Dead Mom Walking

by Rachel Matlow

  Tuesday evening

  Mom’s cell energy doctor, Dr. Beattie, lent her something called a Rife machine, an old-timey-looking device that would supposedly clear her cancer cells of negative energy. I thought it looked like a Scientology E-meter—and probably just as effective.

  Mom held a cylinder grip in each hand and powered it up. “It was created by a man named Royal Rife in the 1920s,” she said. “Of course, he was hounded because he was so successful.”

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “My cancer is sending out certain energy.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “We’re talking about the quantum world now. You know we’re all made out of energy, right?”

  I nodded tentatively.

  “The Rife machine sends out charges that match the frequency of the cancer inside me. It destroys the cells in the same way an opera singer’s voice can break a mirror.”

  I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. Did she really think she could reverberate her cancer to smithereens? Mom shrugged and rolled her eyes at me. “I’m sure you’ll want to leave Newton behind at some point in your life.”

  Thursday, after work

  “I went to see my homeopath today!” Mom said. “I really trust her. And she’s completely in my camp. She completely believes that I’m doing the right thing.” Mom was particularly excited because her homeopath had given her some scorpion venom. “She bought it in Cuba for like $400, but she gave it to me for only $20,” Mom explained.

  “What does scorpion venom do?” I asked, barely stifling a giggle.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Mom said. “But I’ve read about a lot of shamans having success with it.”

  Saturday morning, bright and early

  “Would you like a mimosa, sweetie?” Mom called out.

  I emerged from my bedroom and entered the kitchen, where Mom was opening a bottle of prosecco. She was her usual cheerful self. “The thing I like most about the Budwig diet,” she remarked, “is that you’re allowed to have a glass of champagne every day as long as you put freshly ground flaxseeds in it.”

  Saturday, an hour later

  Mom did something called “oil pulling” while puttering around the apartment tidying up. She swished organic coconut oil around in her mouth for fifteen minutes—it was supposed to be good for removing toxins. “It also whitens your teeth!” she declared proudly.

  Sunday afternoon

  “I’m off to see my acupuncturist,” Mom said on her way out. “You do believe in acupuncture, I assume?”

  I looked up at her and smirked. “What exactly do I believe? That it can cure cancer?”

  “Okay, never mind,” she said, laughing.

  Sunday evening

  “What is this ‘Guardian’ thing you keep talking about?” I asked Mom, staring at the mysterious device on her night table. It looked like an aromatherapy lamp, but it didn’t release any mist.

  “It’s another method of energy healing,” Mom said. “I don’t want to tell you more because, well, I don’t really get it,” she admitted, her voice trailing off. “But what the hell. I’ll try anything that only takes five minutes.”

  Mom’s game plan struck me as rather messy. She argued that it was of paramount importance to be a hundred percent focused on her course of action—that’s how she justified closing herself off to anything or anyone who interfered—but it was impossible to tell exactly what that course of action was. What the heck was she even doing? She could barely explain half the stuff she was up to. Just as with her approach to spirituality, Mom seemed to be cherry-picking the parts of various protocols that appealed to her, skipping from one remedy to the next without ever fully committing or going deep.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING to live anyway if I die. There’s nothing in this for you. You’ve gone rogue. I invite you to join the community of healthy cells, or I want you to recycle. That means die.”

  Mom was talking to her cancer cells. Out loud. Visualization was one of her everyday practices. “I imagine my good cells as little vacuum cleaners munching up the cancer cells,” she said. “The way I see it, cancer isn’t against you; it’s part of your body. Cancer is a thug—there’s no doubt about that, it kills you—but cancer is actually a last-ditch attempt to save you. Cancer cells are holding toxicity that would otherwise go into your bloodstream and cause a stroke or a heart attack. Cells only become cancerous because they don’t know what else to do.”

  “So you don’t see it as a battle?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t. The language of war is so patriarchal. I’m not fighting anything. I talk to my cancer cells with respect.”

  As far out as her theory was, I appreciated that Mom didn’t see her relationship with the disease as a battle. I’d read a little Susan Sontag in university. In her 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” she challenged the victim-blaming language often used to talk about cancer, arguing that metaphors create moral judgments against patients and aren’t helpful. Although I totally respected that many people with cancer feel empowered by verbs like “beat” and “conquer,” I also understood Sontag’s point that combat metaphors could make patients feel as though the onus was on them to “win the war on cancer.” And what if they failed? Had they just not “fought” hard enough?

  “The most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill,” argued Sontag, “is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” Mom may have been avoiding the patriarchal language of war, but she didn’t seem any closer to the truth. She was trading in one rhetorical device for another, anthropomorphizing her cancer instead. It was a thug who could be rationalized with. Did she really think she could respectfully negotiate her way out, as if there were some sort of rhyme and reason to it?

  As time went by it became clear that Mom really believed she could control her body with her mind. Week after week, new affirmations went up on her chalkboard:

  I am willing to experience a miracle.

  If you say it enough, you can convince your body.

  My body knows how to heal itself.

  Again, I didn’t think it was all crazy. I mean, humans are made of energy, the quantum field is real, and flaxseed oil is cool. But I was worried that Mom was putting all her eggs in her belief basket.

