This Is Not How It Ends(22)

Her voice quavered. I sat up, the sun slowly fading behind me. “What is it?”

She proceeded to tell me how she had spoken to her friend Millie, whose son Tom was a doctor. “You remember Tom? I asked her to talk to him about some symptoms I’d been having. My skin looks yellowish. And I’ve been itchy all over. Did you notice I lost a bit of weight lately?”

I was so focused on Philip I hadn’t. Don’t close your eyes.

“Tom told Millie I should stop taking my cholesterol medicine. It could be my liver, but it’s already been a few days and still no change. They said it could take up to a week. I looked it up on the internet. It’s either that or hepatitis C. Can someone my age get hepatitis C?”

I was waiting for a different c-word. My deep sigh did little to quell the uncertainty hammering at me. “I told you not to look that stuff up on the internet, Mom. It’ll make you crazy.”

“They put me in touch with someone at Saint Luke’s, a doctor friend of Tom’s. Brian Deutch. He’s the doctor. He said he knew you once. It was a fix-up after the last baseball game of senior year. Millie said he’s married now with three kids.” She was prattling on, and I had no recollection of this guy, nor did I care to summon him from memory. “So that’s where I’ll be tomorrow. Dr. Deutch. I’m scheduled for a round of tests . . . I wanted you to know . . .”

Philip reached for the phone and explained to Mom that whatever she needed, he would take care of it. He knew the best doctors all over the world. “You need not worry, Katherine. Charley and I will be there for you every step of the way.”

Philip’s reaction to my mother’s illness gave me a glimpse of the life I was crossing into. “Let’s go back,” he said, as though it were his home. “She shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

If Philip wanted to go back, it couldn’t be good. The sun had faded from the sky, and I was left with a cold shiver in my bones. “Yes,” I turned to him, a mild disappointment sheathing me. “Let’s go back.”

We boarded a small claustrophobic plane two hours later. I didn’t close my eyes the entire flight to a private airport outside Kansas City. I needed to be awake.

When we reached the hospital, a series of tests and cold waiting rooms, quiet prayers and crying fits confirmed the severity of my mother’s illness. Philip had to hold me up while my body crumpled. The fancy X-ray machine confirmed exactly what I didn’t want to know: Mom had a mass on the head of her pancreas. The biopsy proved it was the mother of all cancers.

The swiftness of her diagnosis and decline felt like whiplash. My world, once evenly coated in lemony sunshine, turned a smoky gray. There was hardly enough time to sort it out.

Philip helped me pack a suitcase, and I moved back to my childhood home. Mom’s prognosis was grim—most patients survived less than a year—and I was questioning the universe and why God took those who did everything right: the ones who loved and provided for their children, the ones who sacrificed their own happiness for the sake of others, the ones with only selflessness in their hearts.

By then, Philip understood my father was gone. He didn’t question me; he didn’t ask. It was a truth we skipped over and didn’t discuss.

Time brought forth a menagerie of mixed, confusing messages. Time was stolen moments, the few joyful occasions free from chemotherapy and pain meds, free from the heavy cloak of grief that swathed us in its grip. Time was an adversary. It was out of reach and oh so close. It neared, it disappeared. It left me distraught and exhausted from the chase. The contradiction of those months was unmistakable. I questioned fate and the sheer power of love. How could my heart experience such a deep, probing love when it was slowly breaking apart? How might my soul open to a stranger while it closed on the person I loved more than anyone else?

The school year ended, and my students sent me home with an abundance of prayers. They knew when they returned in the fall I might be motherless, and their hugs were extra hard. While they enjoyed their vacation, I spent the summer holding Mom’s hand at chemotherapy and shuttling her to scans, until the doctors told us there was nothing more they could do.

School resumed, and Mom insisted I go back to work. She and Philip ambushed me, leaving me no out. “I can’t,” I cried. “I can’t begin something new . . . not now . . .”

Mom understood what I needed, and I needed to get out of the house. It wasn’t good for her, and it wasn’t good for me. I returned on a rainy September day, hauling the weight of what was to come. I’ll never forget Principal Priscilla’s embrace when I walked through the office doors. “You’re not going through this alone. We’re here for you.”

On a gloomy Sunday morning in October, Mom lay holed up in her bed, the trash can nearby, and I heard a light knock at the door. She had fallen asleep as I read to her. Mom preferred the classics. We were lost in The Bell Jar, as though Mom’s illness wasn’t enough for us to tackle. “Remember, Charlotte,” she had said to me before slipping off to sleep, “be mindful of your expectations. It’s always best to expect less, then you won’t be disappointed.” I knew at the time she was referring to Sylvia Plath, but the meaning wasn’t lost on me. She meant my father. She meant my relationship to men. We never talked about him or what his absence did to us, though I’m certain as she neared her death, there were lessons she needed to share.