This blog began as a way to tell stories. Stories from the road away from home. Then it began a way to view "home" as foreign by noticing the intricate surprises of every-day corners. And suddenly this past month it becomes a coping mechanism. A final gasp for neutral air as I face the most heartbreaking nightmare I could ever experience. My mother is suffering with metastatic melanoma--a fast moving cancer that can pop up at any time in any part of the body faster than most doctors can track and hunt it down. In the blink of an eye, my adventures have arrived at a daymare of sorts--as if these many travel and home "roads" were being devoured slowly by a team of bulldozers. They move slowly and mechanically so that we can hear every sad crunch as I fight as hard as possible without any control.
My dining room table, typically filled with family and catch-up stories and silly nicknacks like sunglasses and ski passes, has suddenly become a desperate source of ever growing prescriptions. The pile of paperwork explaining the prescriptions, each explaining when to take, what to avoid, what to realize will happen as a side effect, appears just as daunting as the many shapes and sizes spilling from the little bottles.
As I hold my mothers hand, snuggling in a blanket that she bought me for my college dorm days, choking back the tortuous lump in my throat that continues to trigger my tears, I listen to my mom's shrieks of pain and charge my eyes open in disbelief. I force my eyes to bulge outward, quietly. There must be some way to wake up from this nightmare. But it is real. So real that to even smile feels like a painful extraordinarily other worldly concept.
And every day my family and I try to hope that the green from my mother's face will turn rosier, the grimace will turn happier, her newly healing wounds will mend nicely, something becomes worse. The only thing we can do is watch meaningless daytime television, like family feud or Judge Judy, alternating with deeply emotional cries of grief.
I've been a rock for my family, holding us together as we deal with insurance denials of treatment that has happened, through my mom's attempted exits from a moving vehicle, through endless hospital cycles and depression. I--the one family member that my mom insisted could NOT know about her melanoma for over a year--have been the one breathing my way through several breakdowns and coaxing final threads of positivity to knit us together. But rocks crack easily. Finally yesterday I just cracked like a baby. And as I cry with my mom, and apologize for living so far away all this time, and her--apologizing for the fact that she is making us feel this way-- we cannot even embrace one another. The cancer in her back has bloomed so forcefully that it hurts her to hug me, or even sob.
People say we should value our final days together rather than mourn an oncoming death. this is not easy. Mom and I tried this by taking a trip to Target. We used to love shopping together--which usually meant mom finding things and laughing, "I had something just like that in the 60s" and I would laugh saying, "i know, i found it in the basement and wore it out!" But as we walked through the corridors of Target, slowly as she uses a cane like an "old lady" we know it could be our last shopping moment. Regardless of the nostalgia the pain in mom's body is so great that she almost faints walking back to the car. And she suffers extraordinarily during the night after the extra effort. I cry feeling guilty that I encouraged the trip. Enjoyment is physically impossible.
I charge forward, attacking the scene with phone calls, online research, sifting mentally through the overwhelming array of information trickling from friends and relatives who "know someone who had melanoma". I make demands to her doctors even though I appear like a crazy kid, crafting my words to scowl verbally at the insipid insurance company, pointing fingers like a mad barking orchestra conductor to everyone around me who seems lazy. But regardless of my viscous go-getter attitude and hostage-negotiating communication skills with my stubborn mother, most of the moments we, I, mom... are helpless. The meaning of Friday has shifted from "happy hour" and celebratory weekend-welcoming to a dreaded deadline, leaving us free from office hours and in the hands of fate for the weekend, left for our cries to echo alone without the help of doctors. And when the doctors are available during the week, they seem to forget our detailed descriptions of mom's pain, missing important clues, lagging behind as the cancer blooms and takes root faster than her slow moving treatment. My mother, my best friend, my idol, my role model, is in the hands of one world-famous doctor. But he is just a man. A man with research. With a kind heart and a million other patients. A clock ticks loudly in all of our heads. with each tick we are grateful we can tell her again how much we love her, with each tock, we scream silently by all of the horror.
I would never wish this twist. this bulldozed road. on my worst enemy.