  Sontag was writing in response to popular theories arising at the time about there being a cancer personality type: that people with repressive personalities are more likely to develop the disease. She warned against such interpretations and instead argued that people should see illness as illness—not as some judgment on their character or a product of bad behaviour.

  “Michael told me that, in his experience, the cancer patients who survive are usually the ones who use this challenge as a way to grow,” Mom explained. And so she set about trying to heal old wounds, clearing her cells of negative memories. She told me that she and Dr. Beattie were working together to clear her energy fields of resentment, judgment, and criticism, and Mom’s need to please.

  “When Dr. Beattie first mentioned resentment, I told her I didn’t have any,” Mom recalled, laughing. “ ‘Well, it’s in your field!’ she told me.” Mom thought she’d already cleared up her resentment issues. She told me that part of why she was so surprised she got cancer was that she didn’t think she had the “personality” for it. Whether or not this theory held any water, it was true that Mom didn’t repress how she felt—she was constantly making her concerns clear. I’d never known her to hold back or bury her feelings (except for that one time she literally buried them).

  According to Mom, her diagnosis was a sign that she had more work to do. Her cancer posed an opportunity to change. “I’m grateful to my polyp for signalling disorder,” she told me. “Before the diagnosis, I was stuck in certain unhealthy relationships, indulging in pastries and wine, and st
ruggling with anxiety and insomnia.” She faulted herself for eating too much red meat—“I shouldn’t have been eating all those steaks at David’s!”—while ignoring stress and constipation for years. Mom was buying into the very theory of personal responsibility that Sontag had written against. (On the chalkboard: I am willing to release the patterns that led to my cancer.)

  It was apparent that Mom was more focused on healing the person than on curing the disease. “I have to let go of who I thought I was,” she explained. “No more working hard at appearing normal, whatever that is. I have to allow myself to be vulnerable, to be ever more real. No more convincing others and myself that I’m always ‘just fine.’ I want to be completely well. Not just cured of cancer.”

  A mind-body link made sense to me, but a direct connection between personality and cancer? I wasn’t buying it. I appreciated that Mom was looking inward, but I was concerned that she was placing the burden—and the blame—fully on herself.

  On the chalkboard:

  My body is producing miracles.

  I breathe in courage and breathe out fear.

  I will bet on myself.

  Why did Mom feel she needed to be the one to heal herself? Was it because she thought she’d caused her cancer in the first place?

  Who knows why people get cancer. Genetics, cigarettes, living next to a toxic waste dump—sure, they’re real factors. Erin Brockovich was right. But there was no reason to believe that eating steak had done this to her. The truth is that cancer is chaotic and confounding. It’s not something that can be reasoned with. However, even if the doctors weren’t ultimately in control either, I firmly believed Mom had a better chance of being cured with a surgeon’s scalpel than with an imaginary vacuum cleaner.

  But I didn’t say that. I just listened.

  * * *

  —

  MOM WAS UP to a lot of bizarre shenanigans, but I wasn’t prepared for the arrival of the newest member of her healing militia: the ghost of my dead grandma. Her mother—who’d been the source of so much friction in her life—suddenly became her role model and spirit guide.

  Grandma had been a health nut way before her time. She was an early devotee of food combining in the 1940s and didn’t allow any sugar in the home when Mom was growing up. Mom told me how she’d have to hide in the closet to eat Aero bars so that her mother wouldn’t yell at her (it wasn’t a big mystery where her issues with chocolate came from). I remember how when Josh and I were little, Grandma would try to pass off carob bars on us. I’d fall for it every time, biting down on a waxy-brown square before spitting it out.

  Mom began to channel Grandma. She told me how she’d woken up in the middle of the night from a torture nightmare. Shaken and scared, she asked her mother what she should do, and Grandma’s ghost appeared. “ ‘My darling Elaine, your body is capable of repairing itself,’ ” Mom recalled in Grandma’s soft, sweet voice. “ ‘Remember when I used herbs to reduce my arthritis so that I could dance at the Betel Centre? You just keep doing what you’re doing.’ ”

  This really made my eyes roll like Judge Judy. Grandma worshipped doctors! She may have made her own almond milk and squeezed too much lemon juice on everything, but she was way too nervous a person to have ever disobeyed doctors’ orders. I was positive Grandma would go apeshit if she knew what her precious Elainela was doing.

  Grandma had died five years earlier at the age of ninety-three. In her final years she suffered from dementia and had to move into a nursing home. As an adult, Mom had gotten along with her mother fairly well. But with dementia, Grandma would sometimes regress and freak out at Mom in exactly the same way she did when Mom was a child. “When I’m alone with her, she yells at me!” Mom told me. During that time, Mom played Pema Chödrön’s Don’t Bite the Hook—in which the American Buddhist nun explains how to stay centred and refrain from reacting to triggers—on a loop in her car. Although Mom had vowed never to abandon herself, she also didn’t feel she could abandon her mother while she was ill. So she continued to look after her while also regularly taking off to Mexico to look after herself. She spent a few winters in San Miguel de Allende, a picturesque historic town in Mexico that’s home to many artists and writers.

