Two months ago. . .
Jan. 1st, 2009 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sacrilicious13The only person who knows this is Duia, but I signed up to do NANO last year. My plan was to write a kind of memoir about everything Mum and I went through with the treatments and the surgeries and how much I loved her. I planned to write it in November, blaze through any editing in the first week of December and send it off to Lulu for a quick self-publish so I could give it to her for Christmas. I didn't tell her I was going to write it because I wanted it to be a surprise.
Two months ago today, Mum was feeling great. She was admitted to the hospital the night before, and they had given her lots of morphine to make her head feel better and she was doing amazingly. It was a Saturday. I called her up when I woke up and she told me she was feeling so much better. I told her I'd be around to visit after lunch because I wanted to clean the house up before she came home. We were both figuring that she'd probably come home Monday or Tuesday.
I arrived at the hospital and we spent the day together. I don't remember exactly what we did, probably watched the food channel. We shared the piece of lemon meringue pie that came with the hospital tray, and we talked and we were both so hopeful. I was so happy that she was feeling better.
We were both bummed that we had missed Halloween, but I told her that I was pausing the month and we'd have Halloween when she got home. I had the most perfect pumpkin waiting in the kitchen for us to carve. I never did carve that pumpkin. Eventually it started to shrivel and I put it out on the porch where it withered and rotted. But when I bought it at the grocery store it was perfect. Halloween was always our favorite holiday.
I stayed until seven or eight o'clock. I told Mom I was going to hit the post Halloween candy sales at Target and go to bed early since I'd had to work late the night before. I called her again when I got home to tell her about the cute Halloween scrapbook I had gotten on sale. I told her we could fill it with pictures from our first Halloween in Charlotte. After I got off the phone, this is what I wrote.
Prologue
Lemon meringue pie tastes like the promise of summer. On the first of November, I sat beside my mother’s hospital bed, sharing a piece of pie and clinging to the promise of North Carolina and a new beginning.
“I had a dream last night,” she said. “I dreamed there was a contest and we won a house. We lived upstairs because the first floor was our bakery.”
I have that image in my mind. Rows and rows of pies and cakes rest on the gleaming counters, frosting and meringue, candied fruits and sugared flowers shining through the plate glass window like colored jewels enticing passersby. It’s what I think of when the days are bad, and I feel trapped by winter, by Maine, by cancer.
It was April twenty-fourth. April twenty-fourth when the world as I knew it ended, and I was thrust into a place I never wanted to go. April twenty-fourth when an ER doctor said the words “breast cancer.” April twenty-fourth.
This wasn’t how my life was supposed to be. I was never supposed to know what it is to brush my mother’s hair and have it fall through my fingers into an auburn heap on the floor, autumn leaves lost to winter.
This wasn’t how my life was supposed to be, but the way I saw it, I had two options. I could crumble, break down, drive my car off a bridge as a weeping mess, mascara running down my cheeks with a suicide inducing ballad blaring from my radio.
Or I could fight back.
I chose speeding down the road with classic rock echoing from the speakers. I chose coconut cream and pecan and chocolate cinnamon over giving up and giving in. I chose survival.
Chapter One - Firefly Pie
My mother has red hair. Autumn was always my favorite season, and I would start anticipating the shift of color from green to russet long before September. Part of me was always the tiniest bit bitter than I didn’t have October colored hair.
We were always thicker than thieves, cold molasses or whatever other analogy you can come up with. I lost count of the schools and houses long ago and living a nomadic existence never bothered me.
A few weeks after her diagnosis we drove to New Hampshire on impulse, followed that impulse into a pet store and came out with Charlotte. Charlotte was a ruby colored Betta fish with a personality to match that of both her owners. Ignore her and suddenly you’ll hear a tapping. Rocks nudged against the side of the glass demanding food or just attention. Charlotte fits us.
I spend hours at my computer, escaping into a world where life was easier and constantly flitting my eyes from Charlotte drifting among the rocks to Mom asleep and back to the comforting digital glow.
I made my first pie in the early days of June, when the chemo was wreaking havoc through my mother’s body. I spent hours tying to coax her into eating crackers, applesauce or bland noodles, anything her poisoned stomach could handle. I spent hours feeling like a helpless failure because I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t take it away. I couldn’t make her stop hurting.
