“Two months ago, I was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer. You see, my husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for years. It was a very stressful time each month, waiting to see if it worked, mourning it for days when it didn’t. I was anxious…always anxious it seemed, and my stomach was upset a lot. But any time I felt nauseous or bloated, I got excited, thinking it was pregnancy. I didn’t really look for any other reason for the symptoms. I just always wanted it to be pregnancy, I guess. But I’m a nurse practitioner. Eventually, I climbed out of my hopeful shell long enough to notice that something was wrong. Very wrong.”
My chin trembles, and I swallow hard so that my voice remains strong, so that it won’t shake with the tears that have pooled in my eyes. I haven’t cried about my cancer since the day I was told that it was stage four. It seemed pointless to spend the last part of my life crying over milk that had long since been spilled.
“By the time I was diagnosed, it had already spread to my liver and two of my lymph nodes. Being a nurse, I knew what that meant. Besides that, I’ve seen it before. With my father.”
The priest says nothing. He merely gives me time and space and quiet. It is in that quiet that I reach for and give this holy man all that is in my heart.
“My dad died with stage four esophageal cancer. It’s very similar to my condition, and it had spread to his liver and lymph system, too. I was a little girl at the time, so I didn’t know much. And they hid things from me. But still, I knew. I could see that he was sick. Very sick. I could see what he was going through. That’s how I know what’s coming for me. I know it all too well.”
My pause is short. Everything is rushing to the surface now, a tide beyond my control.
“My older sister had cancer, too. Childhood leukemia. So, you see, I’ve seen more than my fair share of what this disease can do. What it will do. I’ve watched it wreck families too many times, and I’m not going to let it wreck mine. That’s why I refused treatment.”
The priest is quiet, contemplative.
“And what did your husband have to say about that?”
I shrug. “Nate loves me. He would never ask me to do something I didn’t want to do. Besides, he was part of the reason I made that choice. I watched cancer eat away at my father and my sister. I watched them fight it like there was hope and then lose the battle anyway. My mother watched it, too. Only she never recovered. She died in their battle, too. And I don’t want that to happen to Nate.”
“Your mother died as well?” he asks.
“No, not technically, but she might as well have. She more or less checked out of life after Dad died. She checked out of life, out of motherhood, out of participation in being a human. Seeing them die that way…it broke her. She just gave up. It didn’t even matter to her that she had another child to raise. She stopped caring and trying, or even pretending to care or try. She just…stopped.”
Before the priest can say anything, I continue, my lips curving into a darkly bitter smile.
“But I was lucky, I guess. Lucky that I was fourteen when he died. I was mostly grown and able to take care of myself, so when Mom quit doing it...” I shrug, even though the priest can’t see it. “I did it for myself. For both of us, most of the time. I guess in some ways, I ended up raising her rather than the other way around. I wasn’t able to grieve. I lost my dad, but Momma lost her soul. And I had no choice but to take up the slack. I held my mother while she cried. For hours sometimes, way up into the night. I gave her a bath when she wouldn’t get out of bed to shower and the whole house smelled like sweaty feet. I nursed her as well as a grieving girl could nurse her mother and still try to keep her own life from falling apart. That’s one thing I can sort of be thankful for, I suppose. Taking care of Momma is when I realized I had a pretty good knack for it—nursing. That awful time gave me a dream, a dream that I held onto when there was nothing else. I focused on going to college even when I had to learn to forge my mother’s name so I could cash the Medicaid checks and buy necessities. I focused on getting out when I walked down to the corner market once a week to buy us food. I focused on college so I could get through high school, while I learned to cook and clean, while I did my homework and then did the laundry. College is why I didn’t miss a single day of school. No matter how tired I was, I didn’t miss a day. And I still took care of my mother, right up until I got the letter of acceptance to nursing school. Only then did I stop. That was the day I called Social Services and had them come to do an evaluation of her.”
I link and unlink my fingers, fidgeting in the way I used to when I was a little girl. I haven’t done it in years. But then again, I haven’t rehashed the story about my mother in years either. The guilt over what I did is still fresh, as fresh as it was the day I made the call. And after all this time, the result of my actions still burns in my gut like a lifetime of swallowing battery acid.
“I was so bitter. I didn’t want harm to come to her; I just wanted someone else to take care of her,” I explain, the slow trickle of tears down my cheeks starting anew. It has been so long since I’ve cried over Momma, but I never stopped missing her, missing what could have been. What should have been, but never was. I felt grief, grief for the other parent I lost. I didn’t lose her physically, but I lost her emotionally.