  In my early twenties, before setting off for grad school in Montreal, I stayed with Mom and helped lessen the burden by visiting Grandma every week. Grandma was only ever her sweetest self with me. She showered me with love, but I also sensed her neediness under the surface. She’d always seemed more like a little girl than an old lady: she loved porcelain dolls, The Little Mermaid, the colour pink. Even as a kid I’d felt older, in a way, than Grandma. I could definitely see how Mom had been put in the position of having to parent her.

  With the benefit of time and space (and plenty of fresh lime margaritas), Mom was able to gain a deeper appreciation for her mother. At age sixty, Mom came to the realization that her mother had given her far more than she’d been given by her mother—not an easy thing to accomplish. Mom knew her mother had always adored her, and she appreciated how supportive she’d always been. “She believed I could do anything—except give her enough love,” Mom told me.

  Mom said that ever since Grandma died, their relationship had only been getting better (so much better, I suppose, that they were now hanging out in the middle of the night). Yet despite this supernatural ventriloquism, which helped make her feel she was on the right track, Mom obviously still had doubts. Looking back, I can see how she was projecting her conflicted self onto the two of us: Grandma was the agreeable angel and I was the Western medicine–devoted devil.

  As uncomfortable as it was to be confronted with Mom’s wacky rituals and routines, when we weren’t arguing, we still had a great time together. She still made fancy coffee in the morning, and we’d sit down in the sunroom for a few minutes to talk before I went off to work. Most evenings we just chatted and laughed over a glass of organic Pinot and vegetarian takeout. Mom even started making meals once in a while. She prepared lovely organic salads served in her Italian pottery bowls and set the dining room table artfully with brightly coloured Mexican placemats and cloth napkins. Sometimes we’d watch The Sopranos while Mom did her Rife machine. In those moments the ease between us returned and our differences melted away.

  * * *

  —

  IN APRIL I moved into my new apartment and attempted to resume life as normal. By then I’d told several friends and close colleagues about Mom’s cancer, and they would check in with me from time to time to see how she was doing.

  “Has she started treatment yet?” they’d ask.

  It was difficult for me to explain that she hadn’t, and had no plans to. “Nope. She’s trying to cure herself with herbs and healthy eating instead,” I’d say, making a joke out of it, downplaying how scared I was.

  Their responses ran the gamut from mild confusion (“Huh? Come again?”) to abject horror (“Is she fucking crazy?!”). Often when I told people that Mom was refusing medical treatment, they’d assume she had late-stage cancer and that nothing much could be done to help her.

  “No, it’s treatable,” I’d clarify. “She just believes she can cure herself naturally.”

  If they said “You must be so worried,” I’d feel my panic and helplessness expand, and if they said “That’s so selfish,” I’d be compelled to defend her. Sometimes an awkward silence would ensue.

  And so, after that first year, I stopped telling people that Mom had cancer.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE SUMMER, one year after her diagnosis, Mom went to “shaman camp” in the Catskills.

  “What did you do there?” I asked when she got back. I had a feeling there hadn’t been much water-skiing and archery on the schedule.

  “You’re just going to make fun of me,” Mom said. Her instincts were correct, but I promised I wouldn’t. So she told me about the shaman from California (yet another
Jew), who told corny jokes at every sacred fire and at one point jangled a leather-covered rattle over her head, sucked something in from her left shoulder, and then spit it out. “Find your own rhythm—don’t move to another’s beat,” he told her. He instructed her to go down to the riverside and flip a log over thirteen times, each time letting out a deep, angry wail.

  “I know it sounds woo-woo,” Mom said. “But I believe I was receiving an advanced form of mind-body medicine, even if I can’t explain it.”

  That fall Mom packed her supplements and Guardian gizmo and headed off on a six-week silent meditation retreat. She’d read about a man who supposedly cured himself of fourth-stage rectal cancer just by meditating. I think Mom was happy on her retreats. Sure, the legume-heavy monastery food upset her stomach—she’d often make trips to nearby villages to buy scones—but they served an important purpose: there, she was accountable to no one but herself.

  I, on the other hand, continued to poke her from time to time—just never hard enough to get her mad at me. I’d occasionally suggest that she might want to get another scan to see if her cancer was progressing. Mom still hadn’t even gotten the lymph node biopsy.

  “I know it hasn’t progressed,” she insisted. “I feel wonderful!”

  “Sure,” I said, “but the doctors said that people often don’t feel the symptoms until it’s too late. And then it hits you like a ton of bricks. How would you feel if, say, in six months you were told that your cancer has spread?”

  “You’re not being supportive,” she snapped. “That won’t happen.”

  I told Mom how Steve Jobs died regretting his decision not to get surgery earlier (he’d had the rare form of pancreatic cancer that’s treatable). Despite pleas from family and friends, the Apple CEO spent nine months trying to cure himself with juice fasts, organic herbs, acupuncture, bowel cleansing, hydrotherapy, and other treatments he found on the internet. He even consulted a psychic. When he was finally prepared to try surgery, it was too late. His cancer had spread too far.