Marrow (20 page)

THIS TIME, WHEN I AM
about to return home, Maggie clings to me.

“Can you stay longer?” she asks.

I want to say, “Why? Why me? Ask one of the other sisters. Ask Katy. Ask Jo. They live closer; they love you too.” But I don't say this because she has already told me she can barely be around anyone anymore besides me and her kids and Oliver. That's her team; that's what she wants. And therefore, that's what I do. I unpack my bags, and I stay. I take a chicken out of the freezer to prepare for dinner. I settle in for another night. I shouldn't. I am letting people down at work; I have neglected my home and my family. But I feel a force pulling at me to stay—it's the same force I felt in Montana eight years ago, the same force I felt in my bones when the marrow cells were proliferating.

How did I get here, to this plateau of devotion to my sister, to this place out of time and out of step with the rest of my life? I have been consistently surprised by Maggie's need of me, and by my response to her. Not because the role of caregiver is a new one for me. Cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring—I actually love these caregiver skills that mothering three kids ground into me. And medical researcher. My favorite part of the Sunday
New York Times
is the section where a misdiagnosed disease is finally deciphered by a diligent doctor who won't stop searching until she knows what's killing the patient. And I've never shied away from guts and gore,
bodily fluids, hospitals, or standing up to the medical establishment so as to get the best care, the most honest answers. I'm a big fan of Albert Einstein's guiding principle: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

It is the other roles I have stepped into over these years—or, rather, that we stepped into together, Maggie and I—that have surprised us both. We have become the best of friends. And biggest surprise of all, I have, in many ways, become Maggie's mother and she has also become mine. We are remothering each other. In my constant (and sometimes obsessive) care of her, I am rewriting how we were raised. I am giving her the kind of attention we rarely, if ever, received. The kind that says through constancy and presence, “You are my precious, cherished, worthy girl. I will put you first. I will do this because you are my girl, because you belong to me, we belong to each other, and you belong here on earth with us. And as long as you are here, you deserve to be seen and tended to.” That's not the message—expressed or implied—that we received from our parents. They loved us, but they did so without much fanfare or tenderness. They felt it their duty to give us a moral compass, and then we were on our own to go forth as good citizens of the world. Demonstrations of love, acknowledgment of one's unique character, guidance and solace after falls and traumas—these were for other people. These were Hallmark Card coping strategies for the weak and the silly.

The idea that Maggie and I were reparenting each other came to me early one morning as I sped up the New York State Thruway toward Vermont on one of my increasingly repetitive three-hour drives. I was passing the same forests, the same fields, the same road signs, wondering once again, why I am doing this? Should I be doing this? Is this what Maggie really wants, needs? Am I overstepping
my bounds, taking up too much space, filling roles better suited for others? And suddenly, ping! The answer to the riddle of “Why?” dropped fully formed from the sky—like a pebble hitting the windshield. It was such a vivid realization, I had to stop on the shoulder of the highway and sit in my car, letting the traffic whizz by.

The answer started as a physical feeling, as if a strong magnet was pulling me toward Maggie, and Maggie toward me. What was it? A line from a poem came to me: “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” Rumi wrote that. I said the line out loud, several times, as I sat in the muted calm of the idling car. “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” I was being pulled by the strength of unconditional love. I knew that pull; it was the force I felt when I first laid eyes on my babies. It was primal. It was the response a mother has to a child's cry. It was the response we each long for as children—to be seen by our parents for who we are; to be loved, just because of who we are; to be cared for not because we have done something right but because we are here, we matter, we belong.

I remembered a conversation I had with a friend during the relentless days and nights of being a young mother. My friend, a childless colleague at work, asked me why in the world anyone would have kids. All she could see from the outside looking in was the thankless tedium of snotty noses, interrupted sleep, and the inability to concentrate at work.

“What is the payback?” my friend asked.

Payback? I had never stopped to think about that. But I knew the answer right away: “It's the only shot I'll ever have at unconditional love,” I said.

“But children don't love their parents unconditionally,” my friend replied.

“That's not what I mean,” I said. “It's the only chance
I
will get to love unconditionally. It doesn't matter if my kids' love for me matches my love for them. There's no math involved in this. It's just an incredible feeling. Almost holy. And that's the payback. It's a steep price, you're right. It sucks a good deal of the time. But to love so fully, day in and day out . . . No expectation of anything in return, no real concern for myself. That's the payback.”

