Since this has been one of the heavier issues weighing on me for the last... God, has it been a year and a half?... and it rather harshly intruded on a public event of my life recently, I think it might be time to actually do a post on it.
To lay it straight out-- my mother has lung cancer. There is a tumor on her lung that has required three rounds of chemotheraphy to manage, and has drastically affected her life and health. And in turn, it has drastically affected mine. This is one of the most major authors of the intermittent depression of my recent life.
We are not people who talk in public about our personal problems. For a long time, desiring to avoid the "cancer patient" label and be constantly treated with pity, my mom didn't want anyone knowing about it. Additionally, being the kind of person who usually doesn't feel better talking about things, it was easier for me not to share it with anyone. But at this point my mom is okay with people knowing, and it has had enough of an effect on my life that it might be good to explain a few things.
My mother is one of those people you might call Practically Perfect. You know what I mean by that-- one of those nice, sweet, smart, pretty, good at everything, gosh-darn-likeable people that seems to be able to do it all and be an unusually wonderful human being. She's massively talented. Anything that requires creativity and artistic talent, she was incredibly good at-- drawing, painting, sculpture, metalworking, graphic design, interior design, sewing, cooking, costume design, set design, any visual art you can think of, she knows how to do and has done at some point well.
She's unbelievably strong. My dad always worked long hours and traveled a great deal, so she shouldered a lot of the burdens that come with that. For most of my life, she worked at an art teacher at my school, did most of the day-to-day taking care of us kids, and had a fantastic dinner on the table every night. She takes care of everyone and is totally selfless. When my grandmother developed Alzheimer's and a host of physical medical problems, Mom took on the enormous burden of taking care of her herself, and even through the worst of that time she shielded the family from the effects. Never in my memory has she ever let me down. She's so positive, so full of hope and faith-- I've always wish I were that way with that kind of vitality, I who have always been more inclined to shutdown and scorched earth.
And of course she's beautiful. (Being me, of course I have to mention this.) If you think I'm at all nice to look at, everything I've got I got from my mom, and I'm nothing compared to how pretty she was when she was my age. Golden blonde hair, jade green eyes, perfect figure, gorgeous face. And even as she got older, she always stayed beautiful-- for whatever life stage she was in she was always remarkably good-looking and never let herself go. With exercise and care, she managed to stay a size two even at the age of fifty-five. As a person who is mortally afraid of aging badly and/or ungracefully, I mention this out of fervent hope that I will resemble her in that respect as well.
My mother, in short, is amazing. As a person who struggles with being positive and kind and generous of spirit, I am in awe. I am unbelievably lucky to have her.
Practically Perfect though she may be, I know there are a couple of things about her that aren't. Like most people who pay perhaps an inordinate amount of attention to little things about presentation and impression, she is terrified of being judged. When I think about it, it is kind of mind-blowing to me. How can anyone like her, who is so good in pretty much every way, be so concerned that people will find her lacking in any way? That's her major one. Her other flaw, it turns out, was cigarettes.
I am in no way exaggerating when I say it was not until a year and a half ago that I had any idea that my mother was a smoker. Growing up, my brother and I saw zero evidence of it. No one saw any evidence of it. The only person who knew was my dad. She had always decried them as a disgusting, unhealthy habit that we were never to consider indulging in. She kept them secret because she was ashamed that she needed them.
It's hard being perfect, of course. It's hard to handle so many responsibilities and stay as pleasant, gorgeous, and positive as she always was. Strong as she is, the stress got to her. She didn't let that stress ever make her let anyone down, or change her in general very good disposition, but she used cigarettes to help her keep an even keel. To her it was a failing, something disgusting that she thought would make her seem like less to people. So, in a behavior that is eerily similar to my own inclinations when I'm ashamed of something, she hid it from everyone.
You know how I finally found out about this? She told me. She told me two New Years ago, because a few weeks before Christmas she'd started coughing blood, and her doctor diagnosed her with lung cancer. Fifty-five years old, healthy in every way but one, and she had cancer.
It's been hard. Chemo is a terrible thing, for those of you who haven't seen the effects of it. Between the two courses of chemo and the accompanying stereoids and medications, she has lost her hair, gained sixty pounds, and had to endure many weeks of nausea, sleepiness, weakness, and occasional bad reactions to the drugs. She has worked hard to keep her life as normal as possible, but she doesn't have the strength, energy, and fitness to keep doing things exactly as she used to. She just can't be as perfect anymore.
You might wonder why I bother to tell you how great and perfect my mom is. It seems to imply a question of deserts-- like, how can my mother get cancer, she's too good, she doesn't deserve it. Of course she doesn't deserve it, no one deserves cancer. But it's really tough to deal with the notion that the woman had practically one flaw, and for that one flaw she is punished so severely.
Her attitude is largely hopeful and positive, with naturally a handful of lapses here and there. She's afraid, as we all are. There's a very distinct chance that she will have to just keep going in and out of chemo fighting it off a little before it comes back again until it finally kills her. There's a chance that she will never be healthy and free of the treatments again until she dies. And of course, she could just die. The treatments could not work at all and the tumor could just kill her. It's terrifying. Terrifying for her that goes through it, and terrifying for me who might lose her. In addition, she struggles with her body now-- someone who has always been so beautiful she never before had to --torn between being very unhappy at the loss of her hair and figure and ashamed to care about it when more important things like life and health are at stake. But mostly she is dealing, keeping high spirits and not in the least bitter. All my life I never ceased marveling at how she never loses hope, but now more than ever.
I wonder if I might end up the same way. Her mother, my grandmother, had lung cancer too. Yes, they were both smokers, but my grandmother was in her late seventies when she got it; my mom is in her fifties. And apparently a quarter of lung cancer patients never smoked. Clearly there's at least some genetic predisposition in my family. I start thinking bad, crazy thoughts, like I should never get married, so nobody has to deal with my falling apart, and I should never have kids, so I don't condemn them to cancer either. I am terrified of becoming helpless from a sickness. And bad enough that the condition is life-threatening and at times debilitating-- it also taps into my very personal fear of age physically destroying you. Cancer harmed her body and stole her looks. If it can happen to a woman as beautiful as my mom, what would happen to me? She's so much better a person than I am, and therefore does not NEED that beauty as desperately as I do, but still, I can see the change making her sad. I think of losing my hair and gaining sixty pounds and I seize up inside. And as I said, I don't have Mom's hopeful, positive nature. Lacking that bright vitality that keeps you from despair, how would I ever maintain the will to live that you can't survive something like this without?
Things in my life have seemed to be piling up in a lot of ways, but this is pretty much the worst. It has been going on long enough that I have more or less found ways to live with it. But it wears on me, and if I have been sadder or angrier in recent history, a great deal of it has come from this.
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