Riding Fury Home (37 page)

“My mother is confused as to whether you said the cancer had spread to her liver,” I explained.

“Yes,” she replied, “she now has liver cancer. Confusion is part of that, because when the liver has trouble metabolizing toxins, patients can get very disoriented.”

Somehow, I kept talking, but my voice had taken on a tinny pitch. “What does it mean that she has liver cancer?”

“Well, unfortunately, the chemotherapy is not proving effective.”

I marched on. “What does it mean in terms of prognosis?”

“It's likely she won't live more than a few months—three or four.”

My whole body had gone into a numb altered state, and I found myself repeating in a monotone: “You're saying she has just a few months to live—three or so?”

“Yes. I'm sorry.”

In a wooden voice, I said, “I will be coming with my mother to her appointment tomorrow. She has told me she wants to know the truth of her condition. So, you need to inform her. It's not something I can do. Will you do that?”

“All right,” she said. I thought I detected a sigh.

 

 

THE EXAMINATION ROOM was a small, narrow space with an examination table, one chair, a sink, and white cabinets. I sat in the chair while the doctor performed a brief physical exam on my mother, who was in her street clothes. “All right, Gloria, I will see you at your next appointment,” she said. And then the doctor's hand was on the door. Before she turned the knob, I managed to gasp out, “Dr. Donner, wasn't there something else you had to discuss with my mother?” She paused there as if suspended, neither leaving nor turning back. I raced on, my voice loud with alarm. “Gloria, if there was some information about your condition, would you want to know it?”

“Yes, I want to know,” she affirmed.

Dr. Donner lowered her hand from the doorknob, turned, and came back. She stuck to the facts. “Gloria, the chemotherapy has not
stopped the spread of your cancer. It is now in your liver,” she said succinctly. “I would say you have just a few months to live.”

There was no crying, not then. After the news, my mother said she was too dizzy to walk to the car. We borrowed a hospital wheelchair. She stumbled into it, head bent, chest caved in like she'd just been sucker punched. While I pushed her through the halls to the hospital entrance, she said, “You're not going to keep studying, are you?”

I looked down at her head, at her soft silver curls, the lobes of her ears. The Silver Fox. It was a nickname I sometimes called her, teasing her that she was still a wild, sexy woman. “No, I'm not. I want to have time to be with you.” I meant it. The orals, the rest of my life, were rapidly receding in importance. Nothing mattered more than these last days with my mother.

“Good,” she said.

“What shall we do now?” I asked, once I'd pulled up to the hospital entrance, where she'd waited in the wheelchair, and we were both in the car.

“Let's go to lunch,” she said.

Over the couple months of her chemotherapy, we'd taken to going to Saul's Deli. Her treatments left her nauseous, and she had trouble eating. Oddly enough, at Saul's, we'd share the huge family-size platter of smoked whitefish with bagels and cream cheese and a side of coleslaw, and Gloria never failed to eat. It was the same food her parents used to bring us on weekends from Tabachnick's Deli.
She's feeding herself Jewish soul food,
I'd think as I watched her eat.

Now we didn't have it in us to drive across town to Saul's. Instead, we stopped en route to Gloria's at the Claremont Diner. We sat across from each other in a small two-person booth and both ordered the blue-plate special: hot turkey slices with mashed potatoes,
gravy, dressing, and cranberry sauce. I could barely feel my body, and after a few bites I looked down at the plate and pushed it away. My eyes had gone unfocused. My body was traveling in the land of the bereft, as I tried to imagine a life without my mother.

“Chana,” my mother called me back. “Let's go to Hawaii—soon.”

I looked up. “Okay.” I paused, worried. What if she got so sick in Hawaii she couldn't fly back home? What if we were stuck there until she died? What a horrifying thought, to have to go through that without community, without any of our friends.

“I think I should give my clients a week's notice, so how about we make it the week after next?”

“All right.” She sounded disappointed, her voice heavy. She picked at her food a bit longer and then gave up, too.