My friend looked at me like I was crazy, which, of course, I was. Parents
are
crazy. They have fallen in love with a pint-sized tyrant. They have committed to the relationship for life. And although they will never fully live up to the unconditional-love arrow that has pierced their hearts, they will try and try and try, and in that trying will taste the blessed wine of egoless love. But that kind of love is impossible to practice every moment, every day, in the complexity of family life. Monks leave the imperfect world behind in order to pursue God's perfect love. What is the opposite of being a monk? Being a parent.

The longing for unconditional love is universal, and yet I have noticed that few people feel they received enough of it. Rather, they got imperfect parenting from imperfect people. And even though the experts—from neurologists to wise grandmothers—agree that the developing brains and hearts of children need huge doses of tenderness and acceptance, and even though most parents do the very best they can, we can't seem to interrupt the loop of screwy parents creating screwy kids who turn into screwy parents who return the favor to their kids, etc., ad infinitum. If you are a practitioner of perfect parenting, please leave yourself out of the universal “we,” and also, please send us some helpful hints.

I once heard Oprah say that during the long run of her television show thousands of interview guests sat on her couch, and
every one of them—man or woman—had the same need to be validated, to be seen down to their souls, to be loved for who they were. It didn't matter how old they were, what country they hailed from, what job they held, how much status or money they had, they would sit there like kids, asking the world, “Do you see me? Do I measure up? Does what I say mean something to you?” That lesson was drilled so deeply into Oprah, she made it her life practice to let others know she saw them in their wholeness and depth. “Just saying hello is a way of validating even a stranger,” she says.

These thoughts went through my head as I sat at the side of the New York State Thruway, the pebble-sized realization spreading, filling me with an understanding that would guide me for the rest of the days of Maggie's life. Our mother had done the best she could, and now we were stepping in to finish her job; we were responding to the stronger pull of the kind of giving and receiving we had not received as children. We were closing a gap our mother left in the mother-loop. We are stitching the loop with the thread of unconditional love.

IN THE EARLY YEARS OF
Maggie's disease, a village of friends and family stepped in to help her heal. I was only one of a large cadre of willing caregivers, including my older sister, Katy, and youngest sister, Jo. But as Maggie's illness began to outpace her healing, and as her fear and then her resignation moved in like a storm, she closed the windows to the world and opened instead to what lay ahead. And little by little, day by day, she began to deny most people entry into her home and into her heart. First it was the outer ring of her friends, then the inner ring, then family, until the only people welcome were her kids and Oliver and me. Even her well-meaning, loyal old friends rubbed her the wrong way; even the doctors and nurses; even her other sisters. And the more she told people to stay away, the more she asked me to come. I would beg her to let Katy and Jo help. And sometimes she would agree, and I would gratefully hand off the baton, return home, and pick up the reins of my own life.

But a week or so later, I'd get a call again. Could I come back? Could I take her to an appointment? Could I speak with her doctors about a new regimen they were considering? Could I call her friends and Katy and Jo and tell them not to visit? I hated telling my sisters to stay away. It felt wrong. But this was not the time to demand that Maggie change her stripes. It would have been better if she gently yet firmly told others what she needed—except she
could hardly do that when she was well. And so I tried to explain the situation to my sisters as best I could. Every time I was the bearer of Maggie's messages, I sensed old childhood resentments waking up and sprouting new tendrils. Were Katy and Jo blaming me for taking over? Were they talking about me behind my back? I didn't stop to ask them, and they weren't forthright with me.

Soon I was spending most weekends at Maggie's house, sometimes the whole week. And although it was always hard to leave my own home and work, when I got to Oliver and Maggie's, it was where I most wanted to be. It was where the stronger pull of what I really loved had led me. The world rushed onward, but I got off the train and stayed in the slow, small backwater of loving one person as best I could for as long as I could.

