Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Mom - 6 November 1920 to 29 July 1982



This is something I wrote when my Mom was sick. I never finished it, so it ends before it should, but so did she.

I am getting ready for my mother’s funeral. She’s not dead yet, but she is dying. A year and a half ago she went to her doctor about a pain in her back; x-rays showed a small lesion on her spine, tests showed it to be cancerous. The doctors discovered a small malignant tumour in her breast. It had metastasized and produced the lesion on her spine. Other lesions developed, on her legs, her hips. The doctors decided not to operate on the tumour in her breast, but to treat it and the lesions with radiation and chemotherapy. She spent several weeks in the hospital undergoing more tests, and then returned home.

She now needed a cane to get around - the radiation treatment on her legs had left the muscles weak and sore, her bones ached. The chemotherapy made her hair fall out, and she bought herself a grey wig that matched the colour of her hair but which was too obviously a wig. Later on she bought another wig that looked more natural; I sometimes forgot that it was a wig at all.

She insisted on maintaining her independence - stairs were hard for her, and she would accept an arm when going up or down, but on level ground she would manage by herself, moving slowly across a room or down a hall, cane in hand, legs moving stiffly beneath her, a small tight smile on her face.

Then one day she fell as she was making her bed and broke her leg. The bone had been weakened by the radiation and snapped like a dry twig. The doctors set her leg and put a huge steel pin in the bone. They said the pin would probably help eliminate the pain in her leg by taking the strain off the spot that had been irradiated; we were all cheered by this good news out of bad.

When she returned home from the hospital she was on crutches, just until her leg healed, she said; then she would go back to the cane, and eventually she would be able to get around on her own two feet, just like before. My father bought her a special chair, nicely padded with a back that curved around and firmly supported her. It was a curious colour - a shadow of green hidden behind silver-grey. It rocked and swiveled, and was quite comfortable.

She continued the chemotherapy. Every other week my father would drive her to the cancer clinic and sit with her while the chemicals dripped into her bloodstream. She dreaded the treatments, hating the needles and the sickness that came the day after. The doctors took x-rays and did bone scans and told her that the treatments seemed to be working - they could find no more lesions, things are looking up, they said, maybe we can stop the chemotherapy for a while.

All this time my mother was quite optimistic. She and my father made plans of what they would do when she got better - they would drive back east in the summer, stopping here and there to visit relatives and friends. They knew, they said, that it was better to get out and around and do things rather than to stay at home waiting for something to happen.

Whenever I asked her how she was feeling, she would say, not too bad, thanks, Stephen, and then talk about how she wished the swelling in her leg would go down, or how her hip ached. She always spoke very matter-of-factly, with no trace of self-pity; it was almost as though she was talking about someone else. Sometimes, though, the pain showed through. When she stood up, she would do so very slowly, lifting her weight with her arms until she could reach the crutches leaning in the corner behind her chair. She would then slowly straighten up, moving her body around the pain, careful to avoid putting weight on her legs. She concentrated all her energy on walking - her eyes would look inward, as though watching her damaged bone and tissue from within, her mouth set tightly, sometimes biting her lower lip. When she sat down, she would sigh, her eyes would clear, and she would be with us again. She had pills for the pain, and sometimes her voice would be thin and wispy, the drugs killing the pain also robbing her of her breath.

The last time I saw my mother before she got sick was at my brother’s wedding. The reception was held at a big old-time dance hall, where the band played all the old dance favourites - swing, polkas, tangos, foxtrots. It was a bottle club - you brought your bottle and bought your mixer. Some of the people had obviously been going there for years and years. Couples my parents’ age had all the steps down pat - their feet and bodies could follow the music without thinking. Penny and I had a few dances and felt like clumsy oafs next to the spinning regulars. Mostly we sat and drank and talked with other people in our party. At one point, my mother asked me to have a dance with her, and I begged off, saying something about being too tired. The next time I saw her she was in the hospital.




Several months passed. She didn’t seem to get any better or any worse. She spent most of her day in her chair, getting up only to eat or go to the bathroom. My father rented a wheelchair for excursions out of the house; he kept it folded up in the back of the car, and if they went out shopping she could ride around in relative comfort. He also bought a grab rail that bolted on to the side of the tub, and a bath stool that went in the tub.

Throughout all this, in spite of her shrinking world, my mother managed to maintain her optimism. She never talked of not getting better. She acknowledged minor setbacks - another lesion showed up on one of her hipbones that required radiation - but she did not let them get her down. She and my father made plans to fly down to New Zealand to see my sister, and they would talk about how long the flight was going to be, and how exhausted they would be when they arrived.

One day about a month ago I was talking to my mother on the phone, and she complained about a stiffness in her neck that was causing her some discomfort. She had had it for a couple of days, and she and my father decided to call the family doctor to come and have a look at it. She didn’t feel that it was anything serious and didn’t sound too worried. The next day I took my holidays, and when I got back to town a week later she was back in the hospital. The stiffness had turned out to be another lesion, this time in the bone of her skull behind her ear. I talked to her on the phone and could tell that she was quite drugged. Her voice was thin and dry, her words were slurred. I went up to the hospital to see her, and it was then that I realized that she was probably going to die soon.

She had been in the hospital for nearly a week. They had given her chemotherapy for the first three days, but it had made her so ill that they had stopped. They were also trying to adjust the dosage of morphine she would need to effectively kill the pain. When they gave her too much, she would be sick; not enough and she would hurt. I sat beside her bed and held her hand, and we talked. We talked about New Zealand, about the chemotherapy, the morphine, the wonderful whirlpool bath down the hall that they lowered her into. Her hand was warm and dry, the skin soft, almost without substance. Her voice often trailed off, leaving sentences half-spoken.

One day she asked me if I was afraid of death. I said that I didn’t know, hadn’t given it much thought. She said that she used to be afraid of it, but now it didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.

That’s as much as I wrote. She died on the 29th of July 1982, 61 years of age.

So when your Mom says, “Let’s dance” - dance!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing Steph. Made me think of my Mom who is mourning her mothers death. My Grandma passed away four weeks ago. I'll definitely dance if my mom wants to... I sent this post to my Mom to read. Love the blog!

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  2. By the way - the photo of you and Mom at the top of the page - my all time favourite pic of Mom.

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