Losing Mom

My mother has terminal cancer.

Six weeks ago I dreamed of a long haired woman stirring a cauldron of liquid. She was placing garments in it, swirling them around and taking them out. I asked what she was doing and before she could answer, the word “dyeing” popped into my dreaming brain.

I awoke a bit unnerved by what that dream might signify. Several months ago in my therapist’s office, I began to talk about losing my parents, even though there were no indicators of serious ill health in either of their 81-year-old bodies. We explored my terror of their deaths and of my emotions when that finally did happen. Back then, it was academic.

Over Christmas, an antique clock in my parent's house, stopped for years, stood out sharply on its shelf on one particularly bright winter day. I remember a quiet melancholy about it, wondering how much longer this clock, this house, this family, would stay unchanged after so many years of stability, predictability, and health.

Now I have just returned from a trip to see my mother, who only 2 weeks ago was diagnosed with bronchioloalveolar carcinoma. Some kind of post nasal drip had bothered her throughout the fall and winter, but she dismissed it. A routine chest x-ray in October showed nothing out of the ordinary. But several weeks ago she began to feel worse, and was admitted to the hospital for what was thought to be bacterial pneumonia. Tests and now-clouded x-rays were inconclusive, and were forwarded to Massachusetts General, which responded with a diagnosis of lung cancer.

The doctor told us as Dad, older sister and I had been smiling with mom about how much better she felt since taking steroids for her “pneumonia.” She had just been commenting on how nice it would be to live to 100.

The news now is that mom may have only a handful of weeks to live. She is not strong enough for chemo, mostly due to her age but partly because of her weakened condition. The new drug Tarceva, from a different class of treatment that targets the cancer, may buy her a few months, but it works in only 1 in 3 people. We are all preparing for the inevitable, as is she, and it has been an excruciating time these last couple of weeks coming to know and accept her prognosis. Mom may be 81 but until this winter was as active as ever, with all kind of projects planned – memoirs, living history interviews with the locals, more volunteer work for the library – fingers in lots of community pies. A few years ago, at age 78, she got her college degree. We held a party in her honor; so many people came!

I am so glad we got to spend Christmas with her and Dad at their home in upstate New York. This was a rarity, since they usually flew out to the west coast to spend it here, where three of her four children live. Now, mom says she wants a bench erected in one of the city parks here in Seattle, near all her kids. Talk about heart rending– she always felt sad that we were all so far away.

Although this is what people do – live and die – and none of us gets out alive, it still feels like a bad dream. She will be the first person really close to me who has died. I will finally join the ranks of all those who have lost a parent. Though it makes me feel very alone, I know that I am far from it. I only wish our culture, and our families, better prepared us for it. The taboo and shadow that exists around dealing openly with death is so deep and wide, I am certain it adds immensely, and unnecessarily, to our pain about it.