We fell into a routine. Maggie and I would spend mornings in the window seat, in our chosen spots, reading, talking, dozing. We worried and cried; we watched funny videos and laughed; we revisited our childhood; we speculated about life after death. I taught her meditation. She taught me a million things—about planting fruit trees and tending bees, rolling piecrusts and making jam. Much to her chagrin, in the afternoon she would nap and I would do what she no longer could: shop and cook; clean and tidy; call the doctors, check on results, make appointments. Oliver and I would compare notes on research, new drug trials, different doctors. Sometimes I would drive Maggie up north to the hospital for tests and treatments—on the way up, there'd be more talking, more laughing; on the way back, more dozing (her), more praying (me).

In the evenings, Oliver would choose a movie, and the three of us would gather on the guest-room bed with bowls of ice cream—sometimes the only meal of Maggie's day—and settle in for our
secret, sacred ritual. It was as if we were having an affair, a threesome that excluded the whole world but was precious to each of us. There were moments in my visits to Maggie and Oliver's house that felt as if I had finally come home, a feeling of not wanting to be anywhere else on earth but right there, in the little guest room, on the funky futon bed, ice cream bowls balanced on our laps, laughing at a movie on their tiny television. Maggie would fall asleep, her head on my shoulder. We'd finish the movie and then say good night, holding onto each other for dear life, for one last hug before she went upstairs and tried, usually unsuccessfully, to turn off her mind, to get beyond the pain and find restful sleep.

From the first moment of her first diagnosis, Maggie must have known something in her marrow, long before she knew it in her mind. Why else would she have called me in Montana and said the two words that calibrated the magnet and set my course for these past eight years? “I'm sick,” she had said. And then she asked me to help her, which was stunning since she was not one to ask for help, and certainly not from me. She was more likely to ask our older sister, Katy, the de facto mommy by virtue of seniority, not to mention that Maggie and Katy shared similar personality traits—something they never failed to mention. They were the no-nonsense, athletic go-getters; I was the introspective, intellectual mystic (and this was not a compliment). They lived in Vermont; I lived in New York (another choice I had made that flew in the face of the family values).

Our youngest sister, Jo—the one most like me, the one who also marched to a more meditative drum—had been estranged from the family until recently. Years previously she had married a man who did not like the way Jo had been treated as a child or an adult by our parents, or by us, the sisters. He and Jo viewed
our family through a different lens than I did. Sure, our parents had been somewhat neglectful and self-serving, but they were also adventurous and creative. If I had to describe my upbringing using just one word, I would say it was rousing. But that was not Jo's experience. She was a quiet, shy child—a true introvert who barely got a word out in the competitive, fast-paced noise of the sisterhood. We were raised by the same parents, and with the same siblings, but still, we had different childhoods.

One by one, we grew up, we left home, and we went off to college, leaving Jo behind. But she had practice being alone because within the family system she had always felt forgotten, “the least of the Lessers.” In her twenties Jo and her husband broke off contact with us. The break was especially hard on Maggie. She and Jo had been a unit as children, and became intimate friends as young women living near each other in Vermont. Maggie missed Jo. We all missed Jo. Our little sister was lost to us. And although she lived close to Maggie and our parents, it felt as if Jo had moved to a foreign part of the galaxy. We would discuss this as a family and wonder if we should try to save her. Jo insisted it was we who needed saving. She had built a life that worked for her; she was happy, she said. My parents were distraught. But they went to their graves without resolution.

During Maggie's first diagnosis and treatments, Jo made tentative steps back toward Maggie. But it wasn't until Jo's husband's untimely death from cancer that she and Maggie began to rebuild their friendship. There were unresolved issues and unspoken hurts, but there was also a bond stronger than the years of separation.

I always thought Maggie would call on Jo or Katy to come to her rescue when she first got sick, but her cells must have known some
thing that none of us could imagine. And maybe my cells perked up, even that first time, when she called me in Montana, and I got right on a plane and flew to her. Perhaps it was because our mother had recently died and I felt a new responsibility. Or was it as simple as this—that my training as a midwife and a spiritual seeker made me the logical choice as a guide through illness? Whatever the reasons, I didn't think twice when she asked for help. And then, when she went into remission, our friendship blossomed. When the cancer came back, and when Maggie was told she would not live without a transplant, and the tests revealed I was a match and Katy and Jo were not, and when the mysterious mother magnet drew me and Maggie together, up out of the ground came buried sibling dramas, competition, jealousy, misunderstandings—as if they'd been waiting not only for eight years but for all the decades we had been sisters.