Things You Save in a Fire(72)

My brain was circling around, trying to put all the new information together. “That’s it, then? You’re not doing any treatments?”

“Did the doctor show you the brain scans?”

I nodded.

She gave me a look like, Well, there’s your answer.

“I don’t know what to do now.”

“Just be here,” she said. “Just be nearby.”

More tears from me.

“It’s okay. It’s better in a way,” she said. “We aren’t meant to last forever. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my last year getting cut up and drugged. I’d much rather be in the garden. Or painting pottery. Or walking by the ocean.”

Of course, you can’t argue with walking by the ocean, but when the end result of that is dying, it sounds a little less ideal.

“There’s nothing else to try? Nothing even experimental?”

“There was some experiment I could have joined, but I declined. It sounded awful.”

I sat up. “What? Really? What was it?”

“Some new drug. Some clinical trial. I said no.”

“What? Why would you say no?”

“I don’t want to take any more drugs. I’ve had enough medical intervention for a lifetime.”

“But it’s just medicine.”

“With gruesome side effects. The least gory of which is ‘fatal skin infection.’”

“I’m just saying, what if it worked?”

“What if it didn’t? And then I’m killed by my own skin?”

“At least that way, there’s a chance.”

“Not one worth taking.”

In that moment, it seemed like she wasn’t trying. “You have to try it! Call them back! Tell them you’ve changed your mind! You can’t be a quitter. You have to keep fighting!”

She shook her head, infuriatingly calm. “I am fighting. In my own way.”

“How?” I said. “How are you fighting?”

She looked me straight on. “I’ve been meditating three times a day since my last checkup.”

“Meditating? You’re fighting recurrent melanoma with meditation?”

“I think it’s working,” she said.

“What’s working?”

“I should have had many more seizures by now, in fact. That’s a very promising sign.”

“What are you talking about?”

My mom gave me a smile. “When I first got the prognosis, I read everything I possibly could about it—like you do.”

I nodded.

“And one of the articles I read was about a French woman with basically my same situation who had managed to halt the growth of her tumor through creative visualization.”

I shook my head. “What did she visualize?”

“She mediated three times a day, and she very specifically imagined a hard shell growing around her tumor—so hard that it was compressed inside and couldn’t get any bigger.”

I made a conscious effort not to roll my eyes.

“It worked,” Diana said. “She’d been going downhill rapidly—but then her decline slowed, then stopped entirely. She didn’t die for another seven years, and that was in a car crash. Totally unrelated! When they autopsied her tumor, guess what they found?”

“What?”

“A shell. A hard shell around it. And it hadn’t grown at all.”

I shook my head. “That’s urban legend. That can’t be real.”

“It is real. It’s documented.”

“You can’t just imagine a tumor away!”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But there’s certainly no harm in trying.”





Twenty-three


AND SO WE went home. And made supper. And sat in the garden while the sun went down. There was nothing else to do.

It hit me in strange waves. There were moments when I felt gutted, and moments when I felt almost normal; moments when I felt at peace with Diana’s acceptance, and moments when I felt panicked to do something; moments when I felt like somehow, when all was said and done, everything would be okay, and moments when it seemed like nothing would ever be okay again.

Remember when I was all about trying to keep my life from getting destabilized?

Yeah, that whole concept got shot to hell.

I had four days before my next shift. Four days to figure out how to face the rest of my life. So I just helped Diana weed her garden, and I helped her make supper. We looked through old photo albums and sang Christmas carols, even though it wasn’t Christmas. She showed me her old diaries and old portfolios from art school. She walked me through her jewelry box and tried to educate me about which long-gone relatives had owned which rings and necklaces and charm bracelets. We drank a lot of coffee and made a lot of tea. We made sure not to miss the sunsets.

I tried, with at least partial success, to savor the time we had left. That was the goal, anyway—to enjoy her living presence near me and not fixate so much on the sorrow to come that I forgot to pay attention. To learn to make the best of things. As fast as I could.

Every night that week, after supper, the rookie showed up at the front door, wanting to check on us, or do something for us, or help.