Warning: “I cried when I wrote this song; sue me if I play too long.” (-Walter Becker & Donald Fagen, Steely Dan)
Mom was 81 when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancer didn’t care that she had quit smoking sometime in the previous century, some 30-odd years before. Well, she had quit a couple of times. The first time was easy, she said. But she had taken up the habit again after two years cigarette-free. She explained that she couldn’t stand to be around “the smell of your father”, steeped for decades in Chesterfield Kings, so she had started smoking again.
“Oh, well, I’ve had a good life,” she sighed, upon hearing the cancer diagnosis. “HOLD UP!” the oncologist protested, raising one hand like a very well-educated crossing guard. “There are treatments…” he went on, and there were, and she did. Hold up, that is. She lived almost four more years with lung cancer, her activities somewhat diminished, but mostly free of pain and cancer’s other troubling symptoms. She did often comment that she felt uneasy about using up valuable resources that could more rightly benefit others who were more “useful to society”, but her doctors and her children were having none of that nonsense.
“You’re matriarching your ass off!” David admiringly told her, at the first Thanksgiving he witnessed her in action, er, inaction. She relaxed in her favorite chair with a cocktail and some “nibbles” as her grown children labored nearby, carving turkey, making gravy, lighting candles. She had set the table days before, arranged the flowers, set out the heirloom silver serving dishes, each one just so as tradition required. “I’m getting better at it!” she replied, and they clinked glasses, or I like to think they did.
“I’ve got to meet this woman!” David had said, months before, when we were first getting to know each other and I had told him some story about my mom. “You’d better hurry up!” I retorted bitterly. She had just received the cancer diagnosis and I wasn’t ready to let her go. As if being “ready” has anything to do with anything.
I had spent years avoiding even the Cancer Center exit of the highway, having spent far too much time there already, years before. Yet here we were, back there again. She knew how it pained me to be going back there, with Mom this time. She hated that I had to drive her there, but I did. Macular degeneration (BOTH kinds!) was robbing her of her sight and her independence, but it could not rob her of her spirit, nor of her lifetime caring for other people.
When we got bad news at the Cancer Center, she hated that it hurt us. Once, when we got good news – “You’re in remission!” – we found ourselves free of the planned treatment regimen and back in her car with a suddenly open afternoon. “Where should we go?” I asked her. “Just drive,” she said. As I steered the car out onto the road, she said softly, “Carrie, I’m sorry that you and Jeff and Anna couldn’t have had this good news.”
“Jaysus, Mom, I’m driving here!” I cried, suddenly blind with tears.
Bad news or good news, what mattered more to her was, “Where would we like to have lunch?” Steamers and chowder on a deck overlooking the harbor? A juicy cheeseburger at a crowded greasy counter? Spicy tacos and an icy margarita? What is it going to be today? Somewhere new? “Oh, goody!”
I was on vacation in Jamaica when I got the phone call. Hospice. I flew home through an epic Eastern-seaboard-wide snowstorm of which I had been blissfully unaware. Through the seven unintended hours in MBJ airport, then the long sleepless night in ATL, through the many delayed and canceled flights, the strung-together itinerary that finally landed me back home in PWM, I hoped and prayed I would get there in time.
But we were to have a bit more time together. ALL together – she had requested all five of her living children to be with her for her last few days. It had been a decade or more since all five of us had been in the same room – and never without the distraction of our spouses, our significant others, our children. For her last days, she brought us together. She, who never asked for anything, asked for that, so oblige her we did, and gladly, gratefully. I was one day into a tropical vacation, a welcome and intricately-planned break from the “cancer caregiver” routine. One sister was about to embark on a long-awaited conference in which she was a presenter, several time zones away. A brother, head of the English department, was preparing for exam week. Did she know, when she asked, what a gift of togetherness she was bestowing on us?
After her own mother had died, kicking and screaming, as well as decrepit, blind, and disagreeable as ever, my mother had a little bit of her “own money”, for the first time in a long time. She decided to take a trip: a guided tour of English flower gardens. She arrived home from the travel agent with a handful of brochures, all bubbly and excited about her plans. My father, a stoic loner and homebody who traveled widely for work, was dubious.
“Am I invited?” he asked politely.
“God, NO! This is MY trip!” said my mother.
“Oh, thank God!” my father breathed a sigh of relief. “The only thing I can imagine I would enjoy less would be a guided tour of–” with a sweeping arm gesture, “–Fabric Stores of The World!”
And so began my mother’s solo exploration of the world. She traveled widely in her later years – most corners of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii; much of Europe; Costa Rica, Africa; Russia. She traveled to visit her far-flung offspring, or generously took us with her, one at a time, when she could pry us away from our own commitments. Even with terminal cancer, she was still talking about where to go next, and which of her children would accompany her. A couple of those trips are still un-taken. Maybe someday we will be able to honor her legacy. The Cape Cod beaches of her childhood? The Montana Bison Range? Another Alaska glacier cruise? Maybe another swim-up bar in Costa Rica like that one she couldn’t stop talking about? Or to the pyramids of Egypt, where she brought home the unwelcome and durable souvenir known as “Cairo Cough”. On her deathbed, she regaled the hospice chaplain with her story of the chimpanzee who climbed in her hotel window in Africa. She was lying on her bed reading while the rest of her party had gone on an afternoon safari. Who had the bigger adventure?
She did love traveling, but her truest love was her family. “It’s all I ever wanted,” she told the chaplain, while we five fifty-something-year-old children sat weeping around her hospital bed in the living room. She was intrigued with Maine’s new Death with Dignity act, which helps people with fewer than six months to live plan their own exit. There are, rightly, several hoops a patient must jump through to qualify for the program. We made an appointment to discuss her Death with Dignity with the required two independent doctors, but when the time came, we couldn’t go through with it. She was too weak; we couldn’t manage the newly-acquired oxygen tank, the transfer from bed to wheelchair to car to another chair to an office, and back. We canceled the appointment. She expressed her disappointment.
“Are you afraid you will regret canceling, three weeks from now?” we asked her. “No, I’m afraid YOU all will regret it!” was her tart reply.
Cancer didn’t kill her. In truth, I don’t know what took her. She had decided, “This isn’t fun anymore,” and a week later she was gone, like I Dream of Jeannie, determinedly crossing her arms, blinking, and making it so.
“If there’s such a thing as A Good Death, she had one,” David keeps saying, and he is right. That last week she let us parent her, finally, after all the parenting – and grandparenting – she did for all those decades. We spooned tiny bites of her favorite lemon sorbet into her dry mouth that waited, poised and ready as a baby bird’s. We gently took the glass from her sleepy hand before it spilled. We read out loud to her and to our siblings gathered there: Julia Child’s My Life in France, Charlotte’s Web, Winnie the Pooh. We rubbed lotion on her parched old skin; we held her hand. “This is one of your kids. It hardly matters which one,” I murmured to her, as she lay with her eyes closed while I softly stroked the back of her hand.
“I know which one,” she murmured back.