Tiny Memoir

I am not in charge in Cancerland

Oddly, I can live with that.

I really thought cancer and I had come to an understanding. Jeanne is having her last radiation treatment tomorrow, and the whole intervention has gone spectacularly. There is not even a trace of cancer in her breast, and the odds of it reoccurring are miniscule.

My friend, Michelle (I feel comfortable using her name now since she outed herself publicly in Rolling Stone), is doing well. She is still dying, but, for now, not immediately.

Then came tonight. I found out that one of my kids needs to get checked for skin cancer. That was a gut-kick. Worse, that’s all I know about it. I guess I’ll find out more as we move through this.

Until now, cancer has always been something you get because of your own actions. My grandfather died of mouth cancer, but only after smoking and chewing tobacco for many years.

My mother died of lung cancer. She smoked since she was a teenager. Of course, she started smoking in the 1940s when they had no idea had bad it was for you. I always file her death under I for Irony.

In January 1997, my father was going shopping and asked her if she needed more cigarettes. She started to hand him some money for a carton, and then said, “Actually, no. I could use this money to go out to eat with my friend Shirley. I’m not smoking anymore.”

That was very much the way my mother was. Once she made up her mind about something, it was set in stone. She never smoked again. She died of lung cancer in May of that year. Like I said, irony.

When she told me she had cancer, she sounded a little scared, but mostly annoyed. I later found out that it had already spread to her brain. In the following months, she lived exactly as she wanted. For starters, she bought everything in the Honey Baked Ham catalog. Seriously, everything, and four of some things like her favorite pies.

When I approached my father with the idea that maybe it was time to take away her credit card, he replied, “I will never do that. I love your mother, and she can have anything she wants. I’ll pay it all off.”

That is how she ended up buying her self dozens of floral arrangements for Mother's Day. She told my sister that her children never celebrated Mother's Day with her. That wasn’t true, but she thought it was, or, at least, she thought that when she bought flowers for herself from each of five children.

She also told my sister that I never called her. I think my sister would have believed her if she hadn’t been standing next to Mom while I had an hour-long phone conversation with her.

My sister was adamant that Mom would have a great summer and die in the fall. “The doctor said so.”

“Then the doctor is an idiot. There is no way he can know that.”

“We’ll see.” We did see. My sister managed to get Mom to one chemo treatment. It made my mother so sick, she said that she was never doing it again.

Remember what I said about Mom making up her mind. I meant that. The next time my sister tried to take Mom to chemo, My mother told her, “I’m not going.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’’m not. Who’s going to make me?”

“Well, you weigh a hundred pounds, and I am going to bundle you into the car. You need chemo.”

At that point, Mom collapsed on the floor, and she was dead a day later. About that not going to chemo ever again, Mom meant that.

That was almost 24 years ago. This is now, and I am in Cancerland without any irony. I have no idea what sort of advice my mother would give me at this moment. It would have something to do with God, so my atheist self is glad she isn’t here to tell me how to handle this.

I do know how I am going to handle this. I am going to move forward, one step at a time, and trust myself to make the best decisions I can. Tomorrow, I am going to make a nice dinner and a cake to celebrate the end of Jeanne’s chemo. Next week I am going to take Michelle to chemo, and then I’ll wait to find out what the dermatologist says about my son.

In the meantime, I’ll hope that everything works out in the best way possible. After all, I am not in charge in Cancerland. I am just a visitor here.

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