Suffering With Cancer

Earlier this year, my mother and I were reflecting on how merciful it might be that her cancer ensures that she will not reach the state of dementia that some old people do reach.  She, like many very intelligent people, has a horror of losing her wit and her clarity. 

It seems though that the drugs do what age also does.  Palliative care is amazing, and no doubt this would all be much more horrible were it not for the drugs and other steps we've had to take that have redefined "normal" and "life."  Morphine was a brutal angel, aggravating some symptoms and making others bearable.  The hospice team helped to sort out other drugs that were less soul-numbing. 

But it seems that the mind and the body do not part company easily, that to calm the raging of the flesh stills also the lightening strikes of the mind that make up the self.   The senses, dulled, separate the sufferer from the world instead of inviting her into it.

I have to pull the veil over the particulars: but those who have suffered with cancer or other painful diseases know that the flame of pain and the fire of the spirit draw from one source.  And as the disease runs its course, and mom sleeps more and more, and we wake her to dose her, and she sleeps again, I am thinking of the strange relationship that we have with our own pain and the lengths we go to to avoid it. 

Pope John Paul II testified either morbidly or heroically (depending on your point of view) in his teaching and in his body in his last days about how suffering both humanizes and divinizes a person.  But what's strange about it is how it envelopes you.  You don't get to say no to some kinds of suffering, however much you numb the body.  It scampers into some other region of the self, and those of us who stand by waiting to help or to lend comfort become used to its presence.  It walks in our corridors, it crawls into bed with us at night as we wake at the smallest sounds.   Maybe others forget what life was like before the morphine, back in the days when the patient could enjoy a meal or a walk or even going down the stairs.  I don't forget.  But the gradual numbness hasn't yet reached my memory.

Mom, though... her memory reaches further and further back into her own childhood.  She tells me about that at length, and again, I have to pull the veil over those conversations that are too personal and private, too deep in her bones for me to pretend that I have a right to write them.

Now each hour, we rebalance the uneasy sleep and the uneasier waking, the waiting, the watching.