Cancer for Christmas
By Jason Irwin |
Zamieć (Blizzard) - painting by Leona Bierkowska |
Jenny and I had been living together since May of 2014. This was our fourth Christmas together. The year before we spent it with Jenny’s parents in southern Indiana. On Saturday, December 22nd we drove the one hundred and seventy-four miles from Pittsburgh to my hometown, Dunkirk, NY to spend Christmas with my mother.
We exited the Thruway around 8pm, then drove north another two miles before we reached the parking lot of the Lincoln Arms, the apartment building where my mother lived.
The fourth floor hallway reeked of cigarette smoke, as well as the chemicals that were used to try and mask the cigarette smell. A sticker of Pope Francis was pasted to the door of my mother’s apartment, along with a sticker that read Jesus was a Refugee.
The apartment was dark, save the light in the kitchen. Light from the sliding glass door filtered in. The air felt stale and smelled of cigarettes. I turned on a dim lamp -- all the light’s in my mother’s apartment burned dimly. It made you feel as if you were trapped inside a Rembrandt painting. I called out for my mother, but she didn’t reply. I opened the fridge and freezer to find a few TV dinners, popsicles, an opened package of Italian sausage, a half-eaten bowl of Bob Evans mashed potatoes, orange juice and a quart of milk past its expiration. For a time my mother had her groceries delivered, but since her stroke she’d stopped, claiming the kid who delivered arrived too early in the morning. Now I went shopping for her on my monthly visits.
I walked toward my mother’s bedroom door which was slightly ajar and called out again.
“Mom?” I pushed the door open and stood looking at the mound of blankets that were piled atop her bed. The light from the living room formed a halo behind me.
“Mom, we’re here!” I said. “We’re here.”
The tangled lump of blankets started to move. Suddenly the outline of her face came into view, a hand reached out.
“Hello?” a hoarse voice moaned. I moved closer. Finally her dark eyes came into focus. She looked around, moaned again.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as she screamed in pain. She said she’d been in bed for nearly a week, that she’d been in terrible pain. Her arms, legs, her hip.
“You never said anything when I called earlier,” I said.
“Why would I say anything?” she said. “You’d only worry.”
When I suggested she make an appointment with her doctor, or go to the emergency room she just scoffed.
“What are they gonna do? They don’t know anything,” she’d say.
On election night she fell and bounced hard on the floor. She’d fallen before. “Fainting spells” she called them.
Ever since that night, she’d had pain in her lower back and hip.
When Jenny and I visited in November to celebrate her birthday and announce that we had decided, after living together for four years, to get married, she had another fainting spell. My aunt and uncle were there. They brought Jenny and I two bottles of champagne to celebrate our decision to get married. We already picked a day in mid-January with the local magistrate’s office in Pittsburgh.
After dinner we toasted to our wedding, to health and better days to come. Then my mother stood to move to the couch where she’d be more comfortable. Jenny moved the chair back for her and my mother collapsed into Jenny’s arms. We lay her on the floor and called 911.
I knelt down next to my mother and held her hand as we waited for the ambulance. My mother’s eyes rolled back in her head and she vomited. When the EMTs arrived we told them about her other episodes when she was alone. My mother shivered, admitted that she felt dizzy, but refused to be taken to the emergency room.
Two years earlier she had a stroke and didn’t tell anyone for three days. It had been a difficult time. My mother’s left side was affected. She was still able to walk with a walker, but she lost the use of her left arm. I made sure she had a home health aid, that she received physical therapy, yet none of it was simple. None of it worked the way we’d thought it should. Home health aids were unreliable. Sometimes they didn’t show up. Sometimes they sat down and smoked and told my mother their problems. The therapy did not help my mother to regain any strength or use in her left arm. She said it felt numb and heavy, like it weighed a hundred pounds.
*
Now each movement caused my mother to cry out. The pain was unbearable. For my mother nothing was unbearable. She had always suffered quietly with a smile. She never wanted to bother anyone, never wanted to be a burden.
At one of her follow-up appointments after the stroke her doctor sat us both down and said they found an aneurysm in her brain.
“It’s very small,” he explained. “So we’ll continue to monitor its progress.” He tried to reassure my mother, repeating how small it was. He said there was nothing they could do anyway. “Just try to relax. Try not to get stressed out.”
“Don’t get stressed?” my mother countered. “Gimme a break. You tell me I have a blood clot in my brain and you want me to not be stressed, to relax?”
