Of course, I had my father, too. But fathers love in different ways than mothers do.
ON THANKSGIVING DAY, I drove to my parents’, where we were all going to have dinner with Diana and her husband, Josh, and their three boys. I had my mother’s car, which I’d borrowed a week earlier, to help me get to and from Connecticut. I was happy to be driving home, but I was wrung out. My relationship had come to a crashing halt. The night before, the man I was dating had called one final time, and we had fought, and he had enumerated my failings, and I had been up all night examining my motives. And because I had indeed told lies, and had kept secrets, I found truth in many of his accusations. I was losing my grip. My mother was dying, and the only person I wanted to talk to about my despair over it was her.
After a long trip, I opened the door to the smell of turkey and pie and thought: I still have a home. “Hello!” I cried out. Inside, Diana and my mother were chopping vegetables. For a moment everything seemed comfortingly familiar.
But my mother’s hair was messy and tangled and she waved hello absently. She was shuffling oddly, perhaps because of the pain from the tumors in her spine, and her pants drooped around her hips. When I gave her a kiss she only half responded, as if some part of her maternal brain were simply no longer present. My father, meanwhile, was stretched out on the couch, looking bleary-eyed and feverish. He didn’t even say hello. (The next day, we would discover that he had pneumonia and shingles, as if the universe wished to add insult to injury.)
I busied myself unpacking groceries when I heard my mother shuffle toward me. “Meg,” she said, bitterly. “There’s bird shit on the car.” Diana shot me a glance—a sympathetic, oh-no glance.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“That is very bad for the car,” she said.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll get it washed.”
“It eats away at the veneer, it’s very bad.”
“Mom!” I snapped, wheeling around. “I know. There is nothing I can do about it now—I’ll take it to be cleaned tomorrow.”
She rolled her eyes and walked away. I joined Diana and, pretending nothing happened, began washing the apples for the pie; as we talked, my mother shuffled over to the kitchen sink. She picked up a sponge, dumped dish soap on it. Shuffle shuffle, toward the garage door. Diana raised an eyebrow.
Exit cancer-riddled mother to wash car with sponge.
It might have seemed amusing if it hadn’t been so damn awful.
“Mom!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
“I am cleaning the bird shit off the car,” she said acerbically. She meant clearly: You are favored no more, my daughter.
I felt I was losing my mind.
“Don’t do that,” I said. Shuffle shuffle.
I followed her into the garage; she was bent over the car, fruitlessly swiping at the encrusted bird shit with the fucking sponge.
“Mom, don’t do that,” I snapped. “I’ll have it cleaned tomorrow.”
Bending down, she muttered about the wax and the bird shit eating away at the wax; in confusion, I retreated to the kitchen. She came back in the house. “Are you upset with me?” she said. “Are you upset about something?”
When I got angry as a kid I would hide in my bedroom and get under my quilt and cry till I was too hot and sweaty to stay under it anymore. The quilt was yellow, patterned with dark yellow butterflies. The light around me would be golden and gorgeous and redolent of my grief and wronged status. Finally, when I had wept myself out, I would emerge. Now I wanted to do the same. Instead I said, “Yes, I’m upset. I haven’t seen you, I had a horrible, hard week, it’s Thanksgiving, and the first thing you do is scold me about the bird shit. It doesn’t seem that important.”
We were standing in the kitchen regarding each other with dismay, everyone around us trying not to watch.
“I know, Meg.” She had never been able to take it when I criticized her. “But the bird shit is really not good for the car.” Inside me, some last plank of steadiness broke. There was nothing motherly about her. The mother in her would have noticed my desperation; she would have put her hands on my shoulders and said I’m sorry you feel this way, honey, I’m sorry. This was not my mother. This was a shuffling alien with scary hair.
“Mom, I’m having a hard time.”
“I understand that,” she said. “But—”
It was too much for me. I erupted. “Mom, you have never supported my divorce, you don’t know what this is like—”
“You need to calm down, Meg,” she said.
“I do not need to calm down,” I said. “You are always telling me to calm down. You are always telling me how things are. This is how I feel.” I dug my fingernails into my arm so deeply they tore the skin open. I pushed up my sleeve and saw blood on my arm. “Do you see what I’ve done to myself?” I said, in shock. (I was not exactly doing a good job of demonstrating that I didn’t need to calm down.) My father on the couch opened his eyes and then closed them, as if he were just too sick to deal with whatever was happening now.
“I’m sorry you feel this way, but it’s not true,” she continued. “You need to relax.”
“Look what I’ve done!” I cried.
Fumbling through tears, I ran upstairs, no longer able to keep up the pretense of being the helpful daughter. I was furious at her confusion, furious at her helplessness. Why was she letting this disease attack her brain? Why was she betraying us? Why was she so mad at me?
I went to the bathroom to wash my face and the face that looked back was not my own. I slid down the side of the sink, the cabinet knobs digging into my back, and wept convulsively, clutching my right arm with my left, digging my nails further into the skin of the inner arm, nearer the veins. I felt unsafe, unloved, in pain that could not be borne. I eyed the window. It was too small to escape through.
