My mother-in-law is visiting. She showed up with some difficult news: her primary peritoneal carcinoma has returned, four months after her last round of chemo, which we knew-- but her blood work showed marker numbers not at 176, as she had previously told us, but 996. PPC carries a survival rate akin to that of ovarian cancer--36% at 5 years with rigorous, aggressive treatment and surgery, less without. So Ma has decided that at the beginning of October, almost a year to the day of her first chemo treatment, 8 months after chemo and surgery had removed all traces of the previous tumors in her belly, she will start a different kind of chemo, this one designed not to eradicate tumors but to reduce and control them so she may lengthen what little time she has left. She told us this after we had finished eating, sons and wives and grandchildren perched on stools and chairs and the couch, sprawling on the floor. Except for some reason, while she was telling us about her odds (not very good at all) and her plans (nothing on her bucket list except a jet boat down the Rogue River and to visit with friends and family), and who is getting what money and who has power of attorney and how she wants to be buried, she stared right at me. And it damn near broke my heart when I realized that the reason she was staring at me was because if she looked any of her boys or grandkids in the eye, she wouldn't be able to finish. Her pride in each of them and her eldest's wife is palpable, and rightfully so. Every single one of them is a person I am honored to know, in no small part because of her.
It is disconcerting, listening to her speak. She's always nattered on about this and that, and I've heard many of her stories more than once, but it seems that her focus now is getting as many of these stories out of her heart into the hearts of those she loves and those who love the ones she loves. We have shared stories of our ex-husbands' infidelities, and to hear her tell them makes my heart ache for the woman she was and the little boys my mister and his brothers were. She told me the only time she ever asked for money was the first time she found out the boys' dad was cheating on her--she figured she better do something since she had kind of let herself go after three babies and a full time evening shift job, so she asked her grandma for some money and she got her hair done up pretty.
It didn't work, of course. The way she tells the story, however, her desperate trip to the hairdresser reminds me of her cheerful but desperate chemo treatments--it won't work, but she's willing to try, by gum, and if she can suspend disbelief for just long enough, maybe a new hairdo and going without glasses will keep her children's daddy around, and maybe the chemo will work and she'll make it three more years.
It took him five more years to leave for good, but even before the day Ma got her hair done, he was already gone. And frankly, with as fast as her tumors are growing now, she might as well already be dead. I cringe to hear her talk about the garden she is going to plant next spring five minutes after telling me that she can't sleep on her stomach because one of the tumors has gotten so big that it presses painfully against her bladder.
We have been planning this visit for a couple of months, now, right after Ma got the original news. I've had a menu well-thought out and shopped for, heavy on the veggies, smoothies, raw, whole foods with no meat, dairy, or sugar. We will stick with that, of course, but when you've been given six months to live, I think it's okay to eat outside the lines. Diet isn't going to change anything now, and in a couple of months when all she can have is liquid because the tumors are choking her bowels, I don't want her to regret that she didn't get to eat food she likes.
I don't know what to think of this woman. I find her cheerfulness and belief in miracles to be naive, but I know that they bring her comfort, and for a long time they are all she had. I can't begin to understand how it must feel to know so acutely that the body you live in is actively dying. Ma and the mister and the daughter and I all played Sorry! the other day, and the banality of it almost killed me until I realized that really, this is all she wants--to be with her people in the day to day of it, to find joy in the mundane. When we came home from the gym and I saw her sitting in the sun on the back porch, eyes closed, head back, face tilted to catch the warmth and brightness, I had to bite my fingers to quell the grief suddenly welling up inside me. I have spent six years rolling my eyes at her, six years sighing, six years holding my tongue, six years wasting time. I wish I had taken a picture of her, out there on the porch. I wish we had all eaten cake for breakfast.
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