For Mom

I've been on quite a long sabbatical. I know I need to get back to writing, or at least some form of creative outlet, but I promised myself that I'd address this before I continued on.

I don't know if I really want anyone to read this.

I've recently lost my mother to cancer. It's been both a very long and a very short ordeal. It seemed like it was a long ordeal when it was happening, but now that I really put it into perspective, it really hasn't been that long at all. About 2 1/2 years ago, my mother went to get a pain in her stomach checked out and it turned out to that she had cancer in her pancreas. It was a stage 2 tumor, which meant that it was a significant growth but it had not spread. She was given some statistics. I don't remember fully well, but I think they said that gave her a 30% survival rate over a 5 year term.

I was upset to find this out, but it was still very early then; still too far in the future to give up hope. And when they called her in for regular chemo and radiation treatments, I assisted in taking her home in the afternoon. My boss was very generous about it; I took off for an hour or two in the afternoon, picked my omther up from the hospital, and drove her home, and worked a little later in the evening.

An it wasn't bad. They didn't give her the kind of dose of radiation that would have made her lose her hair, and for my part, I tried to keep her in good spirits by antagonizing her. I know that sounds really awful, but it was the kind of well-meaning challenging that kept her talking, kept her debating, and kept her mind off of the purpose of what we were there to do. My mother was a very intelligent woman, and strong-willed - all you needed to do was to present the challenege and she would rise to it. I challeneged her politics, we discussed books (mostly the Dan Brown series), and all in all, I'd say that things were actually kind of nice. I got a nice break from work, and on the longer trips, I'd read in the lobby while I waited.

Spurred by the change in circumstances, and through some intervention of my mother, I proposed to my girlfriend of 5 years (the story of the ring is for another time). Strangely enough, we set our wedding date on the one year anniversary of her surgery, April 8. Even more strange is that we missed out on our opportunity to book the 8th, and had to push it up to the 1st of April (if I ever forget my anniversary I can always claim April Fools), when on the same day, my mother's surgery was pushed up to the 1st of April.

The surgery seemed to be an astounding success, and to this day I regret that I sent out an email to just about everyone I knew, apologizing for my distant behavior in the previous months, and explaining the whole ordeal. At the time, I was convinced that the surgery had been 100% successful, that they had gotten all the cancer, and that everything was OK from here.

The only apparent side-effect was that in removing a part of her pancreas and some other organs in the vicinity, my mother had become newly diabetic, and she was not adjusting to it well at all. She had not been given the full course in the nature of insulin, and when to take it, and my mother would take it at the wrong times, such as when she had not eaten and her blood sugar was low. Then, it would really drop, and she'd pass out and break a bone and hurt herself.

Throughout the year, the insulin incidents occurerd fairly frequently. I confess that by the time my wedding rolled around, I resented my mother somewhat. She was so insistent upon taking her insulin that nothing could convince her that she didn't need to be doing it when she hadn't eaten. She wasn't eating very much - she had dropped a lot of weight all throughout the cancer treatments, and she continued to lose weight afterward. Her stomach gave her pain when she ate, so she often skipped eating. At our wedding, which we held outdoors at Duke Gardens, my mother quickly left thhe outdoor area where we were taking pictures and retreated to the receiption hall, and would not come to join us for the pictures when they were being taken. Even at the reception, she left early because she wasn't feeling well. At the time, I greatly resented her for this, and felt that she was trying to overshadow my wedding day by playing the sick card. I know it sounds horrible now, but she was true-blue Catholic; she knew how to take sympathy and milk it for all it was worth, and she could wield guilt like a sword.

Sometime after the honeymoon, I got word of some bad news. She had gone in for a check-up, and they detected that she still had cancer in her system. What I did not know at the time (and neither did she, or most of my family, except the ones that were reading between the lines), was that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer - where it has spread to other organs, and the time frame they give you from that point is about 6 months.

So for about 6 months, she was and I was under the delusion that she was going to get more chemo treatment to go after the remaining cancer, but the big problem was the diabetes-induced dizzy spells and falls that had weakened her system to the point that she need to get strong before she could get more treatment. And I continued to get upset with he over every hospital trip, because I was convinced that if only she would stop taking that damn insulin when she didn't eat, she would be fine. I thought that subconciously, she was doing it to herself to get some attention from the family, and that one of these daysit was going to bite her in the ass and she was going to put herself into a coma or die on a sugar low.

It never even occurred to me that she was really dying from the cancer.

One day, shortly after I had returned from a business trip abroad in London, my father called me in the middle of the night. My mother had fallen in the middle of the night on her way to the bathroom, and broken her hip. I took note of it at the time, but it bothered me more than it worried me. There had been so many falls and breaks that it just seemed like just another, and that I would go see her for a few days and then she would come home again.

The next day, when he announced that he was calling in the family, and came by my office to pick me up, it started to sink in that this was serious. Over the next few days, I came to understand a few things. The cancer was back in full effect, and the 6 month time frame had already passed - my mother was living on borrowed time. Furthermore, she wasn't coming home again - she was too weak to take care of herself, and she might not survive another fall.

Within a week, I quickly came to terms with the fact my mother was dying, life was never going to be the same for her again, and all this time I had been wrong about what was happening. The cancer was killing her, and not her own stubborness.

She wound up staying in a nursing home - a very nice one, but a nursing home still - she never wanted to end up in one. I came often, but I did not see her every day. It's a terrible shame that you can never know in advance how you'll feel when you look back on an opportunity wasted. At the time, it was very hard to deal with. When you're expecting that someone's going to die any day now, and you're already braced for it, it can wear you out when days turn to weeks.

When Halloween came and went, my mother was still in Duke Hospital, getting ready to be discharged to the nursing home. When the November elections came, and my party retook the House and the Senate, my mother was in the nursing home, and we watched TV together. Not the news, of course - it didn't seem to interest her too much (she had backed the wrong team), but a documentary on Jack the Ripper, or some of the Nero Wolfe episodes I bought on DVD, or half of the movie "28 grams" (another regret, we got about halfway through it when I had to go - she wanted to pick it up another time, but from the beginning again, and we never did). Thanksgiving was the last holiday we spent together, and it turned out to be the last day she was really there with us and (mostly) alert. We brought it in to the nursing home, and we had booked a private room, and it was a nice spread. She ate a little, but she had to retire early.

From there, things quickly took a turn for the worse. She died about a week and a half later, but the final days were really rough. It hurts to think about the details, and I don't want to share them, but I was both disgusted and ashamed and horrified that I was so callous. It is debatable whether or not she died well. What she must have gone through, and what her mental state must have been with all the morphine, is something I've come to dread. My sister has a more upbeat note on it - she noted that we were all (her husband, children, and grandchildren) there with her that day.

I lost whatever shreds of faith I had left throughout the whole ordeal. The pain is still very fresh, and it's like looking at the sun - it's too painful to deal with directly, to think about and to focus on. Every time I dwell on it too long it hurts, and I have to turn my thoughts elsewhere.

I'm glad, at least for the times I did have, although when I think of them, it's even worse than the rough times at the end. When I think about the bad times, I'm glad she's finally free of the pain, but when I think about the good times - that's when I miss her and the pain that she's not coming back really hurts.