Desperate, I called my ex-husband, who was at his parents’ home, forty minutes away, and, listening to me sob—I couldn’t get a word out—he said, “I’m coming to get you.” I said, finally, “No, just call me a taxi. I want to leave now.”
Liam and Eamon knocked on the door. They told me to stay. “We’ll take you to Brooklyn later,” Liam said. “You’re really upset, and it’s not a good idea for you to be alone.” They were clearly worried I might hurt myself. But I was not going to hurt myself. I just wanted to flee the pain that lay like a fog in the house; getting away would be like turning a blank page, to a new story, a different one.
Eamon, who has always had a precocious calm in the face of confrontation, hugged me and said, “Of course Mom loves you, she only says wonderful things about you.”
“OK,” I wailed.
Then our mother was hanging shyly at the door. She seemed uncertain of her role. “Meg,” she said, urgency in her voice. “Come in,” Eamon said, reaching his arm out to her. Her face crumpled. Suddenly I could see it—the trace hieroglyphics that say Mother.
“I don’t want anyone to be sad,” she said, running her hands through her hair.
“But we are sad, Mom,” I said.
“But I don’t want you to be.”
“It’s OK, it’s OK for us to be sad, it’s natural.”
“You’re amazing. You are my children. I love you,” she said haltingly. “I know you’ve had a hard time and maybe I have been judgmental. And you’re right, it’s your feelings, you are the ones who have them. . . . I just don’t like to fail you.”
Liam said, slowly, “It’s OK, Mom. We are going to be sad. It would be weird if we weren’t. You have to let us be sad.”
“I know,” she said at last, crying, nodding. His words always calmed her. “It’s just so hard. I just want everyone to be OK. Tell me you’ll be OK.”
We were in a circle now, hugging. Eamon was slouched over, wiping tears away and looking away, and I was, at once, in ruinous joy and pain, and somehow it was all mixed together like paint, like old stains and water cracks and new color.
Later, Diana told me that when I
ran upstairs after my mother and I fought in the kitchen, her ten-year-old son came over and tugged on her sleeve and said, “What did Meghan get on the car?” As if learning it could help him understand, as if he could file the information away for safekeeping. Note to self: Do not do that.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE HOLIDAY, Jim and I had started talking again. For months we’d been largely estranged, but he was close to my mother and wanted to see her and to help us, and there was something comforting about his familiar presence. That night he came for Thanksgiving dinner, just as he had for the past five years. Perhaps my mother’s death would be not unlike a divorce, I found myself thinking, wishfully: I would see her less, but now and then be granted a reprieve like this. It would be a reunion like those in The Aeneid or The Odyssey, when the heroes go down to the Underworld to see their dead parents and embrace them three times, waking to their disappearance.
I half avoided him on Thanksgiving, but I was glad he was there.
The day after Thanksgiving, I took my mother to the mall. We’d all been milling around reading the Times, and I turned to her and said, “Why don’t we go shopping? You need some new clothes. You need some pants that you’re not holding up with a tape measure.”
“Well, I don’t want to inconvenience you,” she said, then thought for a second. “I would like to get some clothes. I could just come with you, as you drop the kids off at the train station. Unless that’s an inconvenience,” she said again.
“No, it’s not.” And I realized she was confused—another crack in the foundation—and in her confusion she didn’t want to impose on us. She hated being confused. (During this time she would get a look in her eyes that Liam described as “a look of fear, but fear of something she can’t name.”)
She got us lost on the way to the mall. She thought she knew how to get there from Westport, instead of from the house, but when we were on the highway she blanked on the exit. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
She hit her seat with the flat of her palm. “I am just so damn out of it all the time. I know something is wrong with my brain because I can’t remember things.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “You’re going to have the radiation in a few days; it’s going to help. They said it would help reduce the confusion, and you’ll be just like normal.”
“I know,” she said, “it’s just frustrating.”
Of course it was. I was stunned by the way my mother’s body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.
Then she said, without any trace of irony, “I am worried about your father. He’s so sick. I just have to get better so I can help him. If I weren’t so confused, I could help him feel better. He needs to rest.”
Inside the department store, I fingered a blue silk shirt. “This is nice,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “But I think I have to go to the plus sizes section.”
I looked at her.
“Mom, I do not think you have to go to the plus sizes section.”
“But that’s usually where I shop.”
“I know, but it’s not now. Trust me.”
“Well, OK.” And she brightened up.
And I realized: We hadn’t shopped together for clothes for fifteen years or so. She felt self-conscious about her weight and so she never bought clothes with anyone; instead, she usually ordered them online, minimizing having to try things on. We started picking pants out for her; she told me to pull out the largest size.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you are going to be a size twelve.”
“No, get me the biggest size.”
“OK,” I said.
I picked up a soft purple cowl-necked cashmere sweater from the sale table and found some more shirts. When I came back, I heard my mother fumbling.
“Meg? I think these are too big.”
