HOW DID I GET HERE?
BRIT WASHBURN, (PART III)
I Say Yes
alas, it too often happens, while the people we love best are still alive, that such expressions (of joy) appear to us as the exasperating manifestation of some unworthy flight of fancy rather than the precious form of happiness we should dearly like to procure for them. –Marcel Proust
The first time I learned of my mother’s diagnosis, I was driving back from our annual family vacation in Northern Michigan, home to where we live now, in Western North Carolina. She had found the lump some weeks before, undergone tests and come up with a plan for treatment, then waited to break the news to us so as not to disrupt our revelry prematurely. My mother is like that: thoughtful, considerate, disinclined to melodrama.
She can also be long-winded, prone to report the minutiae of her days, her thoughts, her readings, in great detail—from the travails of dishwasher-installation to the intricacies of cosmology, and everything in between. I admire her mind, her heart, her reflective and contemplative nature, and I am also inclined to impatience—with her, especially. When, for example, I am piloting a minivan down the interstate, by myself, with three or four children in the back requesting bathroom breaks, asking for snacks, bickering over radio stations and the thermostat while google maps pings one potential missed turn after another and the gas gauge lights up indicating low fuel, I can become overwhelmed, and frustrated by my mother’s inability to see me, states away, and understand that I might not be at liberty to discuss the mysteries of mid-century plumbing and mystical monastic traditions at this particular moment.
But as soon as she told me about her breast cancer, it was as though a previously inaccessible fount of curiosity and compassion opened up in me, and I wanted nothing more than to tune all else out, hear her voice, listen to her indefinitely, regardless of the content of what she was saying or what else might be competing for my attention.
Like love, illness, with its implicit invocation of mortality–our own as well as that of those we love—works this way: It throws life into relief so that suddenly we can distinguish between our perceived priorities—getting from point A to point B, being left alone with our thoughts—and what is in fact essential—giving our undivided attention to those we love, while they’re still alive.
The trouble is, this condition of heightened awareness has a relatively short shelf life. In the case of my mother, it lasted only a matter of months. After her surgery and a course of radiation, when it seemed she would be okay and remain among us for the foreseeable future, gradually, I became irritable again, apt to play the devil’s advocate as I always have with her, to challenge what I see as her assumptions, to call her out for some oversight I might let slide were it anyone else.
* * *
When the cancer returned, two years later, my mother once again waited for an opening in which to tell me. In this case, I had been teaching a summer session cooking class to a group of Montessori preschool students. We had made ice cream two ways as the finale on our last day, they had gone home, sticky and sated, and I was doing the dishes and packing up the implements when I checked my phone and found a text message from her. “Can I find you today, even briefly after your classes? Privately?” I called immediately, but knew even before she said what was going on. Another lump, another surgery scheduled. This time, I kept even more calm. I would change my plans and visit her four hours away for her birthday three days later. I would take a day off the following week to shuttle her to and from the hospital, keep vigil. My internal logic had it that she had been alright before, and she would be alright again, though she wasn’t, really, wouldn’t be.
As with my father, close calls and false alarms have created the illusion, in his case over decades, of invincibility. Nothing has killed him so far, so it stands to reason that nothing will, though of course that isn’t how it works. If they haven’t died yet, it’s only a matter of time, and yet my nervous system has by now become conditioned not to panic, not to flee or fight or freeze, but to breathe and do the needed thing.
Which would seem a relatively healthy response, were it not for the element of denial this entails, were it not for the fact that, along with cortisol and adrenaline, other aspects of my sympathetic nervous response have been suppressed. This may be adrenal fatigue: repeated crises and prolonged stress having depleted my body’s stores of these hormones. Or it may be meditation: my effort over years to intercept reflexive responses and pause, suspend thought long enough to be deliberate about it.
But what I want to be deliberate about now is acknowledging the reality of inevitable loss, and choosing, not out of pity or fear, but out of love, to be as present to and for those I love as I possibly can, while I can.
My parents' lives have not been easy. It is one thing to be diagnosed with a disease that will require considerable effort, expense, and suffering to fight when you have a life you love and long to sustain, but quite another when sickness comes about amid preexisting difficulty. And yet my parents aren’t quite at the point of wanting to be delivered from their lives. In spite of personal trauma, chronic pain, financial hardship, climate change, injustice, and the pandemic, they would like to stick around a bit longer, to see how things turn out—for their grandchildren, most of all.
And I would like to have them. I recognize my good fortune at having had them around as long as I have. Each of my parents lost their mothers while they were still in their twenties, while I am approaching fifty with both of them still alive. I can’t imagine not having had them around these last twenty years, and am 99.9% grateful that that wasn’t the case, though there remains that .1% of me that believes these decades have given me time to grow that much more attached, that much more dependent, that much less capable of living without them.
And then there is the fact that, at forty-six, my own mortality is that much less of an abstraction. When we are younger, the prospect of dying can seem vague and remote, and so we might experience death as a kind of disappearance, evaporation. As we get older, our understanding of object permanence becomes that much more concrete and immediate (if also delusional), the physicality and finality of death that much more fully felt and frightening.
The day before her surgery was scheduled, I left work early and made the drive from Asheville to Charleston with my five year-old daughter, listening alternately to Julien Baker and a podcast interview with Sharon Salzberg whose avowed mantra is “some things just hurt.” On the morning of the operation, Friday the 13th, I set my alarm for six so that I could pick my mother up at 6:45 and get her to the hospital by 7:30 to prep for the procedure two hours later.
