The Long Goodbye (3 page)

It's funny what you remember most about a person: after my mom died, we all talked a lot about how much she loved driving. She was deeply at home behind the wheel—a feeling I never understood, since I didn't learn to drive until I was thirty. (She taught me, so I could take her to the doctor.) When Eamon was little, she used to drive him to and from his babysitter's in Brooklyn on her own way to school. Not long ago, I was asking him what he remembered most about her, and he said, “The way she wanted everything to be fun.” He reminded me of a game our mother used to like to play: a game of never letting the car come to a full stop on the way home. Sometimes she pressed the gas pedal a bit harder than she should have, and at other times she dawdled, rolling down a block so she'd reach the light just as it turned green, antagonizing the drivers behind her.

She was aggressive in the car. Whenever anyone cut her off or acted wishy-washy (she hated wishy-washy), she'd inevitably honk the horn and, slowly and expressively, say, “You asshole.” One morning when she had a meeting, my dad drove my brother to school. Eamon was then about two and a half, with blond curls and long-lashed green eyes. A car cut off my dad. He hit the brakes. Silence. Then, from the backseat, came my brother's lilting voice:
“You ath-hole.”

My mother grew up on the Jersey shore, in a large Irish Catholic family, good at merriment, teasing, and storytelling, bad at expressing serious emotions. (Her father died when she was seventeen, and she almost never spoke of him to me.) The oldest of six—there were five girls, and a boy, Sean, whom they all “spoiled”—she was tall, fizzy, and athletic. She looked a little like Ali MacGraw. She showed me a portrait of herself at sixteen, wearing a Western-style shirt, with her thick, shiny black hair parted in the middle and pulled by her shoulders, the sideburns twisted together and slicked in front of her ears in curlicues. “I would spit in my hands and rub it in and pull that hair forward like that,” she told me, laughing. “It looked ridiculous.” I didn't agree. She was luminous, her dark eyes as open and cool as a horse's. She liked to spend the summers barefoot, taking the bus every day to the beach club, where she swam, or to the Tricorne Farms, where she rode. My earliest memory of my grandmother's house is of studying my mother's riding ribbons pasted up over the den's window—the rich reds and blues, the printed gold lettering (FIRST PLACE), the crimped edges starting to curl.

My mother had me when she was twenty-three; Liam was born two years later. Her youngest sisters were still in high school and college when I was a little girl. I remember them getting ready for dates on Saturday nights, doing their hair and putting on makeup while my mom teased and watched, her long legs crossed, one always jiggling. My aunts used to give me sips of their beer—
Stop that!
my mother would say lightly—and Barbie dolls, and, once, a drag of a cigarette. In their high spirits, I could see the sparkly girl my mother had been, an image that imprinted on me, so that I was, as a child, already nostalgic for
her
youth. (I think I wanted to grow up to be my mother, and it was confusing to me that she already
was
her.) I'd sometimes pretend that I had her life, returning after school to a house with a pool, having friends over to swim, being surrounded by sisters. I tried to write a novel about it when I was thirteen as a way of imagining myself into that world. On warm summer weekends we'd drive out and my parents would put me to bed and then swim in the pool in the dark night, the crickets cheeping. I would peer down through the blinds, watching as my aunts, their boyfriends, and my dad did flips off the diving board, their laughter filling the air.

Growing up as a Catholic had left my mother with a distaste for the Church or any doctrinaire talk of God. It was an antipathy that was a little difficult for me to understand. Raised without religion, I was dreamily attracted to spirituality and rituals. I half believed that there were forces governing my life I couldn't understand. But after my mother made it clear that she thought religion was hogwash—and restrictive hogwash at that—I never talked to her about this feeling.

At her rather unchallenging Catholic school, she was a straight-A student, and she used to tell us that she'd figured out the nuns' system of calling on the class to read; she'd mark her paragraph in advance and then start a new book, secretly. She told us this story to illustrate how good we had it, how lucky we were to live in a city where a subway ride could bring us to the opera, or to a play, or to a museum housing tombs from Egypt. It was important to her that we understood.