In those days and weeks that I spent exhausted and stressed beyond what I imagined possible, I remembered years of dark chocolate peppermint cookies, carrot cake, lemon frosting so good religions could be formed around it. I remembered sitting on the sofa and watching “Waitress” and for days afterwards saying “I don’t want no trouble. I just want to make pies.” It seemed to be a perfect philosophy for a life out of my control.
Two pounds of strawberries, ripe with crimson juices cooked down on the stove. Add lemon juice for brightness and just enough sugar to enhance the berries. An hour later the house smelled like jam and a bright pink confection was sitting on the kitchen counter.
What started as a diversion became a weekly ritual. Sunday is pie day. I fill the house with the scent of chocolate, blueberry, mango, coconut and for an hour I can forget. For an hour, I don’t have to be afraid of what the next hour will bring.
Everyone knows that chemotherapy is miserable. Everyone at least knows someone who has a friend or relative who has experienced it, but until you’ve watched the most important person in you life struggling to walk because she’s so weak from the toxic chemicals pumped bimonthly into her bloodstream, until you’ve watched her loose twenty pounds she didn’t have to lose in the first place, until you’ve sat next to her and watched her breathe just to make sure, you can’t really understand.
***
That was the first and only day I wrote anything. Mum started acting odd in the next few days. I spent exhausting hours trying to make doctors and nurses understand that "No she doesn't have fucking depression. Something is wrong. Why won't you listen to me? This isn't how she normally is. Something is wrong! Please listen to me. Please." Things just got worse and worse and before I knew it she was gone.
I look back that those two pages, and I see so much hope in them. So much love. I really cannot believe that this was only two months ago. It feels like it's been years. I wish I would have told her I was writing this. I always showed her what I wrote in the past, but I wanted to be able to hand her a book and say, "I wrote this for you."
Someday, I'll finish it, but that day is far in the future, and it's going to be a very different book than what it started out as.
Two months ago today, Mum was feeling great. She was admitted to the hospital the night before, and they had given her lots of morphine to make her head feel better and she was doing amazingly. It was a Saturday. I called her up when I woke up and she told me she was feeling so much better. I told her I'd be around to visit after lunch because I wanted to clean the house up before she came home. We were both figuring that she'd probably come home Monday or Tuesday.
I arrived at the hospital and we spent the day together. I don't remember exactly what we did, probably watched the food channel. We shared the piece of lemon meringue pie that came with the hospital tray, and we talked and we were both so hopeful. I was so happy that she was feeling better.
We were both bummed that we had missed Halloween, but I told her that I was pausing the month and we'd have Halloween when she got home. I had the most perfect pumpkin waiting in the kitchen for us to carve. I never did carve that pumpkin. Eventually it started to shrivel and I put it out on the porch where it withered and rotted. But when I bought it at the grocery store it was perfect. Halloween was always our favorite holiday.
I stayed until seven or eight o'clock. I told Mom I was going to hit the post Halloween candy sales at Target and go to bed early since I'd had to work late the night before. I called her again when I got home to tell her about the cute Halloween scrapbook I had gotten on sale. I told her we could fill it with pictures from our first Halloween in Charlotte. After I got off the phone, this is what I wrote.
Prologue
Lemon meringue pie tastes like the promise of summer. On the first of November, I sat beside my mother’s hospital bed, sharing a piece of pie and clinging to the promise of North Carolina and a new beginning.
“I had a dream last night,” she said. “I dreamed there was a contest and we won a house. We lived upstairs because the first floor was our bakery.”
I have that image in my mind. Rows and rows of pies and cakes rest on the gleaming counters, frosting and meringue, candied fruits and sugared flowers shining through the plate glass window like colored jewels enticing passersby. It’s what I think of when the days are bad, and I feel trapped by winter, by Maine, by cancer.
It was April twenty-fourth. April twenty-fourth when the world as I knew it ended, and I was thrust into a place I never wanted to go. April twenty-fourth when an ER doctor said the words “breast cancer.” April twenty-fourth.
