My mother was first diagnosed with cancer at age 48, in 1973. Deep inside, she must have felt the death sentence, always a possibility, for the rest of her life, but she pushed that thought away. In the dark of night or in her hospital bed when she was undergoing surgery and treatments, she must have felt alone and scared, terrified really.
She said later that in the hospital she felt there was no way she was going to leave us—her four children. And she didn’t despite having a limited lumpectomy in those early years of breast cancer treatment even when they found “involvement of the lymph nodes.” She even joked about her diagnosis and said she’d “made a clean breast of it.”
The cancer recurred two more times, separated by more than five years each time, so the recurrences were considered new, unrelated to the first one. And she fought them off each time.
How did she have the courage and strength to stay so strong? She didn’t really let on her fear, but she must have felt it. And her pain. She didn’t complain. Much later, when I was looking through some things with her in her study, I found a book mark with a little kitty hanging onto a branch by her front paws, her furry body fully stretched out, and the words “hang in there” written across the bottom. She told me I had given it to her and she took it with her to her chemo appointments. Here she was, holding onto such a little gift. But she beat that cancer and stayed with us for decades longer than the time of that the first awful diagnosis.
She had heart-lung problems, probably from the imprecise radiation of those early years, and then such a serious lung infection that doctors went in to operate and remove what they thought was a cancerous tumor, only to find a pocket of infection that antibiotics had been unable to treat. After the lung operation, her breathing became labored, but she refused to let it keep her from playing tennis or working out on the treadmill or going out to movies, dinners, or parties, or flying across the country with her husband of over 70 years until finally it became too difficult for her to move from her bed to the chair next to it without gasping for breath.
It must have felt so cruel to hear the diagnosis at age 93 that she had nodules in her lungs that looked like cancer, not the branch-like formation of lung cancer but breast cancer that had spread to her lungs, cells left over from all those years ago, perhaps.
But we weren’t sure. Those nodules could have been a recurrence of her lung infection, which years earlier was also mistaken for a cancerous tumor and wasn’t. This could be the same mistaken interpretation.
She was too weak even for a biopsy, though, and too weak to withstand treatment regardless of what we learned. So we really didn’t know for sure, but we let it go. It wouldn’t matter knowing anyway.
The hospice nurse called it cancer when Mom asked her why she was so weak, why it was so difficult to breathe. I wish now we had said it was that lung infection. Because it could have been. I think she beat cancer. And I really didn’t want her to think she hadn’t, that somehow cancer got the best of her in the end after all of those years fighting it. It didn’t. Old age did. Or that damn lung infection.
A few nights ago, I went to sleep with those thoughts. And suddenly Mom was there, wearing her brown wool pants from Banana Republic and a brown cotton long-sleeve top. No gold jewelry, though, even though she often wore sparkling gold necklaces. She looked so good, maybe 15 or 20 years younger, and so much stronger with good color in her face, her blond hair bright and healthy and her face relaxed and happy.
“Mommie,” I yelled. “You’re back. Where were you?” She mumbled something about having things to do. I hugged her, and she hugged me back tightly. You were gone five days, I was thinking to myself. We thought all was lost. And here you are.
I wanted to call out to my sister and my brothers that Mom was back, but I didn’t want to let her go.
I felt her strong arms around me, pressed against the middle of my back. I held onto her tightly. I felt her breathing and could hear the saliva in the back of her throat, like she had just swallowed. I caught a whiff of the smell of her body.
Please don’t let this be a dream, I said to myself. It’s too real. It can’t be a dream.
The picture froze. The rectangle framing my mother and me flashed out and fizzled away.
My brain dissolved into fuzziness and then I was awake. And my mother was gone. Why couldn’t that have been real?
Today, September 10, is her birthday. She would have been 94. She died on January 18, 2019.