell her she is losing her grip on reality? By just doing it. Inside, the nurses gave her a private “room”—a nook, really—and handed her a lime-green gown. The entire ER was coated in green. All the nurses wore green “animal” scrubs. One nurse’s were papered with pastel fish, another’s with rabbits. We are not children, I thought. “Now open your mouth,” the nurse said to my mom, in an enticing voice. “Dr. Popper will be with you in a moment.”
Outside our nook, a frail, white-haired woman who must have been in her eighties lay on a stretcher moaning. I stared rudely. There were nurses everywhere, but no one was paying any attention to her. Evidently, she’d been seen and was now in the purgatory of Waiting for the Next Step, whatever that was. We had entered the country of bureaucratic confusion, a hub plastic and colorful and empty as the innards of a Tinkertoy. “AHHHHOOW,” the woman went. It sounded oddly—and obscenely—like an orgasm. My mother looked over appraisingly. “They better give her more of whatever they’re giving her.”
Machines buzzed and clicked around us. Hell, I thought bitterly, was technology in the presence of inevitable death. Because the machines were present, no one—no person, that is—seemed to feel the need to be, unless we made them pay attention to us. I understood the power dynamics here—I was not supposed to ask too much, not supposed to know too much. To try to assert authority would only mean you’d be met with lassitude. Instead, you had to coax their help by deferring to the charts, the information. Meanwhile, they wore animal pajamas and gave you animal clothes, like you were all in a twisted episode of Romper Room. It was the stupidest thing I had ever seen.
I asked my mom if she was hungry. She nodded. Why don’t I get you a yogurt? I said, and I headed upstairs, back to normal life, where people were in the hospital for routine procedures, bearing children and having tonsils out and eating ice cream, getting flowers and going home.
When I came back, my mother was in her aqua gown and socks. She dutifully told me they had taken her in for the MRI. I opened the yogurt and gave it to her. I had forgotten to get her a spoon, so she drank it. I paced, pulling the curtain back to search for Dr. Popper and his Information. Sirens went off outside and one of the nurses—this one in ducks—said to a tall doctor running past, “Do we have a trauma here?” I heard a short laugh behind me. My mother was pointing at her nose, on which a dab of bright yellow lemon yogurt sat. “Look!” she said, in high amusement. “I’m like a child.”
An hour later, as my mother dozed, the ER doctor flicked the curtain back to enter. His balding head was down, looking at a scan. “So, wow, she does have nodes on the brain after all,” he said without affect. “I’m gonna call Dr. Chi, the oncologist upstairs, to come take a look.” Then, barely looking at either of us, he turned to leave.
My mother was staring blankly. “Dr. Popper,” I broke in, “so you mean my mother does in fact have tumors in her brain?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Two over on the left
side. They would be in a place that’s consistent with the spatial confusion you’ve been describing. Very unusual. So I’ll get Dr. Chi.”
Silence. The noises and clicks continued. I didn’t want to look at my mom; I couldn’t bear what I was going to see in her eyes. Then she said, as if she were telling a joke, “Well, THAT was awfully casual of him!”
I could hear the effort in her voice and it broke my heart. It was easier later, when she got irritated and said, “He’s just talking to you. He’s got to stop doing that. I’m here, too. I’m the patient.”
I called Dr. Hershey, the new research oncologist. For all my mother’s hard-won lightness, I was furious. How could none of the doctors have warned us? A man picked up. “Dr. Hershey here.” “Oh, Dr. Hershey,” I said, faltering. Then I felt pleased: I could tell him what happened; I could make him feel remorse for his ignorance and punish him with my prescience. I had known she had tumors. He had not.
“This is Meghan, Barbara’s daughter. We called today, because she was experiencing confusion, and your office recommended she come to the ER for tests and scans.”
“Yes, yes—how is she doing?”
“Well, actually, the MRI shows she has several lesions on the right lobe of her brain. It looks like the cancer has spread to the brain, in fact.”
Pause.
“Real-ly,” he said slowly. His response was dramatic. But his tone was not the one I had hoped for. He didn’t sound embarrassed or apologetic. Instead, he sounded intrigued. “That’s highly unusual,” he drawled.
Then, gathering himself, he said, “I’m sorry to be clinical about it. I know this is your mother, but that is fascinating. This rarely happens with colorectal cancer.” Another pause. “And you’ve been dealing with this long enough now that you have a sense of what is taking place.”
“Yes,” I said, stunned into monosyllables by his assumption that I could think clinically about the fact that renegade cells were devouring my mother from the inside out.
The Long Goodbye Page 4
