Dead Mom Walking

by Rachel Matlow

  “She was great!” I replied.

  “No, not her. How was I?”

  Another time, a few minutes before a scheduled interview, he said he’d been in a car accident and wasn’t going to make it on time. His prank calls always ended with him walking into the office, still on the phone, laughing at us. Always unpredictable, he kept us all off-balance and disoriented.

  If one of us exhibited any excitement about a particular guest, he’d charm or flirt with them all the more, as if to win them away from us or make us jealous. Or later he’d brag about how he’d hung out with them. When he saw a toy we liked, he took it. That’s my truck! After Woody Harrelson showed more interest in playing chess with me than in talking to him, Jian declared himself to be a chess player on the show (even though he barely knew how to move the pieces). For a second I wondered if he was stealing my identity to mess with me, but then I felt crazy for even considering such a possibility.

  We were always walking on eggshells. As soon as we heard the jingle-jangle of the keychain on his hip as he strolled into the office mere minutes before showtime, we’d all tense up. “Good morning, Jian!” we’d say, like a bunch of animatronic Disney creatures who’d just had our power switch flipped on.

  Jian boasted that he had “the best team in the business,” but it felt like he resented our very existence. He needed us, yet I think we were a constant reminder that he didn’t write his own words, that he wasn’t who he purported to be. So he tried to render us invisible, excluding our names from the show’s website or ignoring us at events. It was as if Jian needed to poach aspects of his producers’ identities to create a hologram of a self. He would often take perspectives we’d shared in casual conversation and pass them off as his own during interviews. Our job was to write in “his voice.” But we had created that voice. It was a blend of Sean’s poignant and empathetic daily essays, Brian’s impeccable taste in indie music, my ideas on feminist pop culture and queer identity. The show’s many producers wrote in the voice of a fictional character, a composite of who we were.

  Jian was a brilliant chameleon. The only difference between him and a professional actor was that he didn’t draw a line between his on-air and off-air persona. He believed he was the entity we’d created. And he was so believable (the way he stuttered to make our words sound off the cuff, the way he mirrored guests’ emotional states to foster a sense of intimacy) that listeners didn’t understand it was a performance. The country loved him. People were always complimenting Jian to me. “He’s so talented,” they’d say. I’d clench my teeth and muster a smile. “He’s very good at what he does,” I’d reply. It was the truth. He was the best imposter in the business.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS BECOMING increasingly difficult to hang on to my sense of self. My voice was at once being stolen at work and actively rejected by Mom. Through Mom’s lens, I was a one-sided, closed-minded disciple of Western medicine, just like Teddy.

  “We have different belief systems. You completely subscribe to Western medicine,” Mom said to me. “You have complete faith in it.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m a hippie at heart!” I protested, reminding her, “I’m the one who took a homeopathic remedy instead of malaria pills when I went to India.” In our days travelling around India and Nepal, Syd and I had swallowed little white pellets of something called China Rubra. Granted, I wouldn’t do that now. My teenage anti-vaxxer days were well behind me. In my old age I’d come around to the realization that Tylenol works better for a headache than peppermint oil and that hair is not, in fact, “self-cleaning.” Mom saying that I subscribed to any dominant system of power was laughable to me. Sure, maybe compared with her I was straight and narrow, but I was actually queer! I’d quit school! I’d even worked at a feminist sex-toy store in my twenties. Nobody in my life had ever accused me of being status quo. And now Mom was looking at me as if I were Alex P. Keaton just because I believed in science.

  Mom wasn’t listening. “We’re butting faiths,” she said, shaking her head.

  “I don’t have faith,” I said. “I have evidence!” (In the words of Fran Lebowitz, “I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in.”)

  “I believe that belief is hugely important,” Mom said. “Many surgeons won’t take patients who believe they’ll die. They just won’t take them into surgery.”

  “I’m sure the doctors can successfully remove your tumour whether you believe it or not,” I snapped back.

  “I don’t believe in their way, so I’m not doing it. I have no faith that it will work out well for me. And I do believe that there are lots of other ways of doing things.”

  “What other ways? Herbs? Antioxidants?”

  “I believe in my immune system the way other people believe in God.”

  “EXACTLY!”

  Mom smirked, yielding a smile. “Listen, if I had faith in Western medicine I would endure its hazards. I wish I could believe in it. But I don’t.”

  “But here’s the thing,” I said. “You don’t have to believe in it. It’s not Santa Claus!”

  It was utterly baffling. The Mom I knew was never this irrational, fanatical, and closed-minded. Every argument came back to her belief in the power of belief. Mom’s steel-barrier defence. The next time I was at her place I noticed she’d put up a shabby chic chalkboard in the kitchen and written on it in cursive If you can change your beliefs, you can change your life.

  * * *

  —

  BY DECEMBER JOSH had been sworn in as a Toronto city councillor, and things were already intense. He was busy trying to get important work done in his community while mitigating the damage being caused by our new right-wing populist mayor, Rob Ford (later to become internationally known as Toronto’s “crack mayor”).

