As She Lay Dying

The summer I was 23 my mother was busy dying. It's an intricate thing, this prolonged method of dying. The demon in our midst was cancer. Cancer of liver or pancreatic origin. No one ever decided for sure. It didn't matter anyway because it was far-flung and out of control by the time they found it.

To harbor hope or to dissolve into despair? To live or to die? To make a big deal out of every moment or just live in an ordinary day? Those were the existenialities we wrestled with that summer. Every moment, waking or sleeping, was steeped in a surreal kind of terror. We walked a tightrope of agony.

But you soon learn the necessity of just going on with the ordinary. To try to infuse every pregnant moment with importance and meaning is just plain exhausting. Mother wasn't into resolving issues, reconciling relationships, or making moments. She was just trying not to throw up and wishing that something would make the pain subside. It was hell and none of us wanted to live in our hell. We all just wanted to find a way to pass through it.

But we, the onlookers, the family, suffered only emotional agony. Mother's emotional agony was compounded by her impending doom and by the cruelty of her physcial agony.

It had started with digestive problems over the course of a year and a half or so. She knew something was very wrong but could get no diagnosis. Then one day she awoke with a circle of burning skin on the side of her ribcage. It burned like fire, felt like sunburn only worse, she told me. Turns out it was a spot of wayward cancer trying to eat itself out from the inside.

There were other spots too: on her lung, on her liver, in her spine. Silly little "spots". They sound so innoncent. But they aren't. They mean there's very little hope to be had. They mean the cancer has taken over. But you fight it anyway. Even Mother, who always swore (in theory) that she would never do chemotherapy, did chemotherapy.

The first day of chemo felt strangely exciting -- like the first day of kindergarten or something. I guess it allowed us to feel like there was something we could do. We could march into the hospital all smiles and joviality and fight back. It was the most active attack we could launch.

They weighed her (114 that would drop to maybe 80 by the end) and took her blood pressure (having blood pressure meant that some things were still in working order, right?). And then they sat her in a high-backed turquoise vinyl recliner across from a soap opera on tv and started filling out forms.

She had to sign papers to promise not to sue the hospital if they spilled any of the chemotherapy drugs on her skin. They would burn her skin on contact. And they were cheerfully about to pump this poison into my mother's frail body. That's when the bottom fell out for me.

I wanted to run away. I wanted to call in the adults to handle this. Oh wait -- we were the only adults there were. Twenty-three counts as adult. But twenty-three is still WAY to young to have to think about pumping poison in to your beloved mother to try to kill the evil thing inside her that is even stronger than burn-on-contact poison.

She threw up for a week. Sleep. Throw-up. Sleep. Throw-up. The cycle just repeated itself. Day and night. Every day we hoped it would be over. Every day it just continued. I had to shut off the empathy function of my brain. I couldn't bear to think how she must feel.

It was early afternoon on Thursday when I took the grocery list and drove 25 minutes into town to the store. The small-town Oklahoma grocery store was dim and dank. Focusing on the products lined neatly on the shelves was difficult. I had to push aside the shroud of despair that enveloped me and fight back tears at times to concentrate on the task. Peaches. Cottage cheese.Monterrey Jack cheese. Brisket. Most of the food wasn't for mother. It was for the rest of us -- those who had to keep up our strength to take care of her. Those of us who got to be normal but felt crushing guilt for being so. Pudding cups (for mother). Pedialyte (to try to keep her hydrated). Toilet paper. For normality. Even though I couldn't have felt more detached from normality, swirling as I was in a surreal place where life and death clash,while walking among people who were existing in the presence of life, blissfully detached from of death, consumed by their trivial day-to-day concerns.

About halfway though the store I came to the end of an aisle. Parked at the end of the aisle, two women in their late 20's stood talking over their carts.

"MY mother is driving me crazy!" one of them bitched to the other. "She blah blah blah."

"Oh, MINE is worse!" the other countered, "She blah blah blah.

They laughed and shook their heads at the burden of the mothers involved in their lives, healthy enough to be irritating.

I made a wide circle around them, annoyed, gave them an bit of an evil eye, listened to their continued complaining about the women who had give birth to and raised them as I worked my way down the next aisle, forming a speech to them in my head. It began with, "MY mother is at home in bed on chemo" and ended with "You ought to appreciate that your mother is alive!" In between was the crazed rant that kept me from saying anything to them. I didn't want to shame them and I didn't want to unload my heavy baggage on their blessed, ordinary day.

In rhetrospect, I should have said something to them. My words, my situation, the message I had for them was important. I did them a disservice by not delivering the lesson. In the two decades since, I have tried to make up for my omission by telling this story anytime it was applicable. I hope it's proven important to some. It's a lesson you can never truly absorb until you've lived it. But I hope today I can give someone a new appreciation.

My mother died on October 15, 1989. Five months after her diagnosis. Two years after her symptoms began. She was 48 years old.

I still miss my mother desperately. Even the passage of twenty years has not dulled the cruel agony of that time or the depth of the loss. My daughters never got to meet the grandmother who had SO looked forward to having grandchildren, who saved a big basket of building blocks from my childhood for them, who had envisioned summers full of grandkids at her house on the lake. We all lost SO much.

Now, go call your mother if you can! Or make your kids read this!

To see a photo of my mother, Carol Baker Cromwell, scroll down to the end of the previous post "Mortality in a Box"

Footnote: Today, February 25th would have been Mother's 69th birthday. Happy Birthday Mother!