What We Have (24 page)

In that one wish, so much was betrayed. The desire to help out. The sense of a timeline she couldn’t control. The acknowledgment that the move was not, in the end, for her—her interest in Birmingham, with its restaurants and shops, was not some longed-for, last-ditch return to city living, but instead an attempt to protect my father, imagining him left alone in our house—
Perfect for a Growing Family
. Moving with him, she could have helped him get ready. But it wasn’t going to happen.

Mouth dry, I maneuvered her car out of the garage, and we headed home.

THE SECOND STAGE OF GRIEF,
according to Kübler-Ross, is anger.

Anger has always been hard in our family. I was raised to be anything but: to accept, to apologize. Being the middle of three girls didn’t help; I was usually the one who tried to fix things, to see both sides. Being middle-class and middle-American didn’t help, either, and it didn’t help growing up in the 1960s, the daughter of parents who studied conflict but didn’t live it. I remember walking somewhere with my father when I was young and two men near us broke into a fight and my father grabbed my arm, eyes down, and told me in a low, urgent voice just to keep walking and not to look at them. I was surprised, without really understanding; surprised by the force of his need to get away from their quarrel, and to protect me from it. Anger, my parents taught us, was dangerous. Like disease—something that can destroy you, eat you up from the inside. Better to keep your distance, walk away.

When something or someone makes me angry, I almost never realize it until minutes or even hours later. Delayed reaction. By then, it’s too late to say anything. Not that I’d be likely to let it show.

But Kübler-Ross must have been on to something, because after my mother’s second set of scans came back, I was angry all the time. The news, Dr. Brenner reported, was “very disappointing.” The metastases were worse, despite her brief course of Megace. It was a good thing, he said—trying to find something positive to say, I guess—that they’d scheduled chemo for the following week. They needed to get going.

Anger for me came out at the wrong times and places. At the Northwest Airlines ticket counter. At the drugstore. Seeing ordinary people doing ordinary things. Once, in a dressing room with Sacha in Newton, trying something on, I heard a mother and daughter in the dressing room next to me. They were laughing and arguing with each other about something one of them was trying on and the whole scene was so perfectly ordinary, so much exactly what a mother and daughter should be doing on a summer afternoon, buying something to wear to some event they were going to—maybe together—that I could feel rage burn in my face. I had to look away so Sacha wouldn’t see. Why couldn’t we have that?
Why not?
OK, I knew there were worse things. Hurricanes and rape and addiction and homelessness. Horrible things happen, I got that. I knew in the scheme of things I didn’t deserve to be so infuriated about this random situation of ours, our preset half-life. But I was.

I even picked a fight with Annie when she called to check in. I had told her about my mother in June, but this was our first real talk in weeks. Right away I could tell we were in different moods—she was upbeat, filled with news and plans; I was quiet and down. She started telling me a long story about a friend of her mother’s who had cancer and was doing great, years and years later. Annie was convinced that her attitude really helped. As she put it: “She’s just the kind of person who finds the positive in everything, you know?” I found myself snapping at her. “Surviving cancer isn’t about
attitude
, Annie! It’s about cell type.” She was silent, and I apologized—she was just trying to be a good friend—but I couldn’t help it. I read too much into everything these days.

I was angry, Julie was angry, Sara was angry, I suppose in their way Jacques and Jon and Geoff were angry, and most of all, my father was angry. Blazing, furious, white-hot anger. We controlled ourselves and tried to pull ourselves together in front of my mother, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

My mother, instead of being angry—or at least outwardly so—was busy trying to squeeze her chemo schedule into her summer plans. There were endless logistics, shifting of schedules. Sara was flying out at the end of the week, and would stay through the Fourth of July, so she could take my mother back and forth to the hospital for the first round of F-U. I’d come back in with Sacha for round two in late July, since Julie would be too pregnant to fly by that point. My father would be on vacation in August, and he could take her to round three. My mother set it all up the same way she organized our tickets back and forth for family reunions. She was in her usual position, at the center of everything, running the show. Her biggest concern seemed to be making sure chemo wouldn’t get in the way of her top priorities: having us all together in Michigan for the Fourth of July; going out to Maine when Julie had the baby; getting all of us to Charlevoix over Labor Day weekend.

Like Pope Gregory, she was remaking the calendar, lifting out rituals and holidays, laying them over this new dispensation. She talked about chemo as if it would only impact the infusion days themselves—three days, a month apart. Nine days total. Really only
half
days, when you thought about how long the infusions were supposed to take. Normal life could just go right on.

We took our cues from her, trying to be upbeat. Trying to work on our attitudes. Maybe it was a good thing about the clot, we told one another, because it made the doctors do the second scan sooner and realize she needed something stronger. OK, the Megace hadn’t worked, but the F-U should do it. From the way Dr. Brenner talked about F-U, it sounded like this stuff could kill anything.

“Maybe we should try putting it out on the crabgrass,” my mother said, after she’d read the fine print on the clinic’s consent form.

My mother hated the idea of chemo—more than almost anything else. In her usual way, she dealt with her fear through black humor. That and avoidance—she tried not to talk about it. But it was a hard subject to avoid.

Before my mother started the F-U, people called to tell her how much better chemo was now than it used to be. There were all sorts of wonder drugs these days to combat nausea, a well-meaning neighbor told her. Almost everyone had an inspirational story or a piece of advice. A former colleague thought my mother should consider hypnosis. She sent a big flower arrangement, too—gerber daisies, day lilies. My mother wanted to know how all these well-wishers had found out she was sick in the first place. When more flowers came—pink hydrangeas this time—she complained the house smelled like a funeral home.

