Being Good In The Dark: Suffering With Cancer Like Good People

My dad's been taking care of Mom like a champion.

It's not easy looking after a person with terminal cancer, not if you love them.   I think we're all sort of given this choice of facing it bravely and letting it change us, or disappearing into ourselves.

I'm a little ashamed to say that I've disappeared into myself a little bit.

But the Old Man kind of shows me the way, as he so often has done.

He's gotten more tender, more open, than he ever has been before.  Like good people do, he's faced the hardest thing and grown from it, not been hardened by it.   Small people become withdrawn, selfish, irritable, demanding.  Dad gets deeper.  He surfs the Internet less.  He does more dishes.  He cooks.  He puts up with the small irritations of being told what to do by somebody who cannot do things for herself any longer without tremendous pain.  Most of all, he listens.  

Love is paying attention.

So my sister, rightly deciding that dad needs a break, asked him to come visit.  (She has a small daughter of the sort who puts things right, who tucks you into bed and tells you when you've been bad and who tells you earnestly that you're to paint her room to resemble a fairy garden and that you're using the wrong fork.  The kind of person that uncles and grandfathers need to remind them that life is beautiful and for living.)

I've spent several days with mom, called to move in in relief, to fill bigger shoes.

She's as thin as a refugee.  Psalm 22, metaphorizing Israel as a man dying of a wasting sickness, reads, "I can count all my bones."  So it is with mom.

She wakes cheerfully enough.  But she dreads breakfast, usually a single poached egg.  The first meal of the day might set her to horrible nausea.  Her afflicted stomach and colon grow ever more particular, more angry.

 She dreads too the next round of chemotherapy.  It's been put off because of everyone descending on us for Thanksgiving.  But it will be necessary again eventually, or so says the oncologist.  

Our medical adultery, our attention to a more wholistic approach, has been shelved for the time being; the scans are so worrisome to the doctors that they feel they need to be very aggressive.  But I'm not sure we weren't better off when mom was eating more, was teaching her body to be as healthy as it could be rather than merely to batter back illness with chemo, like firebombing Dresden to beat back the Nazis.  Sometimes you lose your soul in the battle for a good.  I'm not sure we weren't better before.  I'm not sure we weren't happier.

But the fear of death has to be appeased.

So we do the chemo.  And it changes things.

She is not merely thin and wasted.  She dithers.  She forgets.  She cannot focus, and small things worry her.  She tries to be cheerful, and manages it with great success: she has a profound sense of justice and tries to be kind.  She is still good humored, generous, anxious to give her best to the rest of us.  But I know she is troubled by the failure of her spirit.

At the same time, she is funnier, more engaged.  We just talked about my son and his courage, playing football and learning to take responsibilities.  We talked about what we'll cook for the great homecoming when Dad and my sister and her family all arrive tonight.  (New Orleans is under an interdict of some kind.  The water is not safe to drink.  So this talk dwells considerably on her anxieties about her health.   I have to remind myself several times that she's quite right to worry: her body, unlike mine, cannot fight off invaders.)

But it's the little things that get to you.   She has, she tells me, ordered a wig for the loss of her hair.   And she cannot hide the fact that she's thinking of this as her last Christmas, though she has the generosity not to lay the theatrical shadow of death over us all. 

That takes more goodness than most people realize.  When you know (or believe, which is the same thing sometimes) that your life's importance has not only peaked but not entirely crystallized, how much philosophy, how much generosity, how much acceptance of inevitable mortality, must it take just to live that life well and generously rather than to gesture continually at oneself?

"Notice me.  Affirm me."

None of that for Mom.

Sometimes I think this is because we have laughed so much, and every really interesting person knows instinctually that the best rule of good comedy is not to overdo it.

Theater structures emotion.  And around here we have usually preferred our lives to resemble a musical comedy, with lots of absurdity and silliness.  It isn't that we don't take ourselves seriously.  It's that we know that seriousness isn't always in the long face or the serious talk. 

Really, it's in love.  And really good love knows how to laugh, when to weep.  Mostly how not to stare unendingly at itself and its needs.  In fact good comedy takes life very seriously.

And when you can trust someone not to demand that, it makes it so much easier just to attend to them anyway: love and mercy are comic, surprising, leaping out when you least expect.  They never come at the point of a gun, or demanded, like trains moving on time from station to station.

Love and mercy do not obey us, coming when we call.  But they sit easily where they like, most often very cheerfully.

I learned that from my parents.  

Comments

[Allie]

The heart of your family takes my breath away. You are good to share it with others.

[Kathy]

Thank you for sharing your life with us in this way.

[Sandra]

Staring boldly, frankly, unflinchingly into the Abyss, is an act of courage beyond the willingness of most of us. Acknowledging the certainty of death with honor, humor, and character is not for the faint of heart. Although, those of us who have been there and back will say, like Dumbledore in paraphrasing Peter Pan and CG Jung, "Death is but the next great adventure," without any sense of irony. And it is the knowledge of the continuing adventure of death that allows the gracious, merciful, meaningful living in the moment.

May the Love that suffuses All, continue to shine through your mother both now and forever.