The sun is rising over the Cooper River bridge as we drive East toward Mount Pleasant from downtown. The outpatient entrance has yet to open, so we enter by way of the emergency room, and are directed down a long hall, past a piano, to the elevators and up to the second floor. At each check point, she is asked if she has been tested for Covid, and explains that her doctor has told her she will be tested that day. At the final reception desk, they check her in and have her sign releases, which she does slowly, as she does everything, careful not to smear her calligraphic script with the side of the left hand with which she writes.
A little while later, we are shown to her room. She is weighed (makes some self-conscious remark), her blood pressure taken (running a little high), given a Covid test (says it made her eyes water) and a gown and socks to change into (which she does privately, in the bathroom). Soon she is settled in under the heated flannel sheets of the hospital bed. The nurse inserts an IV (I avert my gaze, but wince even still) and says she’ll be back soon to take my mother on a “field trip” to radiology to have isotropic dye injected that will light up her lymph nodes during the procedure.
Then we wait. She tells me about a book she has read recently, Gary Ferguson’s The Eight Master Lessons of Nature. She says that it didn’t say on the cover what those lessons were, so she felt she had to read the whole thing, but that the introduction and the epilogue were the best parts. Metaphors everywhere.
After an hour passes, I step out in the hall to ask if everything is alright, and am told the surgeon is on her way to talk with us. When she arrives, she says she has some news we’re not going to like. Despite having had both doses of the vaccine, and Covid 19 itself the previous winter, my mother’s test has come back positive, so the surgery will have to be postponed. Even though she’s asymptomatic now, there’s a chance symptoms could still develop, and the procedure would cause added stress to her lungs.
We are, predictably, stunned, crestfallen (insofar as we were crested in the first place), but not, to our credit, irate. Who or what could we possibly rage against under the circumstances? Fate?
Because we have been masked, and I, too, vaccinated, there is little chance that I have been exposed. My mother gets back into her clothes, and we are shown down a back elevator, reserved exclusively for Covid patients, and out into the humid Lowcountry morning we go.
My small daughter is disappointed that her Nana won’t be returning with us to convalesce, as had been our plan. I tell her I am sad for her and she says don’t be sad for me, let me be sad for myself. On the drive home she asks me to play a particular pop song for the umpteenth time. We are passing through a construction zone at 60 miles an hour, concrete Jersey barriers mere inches away, and I tell her her begging is dangerous, that her requests could kill us, when really it is my own road rage, born of impotence--in the face of traffic, disease, death—that is imperiling us.
Back home, before we have even finished unloading the car, she begins asking if she can see a neighbor friend, and then for a lava lamp she’s been coveting, ice water, buttered toast, at which point I realize I am on the verge. All afternoon, warnings have been coming through the radio from the National Weather Service, alerting us to wind gusts up to 60 mile an hour, golf ball sized hail, possible flash floods. Reminders that lightning is nature's biggest killer. I have assured her that these storms aren’t in our area, but as the clouds gather and thunder rumbles in the distance, I head out to walk around the lake, clear my head. As I leave her with her brother I tell her if I’m struck, to have a good life.
It is a new low—new to her. When her three older siblings were young, such overwhelm on my part became common, until the top finally blew. This second go-around, I have been better—more patient, more paced, penitent. It has been easier with a single young child rather than three, easier with an easy child than with the willful and highly sensitive ones the first two were. Still, it is catching up with me—single motherhood, full time work, concerns for my parents, to say nothing of all the daily crises—in our home, in my heart, around the globe.
But there is one new ripe tomato in my garden, and in the morning the sun is back out. I take my walk early, preemptively, a kind of preventive medicine, and on the way back stop at the Ace Hardware across the street and buy a toilet seat. Ours has been broken since we moved in seven and half months ago. The landlord has known this, but has done nothing about it, nor have I. A plastic part of the hinge has worn out, such that every time you lift the lid, the seat slips, sometimes all the way off. It has been annoying, but not insufferable until now.
Now, I can’t live with it another day. I go to the basement for the tool bag my father got for me years ago, when I had one of my first apartments by myself. I find the pliers and, with some effort, unscrew the bolts underneath, slicing my finger in the process. I rinse it off, get a Band-aid, wipe down the porcelain with disinfectant and screw the new hardware into place. It takes all of ten minutes, start to finish, but makes me feel inordinately effectual, and motivates me to tackle another task. After dropping my son off at the gym, I go to the bookstore to pick up an order that has come in, then take my daughter to see the ceramic sculptures of an old friend at a local gallery I’ve been meaning to visit for months. We browse leisurely, then make our way to the fountain in the square where a Confederate monument has recently been removed, and she asks if she can take off her sandals and her pinafore, wade in the water.
I say yes, and find a seat on a bench in the shade from which to watch her, tentative at first, run her fingers under the cascade. She picks up a dry leaf and holds it under the stream. A breeze is making her dress billow, her long brown hair spread out behind her like a gossamer cape, and I am overcome with tenderness for this child, who must be at least as troubled as I am by the instability of our lives, the impermanence of all that we hold dear, our helplessness in the face of loss. But for the moment, she seems light-hearted, on tiptoes, levitating, almost, above the shallow pool of cool water beneath her.
that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness
--George Saunders
Find out more about Brit and read Part I here. Part II is available here.