The Long Goodbye (4 page)

My mother was angry with me because I had left Jim, but wouldn't say it directly. “Are you being reasonable?” she asked when I first told her about the separation, sitting on the back porch, in the spring sun. She sounded chilly and stricken at once. No, I'm not being goddamn reasonable, I wanted to say. You're dying. I'm confused, desperate, despairing. Instead, all I said was, “Why do I need to be reasonable?” And then she shook her head and said, “All I can say is, Hasten slowly, Meg.” But I couldn't hasten slowly. I was sick with the speed of time. As Pascal had said, “Not to be mad would amount to another kind of madness.”

She didn't see it this way, and that spring, even as she got sicker, we danced around each other. In fact, we barely talked about my personal life. Finally, I called her one day and confronted her. “You insist you're fine,” she said coldly, “so why should I ask? You don't want to talk about it.” This was true, but it made me angry to hear it. I understood that, facing death, she had wanted me to be settled, and now I had unsettled myself. But the child inside me wanted her to stroke my hair and tell me it would be OK. She didn't, and I couldn't understand why. For the next month, we acted polite around each other, unable to cut through the distance.

 

 

In July, I was traveling with the man I was dating when my mother called and asked me to come home for her family's annual barbecue. She was normally loose with us about family obligations, but this time there was an urgent quality to her voice, a note of need that cut through our estrangement. She'd been on a new chemo drug when I left, and for a while that summer had seemed to feel better, her voice light, going swimming every day at Isabel's house. But a recent scan had shown further growth of the tumors in her lungs. Now she sounded sad and private, as if she knew something she wasn't telling any of us. I flew home, getting to Connecticut late at night. My father was up, watching TV in the den, a glass of red wine in his hand; the kitchen was reassuringly disheveled, garlic and onions resting on the island counter as usual. It reminded me of my childhood.

Someone once wrote, “We fear death the way children fear going into the dark.” Because my parents were teachers, we had long summer vacations together. For years we stayed in a cabin in Arlington, Vermont. It had two rooms and a dark attic, where Liam and I slept. The first summer we spent there, we had no hot water, and we bathed under a solar camping shower my mother rigged to a tree. Some kind of flying creature inhabited the attic, and I kept telling my parents there was something in the room with us as we slept. Don't be silly, our mother would say. It's OK. I'll leave the stair lights on. But one day as I was moving things around in a dark back corner, an animal whirred past. It was probably just a bird that flew in from outside, my mother said, cheerfully. She must have already suspected it was something else.

The “bird” began appearing at night when we were reading. It moved so quickly you couldn't see it. I had a mortal fear it would touch me, and when it came out, we would scream and clatter downstairs. “Don't be wimps,” our parents said. “But why does it just come out at night?” I asked. “It must be a bat!” Liam exclaimed. One night, when my cousins had come to visit, the “bird” got so stirred up it flew down into the living room, where it circled in the light and revealed itself to be a tiny brown bat with pointed wings. Out came the broom; the dog was yapping and leaping, and my brother and I were saying, “We knew it! We knew it was a bat!” Upstairs, I had thought it was going to pull me into the dominion of night once and for all. Down among the lights, and the wine bottles glowing garnet, it seemed small and soft and vulnerable. My father brought the broom down and with a crack got it against the wall. Leave the room, he said, and then he reached down to gather the bat up. Later there were more bats. And I realized it was a family up there, living in our attic.

I mention the story because after I got home that night, while I was talking to my father in the kitchen, my mother came creeping down the stairs in her pajamas. “Meg!” she said, and shuffled over to me. She hugged me and said, “I'm so glad you're home, Meg.” She began to cry. “It just makes me happy to see your face.”

“I'm glad to be home, Mom,” I said.

“No, I'm just so glad,” she repeated, as if there were something I hadn't understood, holding me close.

Then she pulled back and looked at me. “I can't believe that when you were a kid we told you the bat in the attic was a bird. I can't believe we made you sleep with the bat. What were we thinking?” she said, and she started laughing and crying, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I was such a bad mother.” She was warm in her soft aquamarine nightshirt. I heard the mournful croaking of the frogs outside, and suddenly we were close again. This is how we apologized to each other, and first acknowledged that she was probably going to die.

 

 

When I woke the next day it was sunny. I could hear my mother coughing and choking downstairs. The birds were chirping with a pagan intensity, and down the street a lawn mower buzzed, cutting away the summer's growth. It was terrifyingly apparent my mother was having difficulty breathing, but I lay in bed as if listening to a movie. I thought of her black eyelashes, now short from the chemo, her pink mouth, the dark, thick hair she'd had freshly cut. I looked at my tanned legs on the duvet. If I stared at them long enough, it could be any summer, any year—there they were, the same shape as always. Selfishly, I wanted it to be another year, so I wouldn't have to deal with her illness.

I came downstairs. She was in the bathroom by the kitchen, the door open, kneeling over the toilet. The sounds she was making were harsh. They rasped in her throat like little aliens trying to claw up and out. Of course, the disease is always seen as alien. Never native.

 

 

At the family reunion, in New Jersey, we swam in my aunt Jackie's pool and celebrated my grandmother's eightieth birthday with a big buttercream cake. I found it odd to think that my mom's own mother was still alive and well. In the middle of the party my mother took a nap. We woke her up for the birthday ceremony. At the dining table, my grandmother cheerfully blew the candles out, but as we left she looked sad. On the drive there, my mother had girlishly told Liam and me about being awarded the honor pin for “Best Student” in eighth grade at her Catholic school, and how proudly she would wear it on her sweater. “I pinned it on every day,” she said, “so everyone could see it.”