  Josh and I hadn’t had an opportunity to seriously talk about Mom’s situation. “She’s not seeing the situation clearly,” I told him over the phone. “It’s ridiculous the things she’s saying. She doesn’t want to get surgery to remove her cancer because she’s afraid of getting an infection.”

  “But there’s merit to many of the things she’s saying,” Josh said. “Chemo is poison.”

  “Sure, but she doesn’t have to do it. Chemo isn’t even being advised right now.”

  I asked him to tell Mom she needed to get surgery, but he was adamant: he wasn’t going to argue with her. Josh tried to reassure me that he was doing his best to gently guide her toward other perspectives, though he admitted he hadn’t had much luck.

  “When we talk, I feel like I’m talking to someone who’s been conditioned into a cult. Mom goes into these long monologues about how she’s doing the right thing. It’s not really a conversation,” he said.

  “Totally! I feel that way too. It’s almost as if she’s trying to convince herself more than others.”

  Josh was sympathetic to my fears and frustrations, but he didn’t seem all that fussed. He just accepted that this was the way Mom was and that he wasn’t going to be able to change her mind. He told me, calm and level, “Mom’s on her own journey.”

  I wanted so badly for Josh to be just as distressed and outraged as I was. I knew it wasn’t easy to go up against Mom, but I believed we had a responsibility to fight for her. That if you see a beloved family member hurting herself, it’s your moral duty to intervene. This wasn’t a time for calm diplomacy. I was sounding a call to arms; Josh was being Switzerland.

  Teddy was my only ally. He was afraid of telling Mom what to do, but he’d since reached the verdict that enough was enough. He wrote her a letter.

  Dear Elaine,

  I am sending this message to you after much thought and hesitation. I know that you won’t like it but I decided to send it anyway. It may be the most important message that I ever send, and the most important one that you ever receive.

  As you know, I have felt very uneasy abo
ut your decision not to undergo radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy as Drs. Gryfe, Feinberg, and Habal have recommended to you. I listened to your reasons for wanting to choose alternative treatments instead, and I heard your appeal that we respect your decision and support you no matter what your decision may be.

  I have, until now, tried to comply with your requests. I now have come to the conclusion that I cannot and should not, in good conscience, comply with them. I’ll try to explain why.

  I met with three doctor friends today and had private discussions with them. Each one is a leader in his field and highly respected. Their responses were almost identical. Without revealing your identity, I described what is going on “with my friend.” They were in agreement that your decision was a bad one and, as Dr. Gryfe emphatically told you, would inevitably lead to a slow and painful death. They repeated what is obvious to most people, namely, that cancer has the potential to spread and destroy a person’s body, and has to be removed as quickly as possible.

  Although you are symptom-free now, the symptoms, and the horrible pain, will certainly soon begin and, when they do, your life will become awful. They agreed, acknowledging that they haven’t examined you or seen your medical records, that if you undergo conventional treatment you have a high likelihood of obtaining an excellent outcome and being able to continue enjoying a pain-free, meaningful, and active life for a significant number of years.

  Alternative treatments, no matter what you read or think, will not help you survive. They conjectured, I add, that you must be in a state of denial not to appreciate this and probably would benefit from psychiatric intervention.

  I agree with these views and, because I do, I cannot stand by and watch you commit suicide in the most ghastly way possible. I recognize that you have the right to make the final decision, but I have a moral responsibility to you and our children to do what I can to save your life. If it were in my power to have the final decision taken away from you, I would willingly do so.

  As difficult as it may be for you to understand why I have decided to send you this message, and thereby jeopardize our relationship, please try to understand why I am doing this. I love you as the mother of my children. I don’t want you to needlessly die a slow and painful death, and I don’t want anyone, especially our children, to witness what will inevitably happen to you and then lose you forever.

  As well, I don’t want you to regret your decision when the pain starts and when you may find that it is too late for the doctors to save your life. Please come to your senses and make the only decision that will allow you to avoid the horrors that you will otherwise face, and please do what you reasonably can to prolong your life. You mean a lot to many people who love you and would miss you.

  I hope that you will not be angry with me for sending this to you. I considered that there was a risk and decided it is one that I had to take before it was too late.

  Ted

  Mom read his letter and promptly told him to butt out. But I know it hit a nerve. Later, whenever his letter came up in conversation, she’d scoff, roll her eyes, and mock him: “Am I going to commit suicide in the most ghastly way possible?”

  Dumbfounded, Teddy and I regrouped. We talked on the phone a lot, desperately trying to make sense of why Mom was stalling.

  “I think she’s afraid of having a colostomy bag,” Teddy said.

  The chances of it becoming a permanent situation were low, and yet it was obviously her most articulated fear. Mom kept saying, “The operation will leave me with a colostomy bag for the rest of my life!”

  I agreed with Teddy: “Yeah, I don’t think a colostomy bag jives with her self-image. It’s not her style.” Mom prided herself on being a beautiful “ageless” woman. She’d just published her dating guide and was planning on teaching workshops based on it. I could see how her life might seem impossible if she didn’t feel attractive. A fecal sac wouldn’t go with her new custom-made Silver Fox jacket. Being a patient in general didn’t align with her sense of self. She looked at other patients in the hospital as if they were passive casualties of “the system” who’d given up their rights and freedoms. “Once you give yourself over, it’s difficult to remain a decision-making participant,” Mom told me. “They go to work on you.”

