The clock on my computer reads 5:02. I have a kitty curled up at the foot of my bed and a window open to combat the summer heat. My stomach is growling and my eyes are puffy.
Seventeen years ago, when I was in fourth grade and had bangs and wore tie-dyed t-shirts over cut off legging shorts and loved to write short stories and owned a pet rat named Taco who I'd take on bike rides, my mother was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. I didn't really know what it meant at the time, except that I'd seen the pink ribbons and understood that this kind of thing happened to some women. There was a lump and it was a scary thing and they removed it and you hoped for the best.
I remember walking up to the hospital with my father, nervous, not ever having been in a hospital to visit any one before. I didn't really know what to think or feel. A small part of me was excited to visit a hospital. It's one of those places you read about it books but rarely peek into on a daily basis, filled with people in professions that made sense -- doctors and nurses straight out of Richard Scary's world. Except human.
I remember the image of my mom in hospital gown, post-surgery. Half a breast lighter. Looking tired but happy to see us.
I remember my mom's button-up shirts, purchased after her surgery so that she could dress herself more easily. Lifting her arm too high would tug on the stitches in the early days of the healing process. The button-up shirts were more loose-fitting than her usual tops, and she would dress them up with gold pendants that hung around her neck from different colored ribbons.
I remember having a melt-down in my elementary school class one day, for a reason I can't recall (someone wouldn't give me back my pen? perhaps someone teased me?), and the teacher kneeling by my side, saying he knew I was going through a rough time right now. Through my sniffles, it dawned on me that he was talking about my mom's recent surgery. And I found myself surprised that he knew (and quickly realized my parents must have sent a note) and curious whether my tears were in fact related to that (and quickly realized that I had no idea, which only made me want to cry more).
At some point, a coffee table book appeared in our living room, called Art. Rage. Us. -- Art and Writing by Women with Breast Cancer. I looked through it one day, flipping past picture upon picture of beautiful women with breasts missing, sporting scars, tattoos, smiles, and strength in their absence. I felt lucky for my mom that she had not lost her full breast. And I remembered the two little tattoos she had received before surgery, as they had marked where and how, like hasty dots of spray paint on the street where the sewer needs repair.
That was the beginning. Those are the memories I can pin down that mark my first handshake with cancer. My first introduction to the fourth member of our family, who would follow us everywhere in the years to come, albeit just out of sight much of the time.
There was a lump and it was a scary thing and they removed it and we hoped for the best.
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Seventeen years later, I still find myself hoping for the best. But the definition of that phrase has morphed so many times, I no longer know what it means.
The year 2012 began with the sentence "This is the year my mother is going to die."
It also began with the realization that hoping for the best isn't going to cut it any more. I've spent the last year learning how not to be passive (notice that sentence structure?) when it comes to my mother's cancer. My mother's dying.
It's taken this year for me to finally come to terms with saying that sentence aloud, rolling it around on my tongue, imagining what it will actually mean. What it will taste like. How it will feel -- when death actually comes, and I lose my my mother. And, in a sense, the cancer -- that fourth member of our family that has defined so much of the last 17 years.
This is part of my process. Writing, remembering, wondering, feeling, overflowing. In my 5am panic, I realized just how much I've needed a venue for release that is not dependent on any one but me. A place to anticipate and muddle through whatever the hell is around the bend by putting it into words.
It's time to embrace the elephant I've been avoiding since that first day we began hoping for the best.