 

 

A
DVANCED CANCER makes your appetite unpredictable. That week, after days of not wanting to eat any food at all, my mother wanted to eat chunks of warm, soft Brie left out from the night before. The cheese looked disgusting to me, like something forgotten and ruined—the pale yellow core pooling out beyond the organizing principle of the rind. But she spooned in two bites more avidly than I'd seen her eat anything in months. Her eyelashes were growing back. They were jet black and extremely curly, and they made her look young and a little like a stranger.

Just as my mother's appetite was unpredictable, so were my tastes. I listened to certain songs over and over, singing out loud when I left the house for a run. Songs that used to seem antiquated—“Leaving on a Jet Plane”—now had new textures and qualities. The old words about genuine emotions no longer sounded sentimental or trivial or bankrupt. Over this I had no control. In the face of the future erasure of a specific soul—the erasure of my mother's soul—words about beauty and truth seemed necessary, almost ravishing. So did nature. Earlier that summer, during my time out West, I got a catch in my throat looking at the mountains, with their sublime, gray-purple peaks. In their distances, I saw what Whitman once called “the far horizon fading away,” and it spoke to me of the strange change that was to come.

Like a fool, I fell in love with you, I thought, looking at my mom on the couch. But you were always likely to die first.

One day, a good day, we went to Isabel's house and swam in the pool. In the past, when my mother had not been so ill, we had spent many days like this, suspended in cool water, the blue sky overhead, Isabel and her husband Philip's dogs running to and fro, their collars jingling, all of us floating and talking. Isabel and my mother were like teenage girls together: silly and delighted by their silliness, as if it were an iridescent bubble of joy they could step into and stay in forever. “Barb!” Isabel laughed. “Bel!” my mother rejoined. My mother had said something bawdy, something I didn't catch, and shards of their laughter floated up into the air.

My brothers and I talked around our mother's sickness instead of about it, as if it were safer that way. Eamon was a freshman in college when she was diagnosed. He spent that summer traveling, which brought me a sense of relief: I hated the idea of him seeing how ill she was. Liam witnessed it up close as Eamon and I never did; he worked with my mom and dad at Pierrepont, where he was an English teacher. He had an apartment in Brooklyn but spent many nights in Connecticut during the week. We saw each other a lot in the city, where he lived two blocks from me. I found that I wanted to talk about what was happening, but I could see that he did not. Liam said later that he just wanted to be hopeful, to live in the moment. Eamon was away at college much of the time, but that last summer, before he went back to school, he sat down with my mother to ask her questions about how sick she was. “He wanted to know what kind of cancer it was, what stage it was when it was diagnosed, why I didn't have surgery—all the questions he never asked before,” she told me one day after his visit. (I thought of how she and I were different: I would have pressed into everyone's minds just how ill I was.)

I had a different way of dealing: I wanted to “prepare” myself by learning everything, from the start. I read the threads on colorectal cancer websites. I diligently tracked news about the latest studies. My mother had a PET or CT scan every three months, and I waited anxiously for each. I fenced in my terror of the abyss with the pretense that information was control. The man I was dating said, “But the tests aren't the disease. The tests are just tests—don't confuse the two.” I realized with a lurch that what he said was true. We would never “know” exactly what was going to happen. This was part of the terror of the disease: the way it turned life into a daily foreboding.

Sometimes I watched my father with my mother, trying to imagine what he felt; he was losing the person he'd lived with since he was young. Unless guests were around, he moved slowly and rarely smiled; he seemed to be holding himself carefully together, afraid he might fly apart. One day, when I backed my mother's car out of the garage, he just watched, in disbelief, as I drove it straight into his car, which was in my blind spot in the middle of the driveway, where he was unloading plants. He didn't wave at me to stop, as if nothing could be done to prevent the collision he saw unfolding before his eyes. But inside the house I found the scattered traces of his solitary caretaking: the pillbox he bought to keep the meds straight, the stacked cases of lemon soda my mother liked.

My mother was getting another scan at the end of the summer, and for a while I hoped that it would show improvement. But after a week or two of being home, I saw that all progress was downward; she was supposed to be designing the teachers' schedules for the fall, but the pain made it hard for her to work for long. One day I understood I had stopped believing that knowledge could save her or help me. I just wanted her to be comfortable. Her pain was mounting. The cancer had spread into the iliac bone in her hip, and it was causing her agony. She tried fentanyl patches, but they made her sick. I called my friend Jerry, a cancer doctor, who said, “Get her more medication. She doesn't need to feel this bad.”

So suddenly our mother had a new doctor, a pain specialist who was a hotshot in his field. (His title always made me grimly amused, as I felt I, too, was becoming a pain specialist.) I went with her one day to see him for a checkup of her levels. It was black comedy: She was totally stoned on her meds during the visit. When the doctor and his two fellows came into the room, she told a rambling story about her adolescence. Everyone nodded patiently as if she were making sense. Pacing around, because it hurt to sit still, she began talking about her eating habits and her vomiting patterns. Very liquid, she said. It struck me for the first time that she liked being the center of attention. Listening to her meander, the doctors signaled to me that they would lower the dose of morphine.

Later we saw the radiologist, who advocated waiting and seeing rather than radiating the new tumor in the bone. Shifting on his feet, Dad asked the doctor what would happen six months from now. It broke my heart and made me angry all at once. My mother will be dead, I wanted to say. That's what will happen.