And then I noticed something I hadn't before, or, more correctly, something I'd noticed without taking it in: The whites of my mother's eyes had turned yellow.

MY MOTHER PLUMMETED into her final days like a car careening off a cliff at Devil's Slide and plunging toward the gleaming Pacific. There was no turning back from the descent. And I dove with her, bound in the passenger's seat.

In the three days since her doctor's visit, my mother had had no bowel movements, and by the third day she was moaning with pain. I called the doctor's service. The weekend on-call doctor listened to my description of the symptoms and explained that she might have a blockage, which would be very serious. He said he would admit her right away.

“We're going to the hospital,” I told Gloria. She was lying on the couch. “I'll get your shoes.”

“Can't wear them,” she gasped, short of breath. “My feet are too swollen. Just bring my slippers.” She struggled up. She was wearing navy sweat pants, and I noticed the elastic waistband was straining against her bulging belly. It had grown huge in just a few days. I knew what this was, and knowing made me want to cry. I'd
finally done some medical reading and learned a new word with both Greek and Latin derivations:
ascites
—fluid buildup in the abdominal cavity from liquid that seeps out of the bloodstream when the liver isn't functioning. A very bad sign.

At the hospital, my mother got wheeled off in a gurney, and I waited, paging absentmindedly through a
People
magazine while they performed tests. After her scans, the good news was that she had no cancer growth blocking her intestines. But she was much too ill to go home. I followed as she was wheeled to a room in the oncology ward. She'd just settled in bed and was saying hello to her roommate, an eighty-four-year-old woman with metastasized breast cancer, when a nurse came in and closed the curtains between the beds. “We're going to be performing ascitic drainage,” she informed us.

A doctor arrived with a big needle. I held my mother's hand and turned my head away, trying not to look, but I kept sneaking glances, tugged by a mesmerizing horror. She gasped and clenched my hand while the doctor shot her with anesthetic, cut a small incision in her belly flesh, and inserted a thin tube into her abdomen. She was left with a larger tube coming out of her, and a drainage bag hanging from the tube, as if she had sprouted a leak.

Those first days of her hospital stay, I spent my free time with my mother but kept meeting with my clients. Even though it was clear she was extremely ill, I was holding in mind the doctor's three-to-four-month prognosis, which meant it was too soon to stop working. There were moments when I did some of my finest, most connected work, able to be truly present with my clients' suffering. I felt ripped open, and told myself,
There is no place too dark for you to go
. In other sessions, I felt the cold weight of the seconds ticking, the unbearable waste of time lost with my mother. I could barely stay in the room.

Much of the time I was swallowed up into an enclosed bubble, immersed in a world that was just Mom and me. Dana had a back injury that had gotten much worse since the day she'd spent hours with Gloria in the emergency room. But I had little focus for her suffering. In the face of my overwhelming grief, Dana put her needs aside to be there for me. Much later, we'd have to deal with the deep hurt and resentment that built up in her.

 

 

ONE DAY, I STEPPED out of my mother's room and went to find the nurse who'd been caring for her. She was sitting at the nurses' station.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I started awkwardly. How to ask this?

“Yes?” She looked at me encouragingly, her face soft.

I liked this nurse, thought she was a real
mensch,
because when my mother had said to her, “Do you know I'm gay?” as she was taking Gloria's blood pressure, she'd simply smiled and said, “Great. Thanks for telling me.” At first I'd felt a bit embarrassed—why did my mother need to make a point of that?—followed by an admiring,
of course,
a recognition that it mattered deeply to Gloria to be accepted as herself, especially her gay self. Now, at the end, she wanted no more hiding.

“Well . . . well,” I struggled to find the words, “it's just that I've never seen anyone die, so I don't have a sense of a time line, of where my mother is in the process. I was wondering—I thought since you're an oncology nurse and you've seen so much, you might have an impression. Do you have a guess about how long she's got?”