“It’s very tiny,” the doctor assured, smiling. “Come back in six months and we’ll do another scan.”
“Fuck that,” my mother said once we were in the car. “Don’t get stressed, he tells me. I ain’t going back. No way.”
I tried to convince her that it was a good idea to go back, to have the scan. I told her I’d take her. Yet I didn’t understand how the doctor could in one sentence tell her she had a bomb ticking in her brain and in the next tell her to relax, not to get stressed. I couldn’t blame my mother for being angry, for not wanting to go back, but sometimes I felt exasperated listening to all the reasons she’d regularly give for why she wasn't going to the doctor or the ER, when it was obvious she needed them.
One Friday after work I drove to Dunkirk. My mother agreed to go get a blood test the following Saturday morning. She’d suffered from Hypothyroid for years and her doctors seemed unable to find the dosage that worked. When the time came however, as I stood in front of her holding my car keys, ready to drive her to Brooks Hospital, she told me to relax, have some coffee. She wasn’t in the mood. She said she didn't feel like getting dressed. Maybe later we can go to KFC, she said. Or Dollar General if I wasn’t too tired.
This was how my monthly visits played out. She’d dictate what she wanted at the store and I’d write a list. She’d give me her EBT card and I’d go shopping. Gummy bears, coffee, Fritos, TV dinners, pepperoni and cheese, jell-o, mashed potatoes, paper towels, toilet paper, kleenex. The bill never came close to the $192 she received in food stamps so I always bought extra: t-bone steaks, fresh vegetables, as well as some “healthier” TV dinners. Without the use of her left arm she rarely cooked, though even when I was a child we survived on a diet of Swanson and Stouffer’s TV dinners most of the time, though my mother made a damn good meatloaf.
After I returned from shopping we’d sit in the living room and listen to her favorite oldies station on the television, and drink coffee. No matter what, we always enjoyed coffee and music. My favorite times with my mother were when it was just the two of us, like those years after my father moved out, and we sat together, like refugees from God’s grace, like figures trapped in a snow globe. My mother was a dyed-in-the-wool Elvis fanatic, though she also loved The Temptations, The Beatles, Joe Cocker, Queen, and Elton John, as well as others. There was never the typical generational divide between parents and kids as far as music went, though there were some groups I liked that my mother did not and vice versa.
I’d write out checks for all the bills that had accumulated over the previous month. My mother had two piles: one for bills that needed to be paid immediately like her cable and internet, and a pile for those that could either wait or be thrown away like her many doctor bills and bills from when she was in the hospital.
Despite her stroke, or maybe because of it, because of the aneurysm in her brain, my mother chain-smoked with a vengeance. It was her secret plan to hasten her own demise. Sometimes it seemed like she even looked forward to it. Suffering, she used to tell me, quoting Saint Teresa of Avila, is a blessing.
Being cooped up all alone in her apartment, unable to drive, her last vehicle, a convertible Tracker Jeep, died years before, though because the stroke left her left arm heavy and useless as discarded stage prop, she wouldn’t have been able to drive anyway. Alone in her apartment my mother often complained that no one visited her, that no one cared. I took these pronouncements with a grain of salt, knowing she talked with my uncle Joe every day, that even though he didn’t get out of the house much because it was difficult for him to walk, he and my aunt Stephanie managed to visit her when they could.
She smoked cigarette after cigarette. While one still smoldered in her ashtray she was desperately fishing a new one out of her case, fingering a lighter, preparing, searching. I would start to choke and my eyes burned from the smoke. She’d ask if I needed a cough drop, if I was taking care of myself, if I wore a hat and buttoned my coat when it was cold outside. Even when she erupted in a fit of coughing herself it never crossed her mind that it was from the cigarettes.
*
I stood over my mother as she attempted to pull herself into a sitting position on her bed. I want to scream. I want to order her to get dressed to get in my car so I can drive her to the hospital, but who am I to make demands? To give orders? I know she will not listen to me. I know I will only make things worse. We are both stubborn. Neither of us like to be lectured to.
After helping her sit upright. I offered to drive her to the emergency room. I know she wouldn't want the ambulance to come to her apartment at 9:30 at night. I know she doesn’t want the sirens, the flashing red lights, to see the other residents stand at their opened doors and watch as she is carried out on a gurney. She doesn’t want to give the busy-bodies, as she calls them, the residents who congregate in the lobby at all hours of the day and night, more to gossip about.