This wasn’t how my life was supposed to be. I was never supposed to know what it is to brush my mother’s hair and have it fall through my fingers into an auburn heap on the floor, autumn leaves lost to winter.
This wasn’t how my life was supposed to be, but the way I saw it, I had two options. I could crumble, break down, drive my car off a bridge as a weeping mess, mascara running down my cheeks with a suicide inducing ballad blaring from my radio.
Or I could fight back.
I chose speeding down the road with classic rock echoing from the speakers. I chose coconut cream and pecan and chocolate cinnamon over giving up and giving in. I chose survival.
Chapter One - Firefly Pie
My mother has red hair. Autumn was always my favorite season, and I would start anticipating the shift of color from green to russet long before September. Part of me was always the tiniest bit bitter than I didn’t have October colored hair.
We were always thicker than thieves, cold molasses or whatever other analogy you can come up with. I lost count of the schools and houses long ago and living a nomadic existence never bothered me.
A few weeks after her diagnosis we drove to New Hampshire on impulse, followed that impulse into a pet store and came out with Charlotte. Charlotte was a ruby colored Betta fish with a personality to match that of both her owners. Ignore her and suddenly you’ll hear a tapping. Rocks nudged against the side of the glass demanding food or just attention. Charlotte fits us.
I spend hours at my computer, escaping into a world where life was easier and constantly flitting my eyes from Charlotte drifting among the rocks to Mom asleep and back to the comforting digital glow.
I made my first pie in the early days of June, when the chemo was wreaking havoc through my mother’s body. I spent hours tying to coax her into eating crackers, applesauce or bland noodles, anything her poisoned stomach could handle. I spent hours feeling like a helpless failure because I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t take it away. I couldn’t make her stop hurting.
In those days and weeks that I spent exhausted and stressed beyond what I imagined possible, I remembered years of dark chocolate peppermint cookies, carrot cake, lemon frosting so good religions could be formed around it. I remembered sitting on the sofa and watching “Waitress” and for days afterwards saying “I don’t want no trouble. I just want to make pies.” It seemed to be a perfect philosophy for a life out of my control.
Two pounds of strawberries, ripe with crimson juices cooked down on the stove. Add lemon juice for brightness and just enough sugar to enhance the berries. An hour later the house smelled like jam and a bright pink confection was sitting on the kitchen counter.
What started as a diversion became a weekly ritual. Sunday is pie day. I fill the house with the scent of chocolate, blueberry, mango, coconut and for an hour I can forget. For an hour, I don’t have to be afraid of what the next hour will bring.
Everyone knows that chemotherapy is miserable. Everyone at least knows someone who has a friend or relative who has experienced it, but until you’ve watched the most important person in you life struggling to walk because she’s so weak from the toxic chemicals pumped bimonthly into her bloodstream, until you’ve watched her loose twenty pounds she didn’t have to lose in the first place, until you’ve sat next to her and watched her breathe just to make sure, you can’t really understand.
***
That was the first and only day I wrote anything. Mum started acting odd in the next few days. I spent exhausting hours trying to make doctors and nurses understand that "No she doesn't have fucking depression. Something is wrong. Why won't you listen to me? This isn't how she normally is. Something is wrong! Please listen to me. Please." Things just got worse and worse and before I knew it she was gone.
I look back that those two pages, and I see so much hope in them. So much love. I really cannot believe that this was only two months ago. It feels like it's been years. I wish I would have told her I was writing this. I always showed her what I wrote in the past, but I wanted to be able to hand her a book and say, "I wrote this for you."
Someday, I'll finish it, but that day is far in the future, and it's going to be a very different book than what it started out as.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 06:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 06:31 am (UTC)And I always said if I won the lottery I'd just take classes for the rest of my life, so I would like to go back to school. I'm not even interested in a particular degree; I just like school.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 11:39 pm (UTC)My mum passed away from brest cancer what will be four years in February,she was 45.
My mum would go strange,saying odd things,forgetting the names of her children,usually before she needed another blood transfusion.
I hope I haven't upset you in anyway,but your writing really moved me.
Your in my thoughts.xxx
no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 11:40 pm (UTC)deadflowers79@hotmail.com
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Date: 2009-01-04 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-05 02:11 am (UTC)