Stories & Data: Living With Cancer

I'm spending the morning with my mother.

Life here is one round of medications, supplements, routines.

We're off morphine.  We're pushing the natural sources of the things she needs, rebalancing the body.  She says she doesn't feel stronger, but last week's impossibility is this week's difficulty.  So I know she's getting... not better, but stronger.  There's no way to know if this represents a small peak in a deep valley, or what.

One of the necessary pretenses is normalcy.  She gets dressed, even though  the day is mostly spent in bed.  She eats at regular times, even though a tiny chicken sandwich is all she can manage (and we're insanely grateful she eats it all).

I carefully log on my iPod Touch what she eats and how much of it, what medicines and supplements she takes, her weight, what her pain level is.  Instantly on Google Docs, a chart pins all this information for my siblings in Illinois and Shreveport.

We are nothing if not organized, and determined that insofar as life wants her and she wants life, there will be no failure on our part to provide a way for them to meet.

And nine hundred miles away my brother can touch the mouse to a pivot sheet and see how many doses, how much sleep, how long a walk mom given us.

The column on the datasheet marked "Comments" tells stories.  It's about things that go beyond which medicines, how much pain, how much exercise.  These are the unquantifiable things: "Noted her headache preceded a storm"; "Wished she could eat lettuce"; "Told a story about growing up in Georgia"; "enjoyed a little boiled crab with dinner"; "commented on the barking of the dog."

These are things no medical professional needs to know.  But I hear and feel things in them as I thumb them into the iPod.  They seem to pass from the realm of spirit to the realm of data as I do it, and are gone, to be remembered somewhere else.  The truth of these items hides safely behind a textual veil.  Nobody will come near it.  It's for me to say what these things mean, and when I am gone nobody will know, not really, unless I tell the stories.

I feel a little like maybe the thoughtful author of the Book of Exodus, remembering something he can't quite say, some echo in the cultural memory.  Enter your memory.  Hit the enter key.  "Somewhere along the way, YHWH met him and tried to kill him..."

She was looking tired, and I asked her to come for a walk: the sunlight is essential for the vitamin D production, and the exercise is terribly important as she is thirty or forty pounds under her pre-cancer weight, her energy cannibalizing her muscles.  She pursed her lips, got up, braved the stairs.  She walks with a cane my nephew bought her with a gold alligator-shaped handle.

My dog was frisking about around us, tickling up a cat that shot out of the bushes.  Mom didn't start when the animals came streaking out into our path.  She had her eyes on the corner. 

"Thank you," I told her, "for humoring us.  All these supplements and medicines and walking."

"We either need to lie down and give up or..."

"Keep taking what your body will give us," I finished for her, and she nodded.

Maybe her body will say no to cancer in some mysterious way.  Maybe she'll get strong enough to brave chemotherapy.  We don't really know.  We just have these moments that stretch underneath the data and into the sunlight, stories told in the sound of breathing that comes from the bed a few feet from me as I write.

Comments

[Stephanie (Just Me)]

It's hard to know what to say, but this is the type of post one can't just read and leave dangling, unanswered.

I see a type of solemn privilege in these days with your mom... a chance to spend your time on her, to absorb her memories and her spirit, to willingly and tenderly serve the woman who has poured life into you... a tacit "Thank you for all you mean to me."

It's good that you are able to care for her.

[Sandra]

When it was my mom's time, it was cancer that took her. I was half a continent away, in the days before internet and iPhones. We talked when we could--but usually she couldn't--and it was not nearly enough. Not that anything is ever enough when the next thing is good-bye, but really it was that it wasn't enough that I could do for her. There was no gesture I could make that came close to feeling as though it expressed the meaning her life had in mine.

While I hurt for you in your pain, I also envy that you can make this gesture--the time, love, support for not simply your mother's body and physical health but her soul. Your soul will be grateful you had this opportunity for the rest of your life.

Blessings on you all.

[Shirley]

Well said, Sandra. And so true.