 

 

T
HERE IS our mother, and then, suddenly, there is her cancer. It begins with a phone call, a scan, a shock. Disbelief reigns. You distract yourself by watching movies, drinking coffee, doing the normal things. (The night we found out, I played Trivial Pursuit—which my mother had given me for Christmas—with Liam, my boyfriend Jim, and an old friend from graduate school.) The first scan is followed by more scans. In my mother's case, the next scan, in June, was very bad. Colorectal cancer is treatable if it is caught in the early stages. But by Stage 3 the odds of surviving more than five years drop precipitously. By Stage 4—as I had already discovered from the National Cancer Institute website—the survival rate past five years was a mere eight percent. During those first weeks when we were waiting to find out what was happening inside her body, I would lie awake at night praying to an invisible God.
Please, please, please let my mother not be Stage 4,
I whispered.
Anything but Stage 4
.

In June, the PET scan showed that she had more cancerous nodes. “There are two spots on my lungs and one on my liver,” she told me on the phone one day. I felt as if I were falling through my chair. She was Stage 4, with metastases to multiple organs. Did she know what this information meant? It meant that she would
probably
die. Should I tell her?

There would be no surgery: the disease had spread too far. Instead, that first summer, she underwent, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, what her oncologist, Gregory Mears, called “industrial-strength chemo” and radiation. Mears was a calm man, and even though my mother's prospects seemed bleak, he advocated hope: We can't cure it, he said, but we may well be able to turn it into a manageable disease, like diabetes. But I was haunted by the thought of what she was feeling. Was she scared? I could barely formulate the question in my mind. It made me sick. While my mother began her treatments, I spent a lot of time on the porch of a rented house in Long Island with my boyfriend, reading, slapping flies away from my sweating legs, drinking homemade lemonade, trying not to think about it. I was edgy and had difficulty sleeping, and Jim wasn't sure how to help.

My father and I talked every few nights. The news was always bad: My mother was sick, getting sicker, and no one knew if it was the drugs or the cancer or both. I went out to visit three weeks into the chemo and radiation—thinking about it now, I don't know why I hadn't gone sooner—and matters were worse than I'd imagined. The house was filthy. Laundry was piled up on the washing machine. Even the dogs were nervous.

My father had difficulty admitting that he needed help, but his dedication to my mother that first summer touched me. I began to feel a need to batten down the hatches. Jim and I had been together for five years, and while I'd always wanted to have children, I'd never experienced a deep desire to get married. Seeing my mother so ill changed the way I felt. We got engaged at the end of the summer. By August, the combination of radiation and chemo had ravaged my mother. She was barely able to walk, and one night I found her crawling up the stairs, privately, unwilling to tell us how hard it was for her to climb them. But when Jim and I shared our news, her ashen face lit up with joy. “I'm so happy!” she cried. It was the first time she'd looked that way all summer, and within days she started to seem much better; superstitiously I associated the change with our plans to be married.

She had to do one more course of chemo, but when I visited her at school—she was once again working full-time, having scheduled her treatments on Fridays—she was her usual self: authoritative, wisecracking, in command. Two months later, her doctor gave her the astonishing news: The tests could detect no cancer in her body. This was highly unusual for someone whose cancer had been as advanced as hers. Her remission began, and for a brief time it seemed that all this—the marriage, her illness—was headed in a bright direction.

That winter, my parents moved out of their rental and bought a house in a small town, and I regularly took the train up to visit my mother. Though she'd never been a girly mom, we looked at wedding dresses and visited florists and spent time alone together as we hadn't since I graduated from college. She had always been my protector, but we didn't have the kind of relationship that involved talking every day or sharing every detail of our lives, and I knew she thought I was too anxious, and maybe too preoccupied with work. Over time, too, we had lost some of the ease and physical closeness we'd once had. I missed holding her hand and putting my head on her shoulder—all the loose intimacies of childhood. When I realized how sick she was, I started forcing myself to do these things.