Much better than flowers were the thank-you notes she got from her “bubbies” sharing their AP History scores with her—almost all 4s and 5s. She loved hearing from her students. None of them knew she was sick, or that she wasn’t coming back in the fall. “My brother says he can’t wait for the Hittites,” a boy named Samir wrote to her. “He says he’s taking your AP European History class next year even if he has to camp out outside your classroom to get in!” When she read that part, she got a funny catch in her voice.

 

SARA CAME OUT TO MICHIGAN
in mid-June, flying the red-eye from Seattle, getting in at six in the morning on Sunday, in time for the first round of chemo that Monday, June 22. My mother was in good spirits. She brought a tote bag filled with
New Yorkers
with her to the hospital, ready, she told Sara, to finally get caught up on her reading.

Day One started well. They found the infusion room easily. What Dr. Brenner called “the clinic” was really just a big room off its own corridor on the second floor of the hospital, set up with reclining chairs for patients, little clusters of chairs for visitors, and stations with tea and water. You were supposed to drink lots of water while you were getting F-U, to flush away the toxins.

My mother was getting three different drugs, one right after the other—Five F-U, Adriamycin (which was red, and turned her pee red afterward) and Cytoxan, which burned when it went in and made her sick to her stomach. Sara reported that she was “very plucky.” She read her
New Yorkers
, mostly, and looked out the window at the parking lot, and when she didn’t feel woozy, she flipped through catalogues, flagging potential baby gifts for Julie. It was all weirdly normal, Sara said, at least if you didn’t look too closely at the bags of fluid going into her arm, which had stickers saying TOXIC across the bottom and were such shocking colors. If you tried not to think that all your life you’d avoided anything that had so much as a drop of poison in it, and that what was in these bags was pure poison, designed to wipe out “rapidly dividing cells”—cancer cells, of course, but also skin, hair, and white cells. Not to mention all the other healthy cells running around her body. If you tried not to think about that, chemo could be like anything else. A root canal. Whatever. A few hours later, after the last bag emptied and the little machine beeped, the nurse slipped the IV out and my mother was free to go.

The strange part, Sara said, was how tired she was when they got home. My mother had been ready for nausea, and there was some in the late afternoon, but not bad. What was bad—baffling, really—was the fatigue. “It’s like—well, it isn’t really like anything else,” Sara reported. The first night my mother was sitting there with Sara and my father at dinner, and one minute they were talking and everything was fine, and the next minute her face just began to descend, lower, lower, lower, until
boom
, she’d laid it down right in her plate of pasta. It was like something out of Laurel and Hardy—only not funny.

On top of that, she had no appetite. Her mouth tasted like metal.

“The funny taste in my mouth,” my mother told me when I called that evening, asking about the F-U, “isn’t the worst.” Then she was quiet.

“Then what? What’s the worst?” I asked.

She wouldn’t say.

“That isn’t fair,” I complained. “You can’t start to tell me and then stop.”

“I have to go, your father just walked in,” she interrupted. She wasn’t following any of the rules.

Sara suspected the worst part was the flowers.

“The flowers?”

“Everyone just keeps sending more and more flowers. And fruit baskets. It makes her feel like she’s already dead,” Sara said. Literally—they got three arrangements one day. Two the next. Weird combinations, Sara said (she was the gardener among us, so she should know). The house stank of lilies. Apparently word about the cancer had gotten out.

“But maybe,” Sara said, reconsidering, “the worst part is getting the IV in.”

It turns out there are lots of things involved when it comes to getting toxins into the human body, because the body, being how it is, with its intelligence and defense systems, doesn’t actually want Fuck You pumping through its veins; the body says,
Whoa
,
what
is
this stuff?
And in my mother’s case there were protests, cells throwing up their hands, Do Not Pass Here, borders closed. The big issue was her circulation. In the first place there was the clot, caused by a combination of bad veins and Megace. Now the clot was better but the veins in her arms were bad. On Day One, the nurses had argued about the best terms for describing the problem. One said her veins were “small,” another, “dry,” but the consensus by the end of the day was that it was very difficult to get an IV into either arm. Everyone was worried about this.

Day Two, my mother planned to ask for the nurse she’d already decided was the Good Nurse, Gretchen. Not to compare, but some of the others . . . Gretchen was the best. Gretchen knew everything about veins and their stubbornness. Gretchen was willing to go the distance. Warm compresses to soften things up. A massage, especially a hand massage, which my mother—usually no great fan of being touched by strangers—told us felt wonderful. Under Gretchen’s compassionate kneading, my mother’s tiny side-street veins opened into boulevards, and the chemo tunneled through, no problem. But Gretchen was in high demand, and the other nurses—

Sara took Gretchen aside, talked to her, and Gretchen agreed to help my mother through the rest of round one.

In her usual way, my mother developed the relationship into something deeper. Day Two, she and Gretchen talked while the F-U dripped into my mother’s arm. My mother coaxed things out of her, bit by bit. The names of her boys (Eddie and Josh). Who cut her hair like that, on that sharp angle. How long she’d been at Rougemont. What kind of specialization did it take, being an oncology nurse? And true to form, before long they were talking not about my mother’s side effects or symptoms or cancer at all, but about Gretchen’s career dilemmas and her secret love of history. Gretchen—full name, Gretchen Moynihan—had been a Victorian history buff since girlhood. Loved Victoria and Albert trivia, watched the History Channel, read historical romances. She’d actually thought about majoring in history at State, she admitted. But her parents wanted her to become a nurse. They thought it would give her lifelong job security.