“Hmmm,” she answered, “people can surprise you, living longer than you'd ever guess. So . . . I could be wrong . . . but I don't think your mother's got real long. Maybe a few weeks.”

I managed a whispered “Thanks,” and turned to go back to Gloria's bedside.

My mother dozed on and off. When awake, she cycled between confused, foggy consciousness and clarity. I sat next to her bed, my body leaden, my senses dazed, half listening to the husband talking with his dying wife on the other side of the curtain.

Once, she awoke with a start and stared at me.

“Chana!” she called, sounding alarmed.

“Right here, Momushka.” I'd taken to calling her every endearment and nickname I'd ever used. I reached over and took her hand.

She exhaled slowly. “Hard dream, intense,” she said. She didn't tell me her dream. She squeezed my hand and let go, her eyes looking off to the right, her face pondering. “Yes, that's it, that's what it means,” she whispered to herself.

She looked at me then and said quietly, “I'm dying, aren't I?”

Our eyes held. I inhaled, long and deep, and then let the air rush out of me. Another breath. “Yes,” I answered. “You are.”

We sat in a timeless moment, looking at each other, suspended by the truth.

Then she said, “I didn't want this; I wanted to live. I'd hoped at least for a long remission. But here it is.”

“Yes,” I concurred.

We hovered in the silence.

I cleared my throat. “There's something I want to tell you, something I've been thinking about. I hope this doesn't sound too weird. You know, all my life, whenever I've wanted to freak myself out, I'd imagine you dead, and I couldn't see how I'd go on, how I could have a life without you. But now, with Dana—even though I will miss you
terribly
—I can see how I'll go on.”

“That's marvelous, darling. Knowing that makes me so happy.” Her eyelids drooped, and she dozed.

When Gloria woke, a half hour later, she continued as if we hadn't paused in our conversation. She reminded me that she had made plans several years before with the Neptune Society to be cremated for a prearranged price. She told me where in her desk to find the Neptune Society paperwork and her will. I was impressed, and grateful, that she'd had the foresight to deal with this in advance; I couldn't imagine ever getting around to such a thing myself.

“Now, there's something I need you to do,” she said. “Let's not prolong this thing. If I start to go, I don't want them bringing me back. I need you to do whatever it takes—whatever paperwork—so they don't try to jump-start me back with those damn electric shock paddles. I absolutely don't want that.”

“I understand. I agree that makes sense. I'll take care of it,” I assured her.

The process of getting the “do not resuscitate” form put in my mother's chart happened in a blur. My body marched on remote control from point A to point B, doing what was needed. My mother must have signed the form, and perhaps her doctor had to as well, but all I remember is standing in front of the counter of the nurses' station, handing them the completed piece of paper. Sure, in theory I supported the idea of no heroic measures for a terminal illness—why prolong my mother's suffering? Underneath that belief, a part of me wailed:
Stop! Don't take my mother! You want me to just let her go?

 

 

FRIENDS OF GLORIA'S came by throughout each day, and sometimes while they sat with her, I'd go eat or take a walk in the
neighborhood. Once, when I was off doing an errand, Gloria called Dana at work and asked her to come see her.

Later, Dana told me how she had stroked my mother's hair, sitting close. Gloria had looked at her and said, “I know you'll take good care of Chana.”

One night, in the dark of 4:00 AM, the phone rang. It was a nurse calling from the hospital. “Your mother won't let us do any procedures on her, not even take her temperature. She's gotten paranoid; she says we're trying to kill her.”

“I'll be right there.” I'd been awake when the phone rang, sitting in a rocking chair in the spare bedroom, rocking and crying. A nightmare had woken me—I had them all the time now. I was too agitated to fall back to sleep, and I'd tiptoed out of bed, not wanting to wake Dana.

My mother was alone in her room with the lights on. Her roommate's bed had been stripped; she'd left the prior afternoon after refusing any further treatments. “Enough is enough. I'm too old for that,” she'd said.