Twenty years ago, this month, my mother died of lung cancer. She was 46 years old, and would have turned forty-seven the next day. I believe she died angry; she was not at peace.
There is much about her death and dying I can understand now that I could not comprehend at the time. First and foremost is my understanding of just how young 46 is. I was twenty-one then and didn’t realize that I was not yet even close to my prime years. I didn’t yet understand the value of being rooted in a life of my choosing, and I didn’t anticipate the sense of beginning-possibilities I feel in my own life now at 41. I knew she was robbed, but I didn’t fully understand just how much she was denied.
My parents married at 24, had me at 25, and my sister at 29. They had owned two houses by the time my sister came along. They accomplished a lot early and no doubt worked hard to do so. Their plan, by the time we were older, was to move to South Carolina (or somewhere else warm) once we were both out of the house. They imagined playing more and working less, getting my dad away from the 1-2 hour commute into Boston each day, playing more golf, more tennis, and enjoying being free, finally, of the daily work of careers and parenting they had dedicated themselves to from the time they were very young. We buried my mom two weeks before Amy went off to college. They had already, a couple of years before, taken a trip, without us, to South Carolina to look around. They liked it.
There were days that summer when my mother was dying that a neighbor would come to visit with her. And increasingly, as the summer went on, a visiting nurse would come and bathe her. When either of those two women were in her room with her, my mother had her door closed. I didn’t understand then why she would choose to spend those hours with strangers, rather than us...rather than me, but now I imagine those visits were two small things she did for herself, in the midst of many things she was still trying to do for us. I imagine she needed time to talk openly about how she felt, with someone who could handle hearing about it.
I wanted to be her confidante, as she had been mine my whole life, but I was definitely not capable of talking calmly about her dying. I was only capable of tending to things for and around her, driving her to the hospital for her treatments, making her tapes to listen to on her headphones when she was there, watering her gardens, making her iced tea, cutting her roses for her and bringing them up to her room. I cried all the time and she comforted me. She smiled a lot, and hugged me a lot. She didn’t cry often with me, and when she did she was quick to make a joke and turn things around. Even while dying she was taking care of us.
The work that I do to keep my family going is minimal in comparison, yet sometimes I still get frustrated when I feel like I’m the only one who registers what needs to be done to keep the family-train moving. Like my mother did, I pay the household bills. And I anticipate the grocery shopping that needs to be done to ensure Quinn will have something decent in her school lunches for the week. I know how long it’s been since her nap blanket at school has been washed, and when it will need to be washed again. I see the last-minute panic that will happen rushing her out the door and realizing her bag no longer has a clean change of clothes...I see it before it happens and get the laundry done. I have only one child, but taking care of her and keeping the house running takes up a lot of mental space and a lot of physical energy. My mother had two daughters; I can only now imagine how important those few hours were to her each week, when she closed the door to us and allowed herself some private time, as her days ran out like warm water through her fingers.
And those talks with outsiders, those warm sponge baths on her deteriorating body, those must have been the things that allowed her to put on her brave face the rest of the time...to comfort us, instead of relying on us to comfort her. Still, in spite of her efforts to keep us smiling, her anger cracked through now and then. Her temper was short sometimes, and the rage that came out once or twice was like nothing I’d seen from her before.
Throughout our lives, my mother made sure to do everything equally for both my sister and me. Anything she did for one of us, she always did for the other. When I graduated from high school, four years before my mom got sick, she threw me a party and baked an elaborate cake: one half was shaped like the state of Massachusetts where we lived, the other half was the state of Vermont where I was headed. Connecting them was a bridge with a graduate crossing over. High school and college team colors were worked into the frosting; it was elaborate. My sister graduated high school about a month before my mother died. The day she baked my sister’s cake was a difficult one for her. I don’t remember what I did to make her mad that afternoon, but I do remember that she threw a flower pot at me, aiming for my head. Fortunately I had quick reflexes, and fortunately we had enough time left before she died to laugh about it together. But looking back on that day now, I see it as one piece of evidence that she was never accepting of her fate.
And that’s another thing I understand better now than I did then--just how much was at stake.
Do not go gentle into that goodnight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas
My mother was tough. I’ve always admired that about her. She fought for what she cared about. She was a clear-headed, purposeful, and tenacious fighter, and also capable of big love--big enough that I can feel it still.
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