“I’m not going to the emergency room,” she yelled, and immediately winced in pain.
After my mother caught her breath she looked at me and smiled and then suddenly, as if she’d just remembered it was Christmas, pointed a crooked finger at me and ordered me to go into the living room and get the card out of the bag of presents she’d set aside for Jenny and I.
“Now! Before it’s too late!”, she demanded.
“Before it’s too late?”
“Just do it!”
Inside the paper bag was a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano, a bag of popcorn and a twelve-pack of Blue Moon beer. In a white envelope I found a card with a gift certificate for two nights at a local B&B.
“It’s for tonight,” my mother exclaimed. “I know how much Jenny likes to stay at B&Bs. You have to check in by ten o’clock.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. Tonight and tomorrow. Please Jay,” she said. “Don’t argue. It’s Christmas.”
“I really think you should go to the emergency room,” Jenny said, walking into my mother’s bedroom for the first time. This seemed to catch my mother off guard. After all it would be rude to yell at Jenny. Instead, my mother smiled and just shook her head. After a few minutes of this back and forth I helped my mother to stand. With the help of her walker and the three-pronged cane I bought online for her, I guided her to her favorite spot on one of the two couches in the living room.
“I probably just fractured my hip when I fell,” my mother smiled and lit a cigarette.
“Just, fractured?”, Jenny replied as a cloud of smoke swirled above my mother’s head. My mother half laughed and coughed at the same time, which caused her to wince in pain, then she turned the TV on with the remote control. “Hang on Sloopy” blasted from her favorite oldies station, destroying the awkward silence and my mother settled into what appeared to be contentment.
Jenny and I had planned on going out to a local bar to meet friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. Mike, my best friend from grade school, and his wife Marcy would be there. A band was also scheduled to play. We wanted an early night. We were both tired from the long work week, from the drive. Now we were having second thoughts about leaving my mother.
“Go,” my mother said looking at me, as if she knew what I was thinking. “I’ll be okay.”
We agreed to go out for a couple hours and stop back to see how my mother was feeling before driving on to the B&B.
*
We left our friends at the bar around midnight. When we arrived back at my mother’s apartment we found she was still in a great deal of pain. I decided I’d drive Jenny to the B&B and come back and spend the night with my mother.
I was asleep on one of the two couches in the living room when my mother woke me around two in the morning. She needed help getting out of bed and to the bathroom. Exhausted from the short journey that was no more than twenty feet, she had to stop and rest on a small chair that was positioned between the bathroom and her bed. I brought a chair in from the living room and sat down across from her. There was a hole at the bottom of the bathroom door, where it hit the built-in door stop, from one of my mother’s recent fainting spells.
“Just let me rest her a minute,” she said and asked me to bring her cigarettes, a lighter and an ashtray.
At two-thirty my mother still did not have the strength to walk to her bed. Every time she moved pain shot through her body like an electrical current. After a second cigarette she agreed to let me call an ambulance.
*
My mother and I waited in the emergency room for hours. The room was cold and dirty. Dust motes and blood stained band-aids lay under the bed. The doctor was the same doctor who treated my mother when Jenny and I brought her in September when she was having pain in her feet. At that time he said it was probably arthritis, or bunions, but he ordered x-rays to be sure. We had been waiting a long time then as well and my mother grew too nervous and impatient and demanded we leave before finding out the results.
Now the doctor ordered another round of x-rays as well as a CT scan. It was the night before Christmas Eve and the ER was packed with patients like my mother, who had come in the dead of night with a variety of ailments and injuries.
I sat on a hard-backed chair while my mother sat upright on a gurney. Every few minutes she made me go out in the hall to find out “what the hell was taking so long?”
I tried my best to calm her, to shift her thoughts to other things by asking about my aunt and uncle, my mother’s friend Jackie, but found myself dozing off. I’d been up since six the previous morning, I had three or four beers in me.
My mother was uncomfortable so I asked one of the nurses for an extra pillow. The nurse told me she’d have to go upstairs and search for a pillow, there were no extras in the emergency room. She promised to return as soon as possible, but never did.
“I told you this place sucks,” my mother said.
We sat in silence a moment, my mother staring off into space and I staring at the clock above her bed. “Are you okay?”, she asked. “You must be exhausted.” We both yawned and my mother laughed.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said after another stretch of silence. I laughed remembering how just two weeks earlier someone form her PCP’s office called and she told them to fuck off and then hung up. Since her stroke she’d been telling lots of people to fuck off: the office that sent home health aids to her apartment, pharmacists, physical therapists, the people at the cable company. Especially the people at the cable company.