One day, as we shopped for a wedding dress, she sat in the room with me while I took my clothes off. At one point she touched my bare waist and said, “You have a curvy little body, don't you?” In embarrassment, I shied away, saying, “Mom!” I could see our reflections, mother and daughter, diminishing in infinite regression in the three-way mirror, as if we would always be together.

 

 

Jim and I were married the following summer at Isabel's house. My mother looked glowing and happy. Near the end of the evening she stood up to speak. “A year ago it didn't look like I would be here,” she said. And then she said the thought of the wedding had helped keep her alive. I can't actually remember this part of her toast. But others tell me it's true.

 

 

T
HREE MONTHS LATER, in October 2007, she had a routine scan. It showed that her cancer had returned. She would have to begin a new round of chemo. That same week I was granted a modest glimmer of what she must have felt. During a routine visit, my gynecologist told me he had found a large “tumor” on my right ovary. It looked, he felt, “highly suspicious.” There were characteristics that troubled him. My genetic history also troubled him. It was a Friday; he wanted to perform surgery on Monday.

I walked out of his office, on Fifty-ninth Street, stumbling through traffic and into Central Park. The refrain in my head was banal. How can this be happening to me? I kept saying, over and over. And then: How on earth does my mother bear this? And also: I can't tell her. (I did, but not until I knew a little more.) I had the surgery, a few weeks later, and it turned out my tumor was not cancerous, and my surgery was—though it terrified me—minor. My mother's tumor was cancerous, and her chemotherapy was not minor.

Even today, the divergence in our stories seems like an accident to me. If we went back, I still wonder, could we change the story somehow? Could we take a right turn instead of a left? Seventeen months after her death, I walk through New York and watch the trees bloom once more, and she cannot. I think about how things turned out for each of us, and I recognize that it might be different for me next time. I don't know what story to tell myself about that.

As it was happening, my mother's decline did not seem inevitable. My mind kept holding out the promise of more time. And the last year of my mother's life was a chaotic one for me. Jim and I separated just eight months after we got married. It is impossible for me to know whether—or to what degree—the separation was an expression of my grief. But when my mother's cancer came back, the differences between Jim and me suddenly became magnified. I found him distant and closed off. It seemed to me that he was having trouble adjusting to being married, let alone being married to someone who was losing all her bearings. At a time when my mother's illness was upending all my assumptions about what I wanted from my life, he was inflexible, locked in his own ways, ambivalent about building a home. He had kept his old apartment as an office, full of his clothes and his kitchen stuff, leaving me with the distinct feeling that our lives were still not bound together. My surgery had given me a fresh apprehension that life is fleeting, and I had a sense of loneliness he couldn't (or didn't want to) penetrate. We fought often, and every failure in communication between us—like our disagreement over whether he ought to take a business trip the day after my surgery—became epic in my eyes. I had gotten married in some way to signal my faith in the future, a future that, I hoped, would include my mother. Once it became clear that our marriage would not save her, I found myself fleeing it. Perhaps I thought I could find something else that would—or some
one
else who could—deliver me from the pain that was heading squarely toward me. In the winter, I went to West Texas on a fellowship, and when I came back I told Jim I wanted a divorce.

Logic might dictate that in the face of my mother's illness I would cling to everything I still had. But I kept doing the opposite. I left my husband. I left my job as an editor, a job that had given shape and structure to my life, to teach and write. I threw myself headlong into an affair with a man who lived across the country, in the Northwest. Even though I knew how sick my mother was, in the summer I went away to be with him, as if I could escape to a life far from home and harm. As I was doing all this, the watcher in me—the part that now and then stepped back and observed my life—thought my actions betrayed how fundamentally irrational human experience is. No one I loved had ever died. Perhaps I believed that if I changed everything, the inevitable would not come, whereas staying put meant acknowledging the awful trajectory we were on. A friend who worked with the terminally ill had told me about what clinicians call “anticipatory grief ”—the fact that family members often grieve intensely while waiting for a loved one to die. I thought of my anticipation a lot, picturing it as an invader come to rob me of my joy, a stealthy, quilled creature of the night, a fear that wouldn't let me sit still.