I went in. The pants were baggy around her. “Yes, they are. We need to find you a size twelve.”
I fingered a pink dress with a paisley print hanging by the dressing room, and my mother, sounding like her usual self, called out, “That’s pretty, try that on!”
“I don’t need any more dresses.”
“Come on, try it on,” she said. “It’s on sale. You can just come in the dressing room with me,” she said, and I did, and we took off our clothes and dressed, and I helped her buckle and snap shirts and pants. She had folds of skin around her stomach but her legs looked tiny, emaciated, like an old person’s. She put on the purple cowl-neck sweater with a pair of black dress slacks and looked beautiful, her hair dark, her cheeks flushed.
(It hurts to think about this.)
But her underwear was a disaster. Under the soft sweater, I could see her bra drooping around her sides, hanging loosely, the cup fronts folding and creating a funny extra shelf of flesh.
“Mom,” I said, “you need new bras.”
“I know,” she said, “these are too big, I guess.”
“If we are buying you new clothes, we’re buying new underwear. We’ll do a whole makeover.”
She’d been watching a TV show about learning to dress stylishly and she smiled with delight.
“They keep saying you should divide your body in thirds,” she said. “And they tell you to get nice fabric and watch the fit. It’s interesting. Things about clothes I never would have noticed, I notice now. Like this isn’t really fitting right, here. And this fabric feels cheap.”
Wearing the cowl-neck, she looked kind of like a sexpot. But a sexpot with a lumpy, saggy bra. I ran upstairs and grabbed an armful of bras in a variety of sizes. I have no idea what size I am, my mom had said. And neither did I.
“Can I help you?” said the saleslady.
“Um . . . not really,” I said, not knowing how to explain that I was looking for new bras for my dying mother, who’d lost so much weight we had no idea where to begin. I pulled a whole range of styles, including some lace ones—if she was going to die soon, she should at least get to feel sexy and pretty first—and downstairs my mother tried them on. The lace ones, the prettiest, were the wrong size, and she was clearly disappointed. “I’ll just get this one,” she said, holding up a practical cotton piece. “No, I’m going to get you some more,” I said.
“But they’re all the way on the other floor,” she said, but then she looked at a periwinkle lace bra I had tried on, and said, “That’s nice, it’s like delft,” and so I threw on a shirt and ran to find a better size in the lace.
After, we went through all her clothes, the pants and sweaters, deciding what to keep. As we stood in the dressing room, she looked at them in my arms and a shadow crossed her face. “But this is a lot,” she said.
“You need it,” I said. And the unspoken thing was there: How long would she need it for? Probably not more than a month or two.
Still. I wanted her to have them. And everything was twenty percent off. I reminded her of this. She got giddy and said, “It is a good value.” And she smoothed the sweater down and said, “I have cleavage!”
As we paid, she was happy, stroking the clothes like a girl. For a moment I thought, this must be what she’d felt when I was a teenager and she could lift my mood by taking me shopping—a slippery pride, tinged with sadness that it couldn’t always be like this.
She fingered a tag. “Size twelve,” she sighed. “You see, Meggy, there are some good things about having cancer!”
That night, she gave Diana and my father a fashion show, delightedly going up and down the stairs and coming down with a new outfit on.
As we waited for her surgery, my mother and Liam and Eamon and I watched TV. She spent most of each day on the chaise longue section of the couch. Sometimes her fingers absently traced the fabric and kneaded it, as if to touch a body. The dogs sat on either side, like sphinxes. We watched Lost.
“That Evangeline Lilly is so annoying,” my mother said. “Why can’t she do something, instead of talking about it? Wh
y does she always make such terrible choices?” For someone with brain tumors, my mother was doing a fine job of keeping up with the plot twists. (As Jim put it: “Even healthy people can’t follow Lost. Are you sure you want to watch it?”)
In between episodes, when I paused the DVD to go get her a Limonata, you could hear the grandfather clock. Tick, tick, tick, tick. My mother is dying, I would think. And she is spending her last hours watching Lost. How totally bizarre. For a moment I hated the show for that. But then I thought: What the hell. What is she supposed to do, contemplate every moment with saintly beatitude? Exclaim that she loves us, is devastated to be leaving us, cannot bear not to watch Eamon graduate from college, to see our children? Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.
Other people—friends, colleagues—got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.
CHAPTER FIVE
{caretaking}
Even though it was obvious by Thanksgiving that my mother was extremely sick, the swiftness of her final days came as a surprise. She’d had CyberKnife radiation in Stamford; it had made her more confused for a while—the surgery caused a supposedly temporary swelling—which meant she couldn’t be alone. I’d gone up to Connecticut on Sunday to see her and to talk to my father and brothers about arranging for hospice care. She was getting weaker and we needed to be ready; even if her confusion diminished, as was supposed to happen, she was losing weight and clearly declining. And yet we were all acting as though she were going to be around forever, if in an increasingly diminished state. Working up my courage—there was a way in which we all just wanted to be silent—I said as much to my brothers and Dad and they agreed. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” they said.
The Long Goodbye Page 6