  Mom obliged me by meeting up for coffee with a friend of a friend who’d survived colon cancer, and another time by checking out a colorectal cancer support group with me. Afterward she called them all “Kool-Aid drinkers.”

  “There is a cancer industry, and we’ve all bought into it,” she said. “Most of us, anyhow.”

  I knew there had to be some deeper psychology beneath her resistance. Could this really come down her being afraid of a colostomy bag? Even if she were so unlucky, would she really choose death over having to live with one? What on earth would drive her to seize upon alternative cures—and by extension an alternative reality—to such an extreme extent? How does a person end up courting the very thing they fear most? As a producer at Q, my job was to figure out who people were behind their celebrity facade: what motivated them, what made them tick. But I couldn’t figure out my own mother. She was proving to be the toughest nut to crack.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE END OF December, six months after she’d been diagnosed, we were sitting in our usual spots in the sunroom when I started in yet again. “Cancer multiplies and multiplies. I don’t understand how you think your methods can contain that.”

  “Let’s leave it. I know it’s not going to be a walk in the park. I know I’ll have to be more disciplined than I’ve ever been in my life. I won’t enjoy it. But I do think I have a better chance.”

  “You really believe you have a better chance?” I was straining to reach her. My whole body was convulsing with disbelief.

  “Even if it were equal, even if it were fifty-fifty, why wouldn’t I do it my way, which allows me to have the life I want?”

  “If it were fifty-fifty,” I scoffed.

  “It’s a big risk either way. I actually believe I have more than a fifty percent chance doing it my way,” Mom said.

  I couldn’t let her believe her fiction. She could write herself into a Silver Fox; she could write her way to self-confidence and a life of adventure; she could even write her way to a man named Teddy. But she couldn’t write herself out of cancer. Cancer doesn’t give a shit what story you tell it.

  “You have a ZERO percent chance doing it your way!” I shouted. “You won’t have ANY life, never mind the one you want!”

  “I’ve made my decision and I don’t want to discuss it with you.” There it was.

  Mom got up from her chair and walked away. I followed her down the hallway into the dining room. “You can’t keep shutting down the conversation,” I hollered.

  She turned around. “You’re bullying me! I won’t be able to be around you if you continue to push. It would hurt me terribly to stop seeing you. I really don’t want that to happen. But I can’t be around people who are fear-based. You are causing me harm.”

  “Who told you that? Michael?” I asked, treating his name like some supervillain’s. The sheepish look on Mom’s face told me I was correct.

  “I love you, darling, but we can’t be together if you continue to bring me down with your negativity. It would break my heart, and I need my heart in this challenge,” Mom cried. Her eyes looked sadder than I’d ever seen them.

  I was beyond frustrated that I couldn’t reach her. I wanted her to come back. But above all, I was terrified that she was going to die. I couldn’t bury my anxiety any longer. I clenched my fists and screamed at her: “YOU’RE TAKING AWAY MY MOTHER!”

  Mom just stood there, stunned. I could tell that my words hit her hard; her eyes were glossy with tears. I knew she could see that I was suffering. She didn’t want to hurt me, but she was still going to live her life the way she always had: on her own terms.


  6

  CHICKEN LITTLE

  I was hurt that Mom would threaten to cut me out of her life, but more than that I was astonished. The Mom I knew would never have considered such a savage move. I tried not to take it personally. It was classic cult-like behaviour. I suppose in her eyes I was something of a Suppressive Person.

  I resented that Mom was strong-arming me into submission, but I could also see that our constant fighting was destructive. It definitely wasn’t helping the situation. It was a new year, and I would need a new strategy anyway. So I agreed to stop arguing with her.

  In fairness, Mom said I could still talk to her about her cancer as it related to my own feelings and not what I thought she should do. She still wanted to be there for me as my mom—which I appreciated—but her caveat didn’t work out so well in practice. I’d inevitably end up saying something like, “I’m afraid…that you’re killing yourself!” Then, as predictable as a pull-string doll, Mom would deliver her stock refrain: “I’ve made my decision and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  For the most part I managed to keep my mouth shut. But I couldn’t help speaking up once in a while when she’d say something egregiously untrue, like when I’d hear her insist that “rectal cancer is one of the worst types of cancer, even worse than pancreatic!” Her father had died of pancreatic cancer (as did Patrick Swayze, RIP) so I was aware that it was the deadliest of all. “That’s not true,” I’d say, and leave it there.

  Teddy also agreed to stop telling Mom what to do. In early January, he wrote her a follow-up note.

  Dear Elaine,

  I am truly sorry for any grief that my earlier message caused. I sent it because I am very concerned about you and it was important to me to do whatever I could think of to “rescue” you. Once I sent it I was able to relax a bit, and I could actually feel some of the tension in my body dissipate.