I sat in on my mom's latest chemotherapy session with her yesterday morning. This is not the truly terrible affair you might be imagining (they were worse during her first chemo cycle, in 2008, when it could last up to 6+ hours). The chairs are comfy and my mom is usually in pretty good spirits, as that day will be the longest period of time since her last chemo session. The only issues I really have are that it's pretty early in the morning for me, and the room is usually pretty cold.
Most of the way through the session, another patient was brought in to start receiving her chemotherapy. She was French, and looked to be older than my mother, but had the same kind of cancer—ovarian. Nonetheless, this woman was clearly in worse shape, and the nurse whispered to us that her cancer was not responding to the chemo. But the nurse also asserted that she felt my mom would be a good presence for the French woman, and my mom immediately assumed the role of wiser, more experienced cancer patient.
The French woman told me that she wished her daughter would come into the room, so that she could talk to me, but apparently the daughter was feeling resistant, and was generally just incredibly upset at the news. My mom talked about how this experience has really taught her who loves her, and how it was wonderful to be in the hospital and see all her friends and family rally around her at all times, but that sometimes people need a little time to get used to the reality of the situation. The French woman said that she was worried about her daughter, but hadn't yet had time to be worried about herself; she had only gotten the diagnosis six weeks ago, and was still in shock.
I remembered back to the time when I found out my mom had gotten cancer, in March of 2008. I had just recently had a breakup, so I was cultivating and wallowing in a delightfully rotten mood. The only times I would really go outside would be to walk Rosie, which at first felt like a burden, but I eventually came to enjoy. I turned my walks into a performance. It was still pretty chilly, often wet weather in March, so I would put on my rattiest black jacket, whatever clothes I had slung over my chair the night before, and sneakers that were so worn out that they plastic in the heel was poking through and giving me blisters. I would not shower for days, so my hair was sticking out in all directions, and I wouldn't have trimmed my beard so it was scraggly and scruffy. I would put Rosie's leash on and head outside with my shoulders rounded and my eyes downward. As soon as I would reach the street, I would light up a cigarette and savor its disgusting properties. I felt very much as if I were expressing outwardly the way I felt inside, and I loved showcasing it in that way that misery loves company.
On this particular day, I'd slept in well past when Rosie would have liked to go out, and I slunk off with her to the dog park, which was under renovation at the time, necessitating a temporary dog run, which was actually closer to a disgusting mud pit with nowhere to sit. As I leaned nonchalantly against a fence, my phone rang and I saw it was my dad. I answered and I know I heard him say something about mom and cancer, but it was almost as if the words died before they could really register. I asked him to repeat himself, and furrowed my brow, needing to listen harder. He told me she'd gone in to the doctor yesterday and had complained of abdominal pain, and today she went to the gynecologist and had a scan, and she definitely had some kind of cancer in her perineal region, either ovarian or uterine, and was going to see a surgen tomorrow. I know I asked some follow-up questions, but I can't remember what they were. I lit up a new cigarette, and Rosie and I walked around the neighborhood in a haze—well, I was in a haze, and Rosie was just… Rosie.
As my mom continued to talk to the French woman, I remembered realizing some time after she had recovered from the surgery that my mom seemed okay. I mean, obviously she just had major abdominal surgery and would soon be undergoing chemotherapy and the odds were no great, but she seemed fine. At that moment, and continuing through to this moment, I began to worry about my dad more than my mom. My dad also seemed fine, but in a way that appeared more superficial than my mom. My mom could actually do something about the cancer, theoretically, and she was fighting it, but my dad just seemed a little lost, and he still does. And my mom will talk about how she's feeling, to her friend who had just dealt with breast cancer (and is now dealing with it again), and to some extent to the rest of us. All my dad can seem to talk about are results: this scan showed this, that test showed this. It's comforting, I guess, for him to concentrate on the concrete numbers—he was a Math major, after all.
As I was lost in this reverie, the French woman started to tell a story.
Apparently, one day a cockatiel flew into the window of the apartment she shared with her daughter. They named him Bubbo, and he became their pet. He would land on her finger, and hop his little way up her arm, to her shoulder, and then nibble on her ear. This, it turned out, is what Bubbo would do to every single person he met. Shortly after getting her diagnosis and seeing everyone she knew react the same way to her news, the French woman realized: we are all cockatiels. We like to think we are all unique and special, but we all just cockatiels doing what we know to do, and what feels comfortable.
Some time after this, the woman's daughter finally came into the chemo room. I guess her husband had left, and she didn't want to sit in the waiting room all alone, or maybe she just decided it was time—I don't really know. At any rate, the French woman told me that her daughter was having an experience where she would be at a party or somewhere and she would bring up the cancer—it was all she could think about—and somebody else would say, "oh yes, I know someone who had that cancer, and now she's dead." The French woman wanted to know if I'd ever had this experience.
"Well, actually," I said, "when I was first dating my current girlfriend, I learned that her mother had passed on some time ago. I was not sharing with her any details about my mother's fight with cancer, as I was trying as hard as I could to not think about it. Eventually, I asked my girlfriend exactly how her mother had died, and she told me 'ovarian cancer.' I didn't know how to react, except to tell her my mother had ovarian cancer, and then we were both silent for some time."
The French woman looked at me curiously for a moment. "And you did not have a problem with this?"
"I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but it's ended up forcing me to confront a lot of my issues with my mom's cancer, and some of her issues with her mom's cancer. I think in a lot of ways, it's brought us closer together. Around almost the exact same time that my mom got her diagnosis, one of my closest friend's father got diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Sometimes it can seem as though there's cancer everywhere, following you wherever you go. You can see it as an obstacle, or an omen, or you can see it as an opportunity, to try and become closer to the people around you, and to share and listen, and have a shoulder to cry on, and be a shoulder to cry on."
At this point, my mom's last chemo drug had ended, and it was time for me and her to go. The French woman told me she was sorry to see me go, since she felt it would be nice for her daughter to talk to me some more to learn how to cope.
"Oh," I said, "I don't think I cope that well. I mean sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. It's a different experience for everyone, and you just have to—"
"Put one foot in front of the other," my mom cut in, finishing my sentence.
As I was heading back downtown for the afternoon, I thought about the French woman's story of Bubbo, the cockatiel. We might all be cockatiels, but that doesn't make us robots any more than Bubbo is. Bubbo might seem as if he likes to hop up everyone's arm and nibble on their ear, and maybe he does derive some comfort from behaving the same way to everyone, and maybe we do as well, but only because it feels familiar and safe. When the territory becomes dangerous and unsure, we can retreat to those same behaviors, but they may not help us through the new terrain. Sulking through poor hygiene and cigarettes might have been a nice way to wallow, but it didn't actually help me deal with the hurt emotions of a breakup, nor would it help me deal with my mother's impending mortality. My dad's bad habits (overeating, insomnia, late-night Internet shopping) may be a comforting pattern of behavior, but they only do damage to him and his sense of self as he copes with his wife's battle with cancer. In the end, we each need to find our own path, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
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