“If it was me who was sick you’d make me stay,” I said.
“That’s different. I’m your mother.”
“So?”
“Sew buttons,” she said and looked away.
My mother was uncomfortable and in pain, and even though she refused to admit it, I knew she was afraid.
`Finally at seven-thirty in the morning the doctor walked into the room. His face was droopy and wrinkled. His eyebrows stuck out like tentacles. He had that wild, disheveled look of an insomniac or speed freak. Dark rings held up his blood-shot eyes. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and sat down in a chair next to my mother’s gurney.
“Well,” he said, then paused as if the words were stuck somewhere deep in his throat and he had to draw them out slowly. After a moment he turned to me and then back to my mother.
“Well what?”, my mother snapped.
“How are you feeling? How is your pain?”
“I’m cranky and I wanna to go home. I want a cigarette,” my mother said.
The doctor reached out to touch my mother’s hand. It was her left hand, the one rendered useless from the stroke. Instinctively she jerked it away, her fingers twitching. Conscious of this failed moment of tenderness, the doctor placed his hands on his knees and took a deep breath.
“You have cancer,” the doctor proclaimed. You have cancer, as if he were telling my mother she had a pimple, or a fractured hip.
“You have cancer,” he said again and looked at me. Had he forgotten it was the day before Christmas Eve? How could he speak so calmly? You have cancer and suddenly the ground gave way like in a cartoon and all three of us, me, my mother, the doctor were plummeting.
“You have tumors on your pelvis and lower spine,” the doctor said. “It’s not a fracture.”
Watching my mother watching the doctor I felt my throat begin to close as if I had a piece of food stuck in the narrow part of my esophagus. I followed my mother’s eyes as I tried to breathe, to push the imaginary chunk of meat down, to feel my esophagus open like a burst dam. I watched my mother’s brow tighten, then jump in surprise. Our eyes locked from across the room, then, as she looked away, she began to shrink, as if she were sinking into the sheets, withdrawing into herself, to a place I could not follow. I tried to reach out, but my arms would not move. I tried to speak, but there were no words. My mother grew smaller and smaller, until it was as if I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope.
“You have cancer,” the doctor said. And I thought about all those Christmases when I was a child, how excited my mother used to be, how she’d hang up an advent calendar and inside each little door she'd placed a gift for me to open on the corresponding day. She placed an advent wreath on the dining room table, and each week we’d light a different candle. The first week we lit a purple candle We lit another purple candle on the second week, and a pink one on the third week. On the fourth week we lit the last purple candle and on Christmas Eve we’d light the white candle, the “Christ’s candle”, to celebrate the birth of the savior.
My mother also used to paint the windows in our dining rooms: a snowman in one, a Christmas tree in another, Santa Claus, and in the window that looked out onto the backyard she painted the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus.
When I was a senior in high school working my first job as a cashier at a local grocery store I saved $100 for a new artificial tree. After it was all decorated with lights and tinsel and red bulbs she turned off all the lights in the house and sat and stared at the tree for hours. Some nights we’d jump in the car and drive around looking at all the decorations people hung up around their homes. On Christmas Eve we’d gather in front of the kitchen island where she made a faux fireplace by taping up paper that looked like brick and a fire and logs made from construction paper. It was there we hung our stockings.
“You can open one stocking gift,” my mother would say, but after she opened hers she’d want to open them all, the ones in the stocking and the ones under the tree. Even when my mother couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill, or the electric (which was often), she always made sure I had gifts to open on Christmas and my birthday.
*
The doctor pushed back his chair, and the scraping on the floor jolted me from my memories. He stood a moment in silence. Then he told my mother how sorry he was.
“I advise you to make an appointment with your PCP as soon as possible,” he said. “As well as an appointment with an oncologist at Roswell.” Roswell was a cancer hospital in Buffalo.
Despite my own shock and disbelief there was a part of me that always knew this moment would arrive, yet I envisioned that day was far off in the distance, in some future I could not fully comprehend. Now it had arrived, like a storm cloud sweeping in off the horizon, catching us wholly unawares.
(from the memoir in progress These Fragments I Have Shored)
It's sadness laid out as carefully as a place setting in a dining room. Very moving and poignant to me.
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