A Mom Until the End

Ernest Hemingway once said, “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

On one particular Mother’s Day, I walked into my mom’s bedroom, and saw her crying, which was out of character for a woman her friends called “Pollyanna.” As a preoccupied teenager, I was oblivious to the dual significance of the day to her, and surely hadn’t connected the dots that for a family who rarely missed church – we had missed, yet another Mother’s Day service.

“I just wish my mother could have known you, and you could have known her,” my mom said.

Several years later, my husband Paul and I had recently married and moved to Florida, when I got the call, “Hey, honey, what are you up to?” As Mom listened, I’m sure she was acutely aware that whatever I was obsessed with at that moment would pale in light of the blow she was about to deliver. “Well, the doctors diagnosed me with ‘something or another’ carcinoma.” (Today, I smile when I think about her attempt to lesson the impact, by avoiding the word, cancer.)

At this point, what neither of us knew was that Mom had stage IV ovarian cancer.  She was young (not yet 50) and otherwise healthy, but her cancer was found in the late stages, and it had already wreaked havoc on her internal organs.

It soon became clear that time was not on our side.

Time, the very thing that cancer would rob us of, would ironically be the thing that cancer imparted to us. We had time to ponder things we wanted to understand, and things we wanted to say. We had days and rare holidays where we were content to just be together. My brother and I wrote tributes that we would later read to Mom on her deathbed. Mom created a journal for us, full of the things that I had no idea I would one day long to hear.

Our family found solidarity in our mission to fight the beast that was waging a war in our midst. The surprising intensity of sorrow made it difficult to just be; we had to act, or heartache would simply overtake us.  But at some point, a certain reality sunk in; we had run out of options, and the days of searching for different treatments were coming to a halt. 

For me, I think this moment came while spending the night in the reclining chair next to Mom’s hospital bed, when the night nurse walked in wearing a raincoat to protect herself from the vile liquid that she was about to inject into Mom’s I.V. (It was the middle of the night and Mom was actually sleeping, which is a good thing, because I’m pretty sure she would have come undone if she knew what happened next.)  The nurse in her distinct southern accent said to me, “Honey, you know this is bad. Most people don’t live through this, and if the cancer doesn’t kill your Mom, this chemo may.” As the night wore on, and it was obvious I wasn’t going to sleep --I wondered into the sterile hospital hall, and helped myself to the thick medical folder outside of our door.  I think somehow I already knew…

I.  Can’t.  Change. This.

The desperate attempts to change the course of the inevitable slowly gave way to  something different. (Although, I’m not sure when I actually quit kicking and screaming in the process.) Doing simply gave way to serving. And we saw first hand that there is something sacred in holding the pan your loved one vomits in, and wiping the forehead of the mother who birthed you, nursed you, and held your own head while you vomited. During a period of what could be described as a profound loss of dignity, my brother was caring for our Mom and she lamented,  “a son shouldn’t be doing this for his mom.”

He replied, “But, I consider it an honor.”

When the parent who has nurtured and believed in you is incapacitated, it sheds new light on the idea of honoring parents. And in the same way, the lessons that Mom had been teaching for years -- life is both precious, and not all about me -- felt like a movie playing out before me.

As much as Mom’s strength waned and we tried to serve her– the serving remained weighted it seemed, in her favor. She never ceased thinking of us over herself, determined to trudge ahead even into the unchartered territory before us, to clear a path so that it might be manageable for us. While I struggled not to fall apart, I remember still looking to her as Mom, as she lay confined to her hospice bed, to walk me through my pain. As she was wasting away, she longed to ease my suffering.  As I was insensitive during one of many weak moments, practically begging her to tell me that the doctors were wrong, and that this could be beaten --she remained quietly steady through the heartache of watching her baby hurt, a pain I couldn’t even begin to comprehend until I became a Mom myself.

On one particular difficult day, I confessed I hated to see her suffer. And her response has profoundly affected me ever since. She said, “Don’t… I don’t… it is what is going to make you able to give me up.” 

She knew how hard it was to lose a mom, as her own mom had succumbed way too young to ovarian cancer, as well.  Mom knew firsthand that the pain of her death would only be bearable for us when it was actually less painful than watching her live. And so as miserable as her circumstances were, she was willing to endure them, because even in the end – she was still who she had always been.

A Mom.

(My mom’s life ended on Feb. 22, 1998, as she entered her eternal rest on a Sunday morning. She died peacefully on her hospice bed, in the den of my childhood home, with my father, my brother, and me all at her side).