My mother’s next oncologist was a keeper, as his kindness and compassion and

tendency to not descend into madness in response to every test result seemed to be

better suited to my mother’s needs and a better fit for my nerves. He initially placed her

on an old chemotherapy drug from the 1950’s that required twice daily dosing spread

out by 8-12 hours. This went fairly smoothly, save for the times she was visited by my

brother who took her out to a late morning breakfast and then found himself stalked at a

local diner by a huffing and puffing and very pissed off sister with the cancer medication

and a pill box in a clenched fist.

I noticed a sharp decline in her mobility over time. Even after we gave her a

walker, it seemed like a Mount Everest climb for her to get from her bed to the

bathroom. Her difficulty walking was traced back to a bad fall she had taken in a

hospital, not long after she moved up north. She had tripped over her own feet while

ironically surrounded by a group of doctors and nurses at a routine oncology

appointment. A possible fractured hip, which was never officially diagnosed because

she refused to get an x-ray, coupled with a prolonged, bedridden, stay at the rehab,

seemed to mark the beginning of the end of my mother’s ambulatory days. Also gone

were her short trips to her kitchen to prepare big bowls of egg salad or to chop up and

freeze aluminum foil-wrapped chicken that she had enjoyed thawing and eating. I

remember her saying how she was slowly losing everything, and while her heart was

stubbornly clinging to her independence, her mind and body were tugging her in a

different direction.

She had asked me to buy her a bunch of cans of beef stew, promising me she

would eat it, only to express no interest in the literal fortress of cans I set up on her

kitchen counter. Feeling a little desperate as it was clear she couldn’t feed herself any

longer, I prepared a big bowl of snacks, including pudding, apple sauce, cookies,

crackers, and cakes, and I placed all of it within arm’s reach of her bed. We hired a

private nurse to administer her medications and prepare a bowl of oatmeal with melted

butter for her each morning. I was responsible for bringing some kind of real food for her

in the afternoon or evening, every day. This kind of half-assed buddy system

surprisingly seemed to be working and alas my mother did not starve. But her ability to

bathe herself was questionable, and we were screwed if anything happened- like a fire

drill- that would require her to bound down three flights of stairs. Not a day went by that I

didn’t worry about her.

During the two years that she lived in the Westford apartment, we had lots of

arguments. They were the banshee screaming kind that made us say dark things that

we knew we didn’t mean at the time they were spewing from our mouths but that we

nonetheless couldn’t seem to stifle. My mother told me to “Drop dead” once. This was

quite the opposite of what she used to tell me when I was younger, which was that she

loved me so much she would die for me. The roots of at least some of these “knock

down drag out” episodes were my mother’s anxiety or frustration about something that

may or may not have had anything to do with me directly, which I nonetheless took

personally and reacted badly to. There were also times when we didn’t argue but I was

the one in a bad mood, snarling and barking and trying to keep it together but to no

avail. I had apologized to her during these all too human and flawed episodes and tried

to offer up excuses as to why I was sounding so bitchy. And I recall her lovingly saying,

“Oh, honey, you’re fine. I’m not picking up on any bad mood. It’s in your head.”

It’s funny how I now struggle to remember the triggers for any of the foul moods

or tensions or just general inane bullshit that existed between us. At the time it seemed

our need to feed into whatever we were going through was stronger than the need to

appreciate the time we had been blessed to have with each other. While youth may be

wasted on the young, I suppose it could also be said that time may be wasted on the

living. My mother had often said after my father passed that she felt guilty over the way

she had treated him at times when he was sick, and that she wished she had been

more understanding and kinder when he was alive. Whenever she mentioned this to

me, I would think about my relationship with her, fraught as it was with these silly

arguments that I knew I would be similarly feeling guilt over… someday.

(stay tuned for part 5 of “Foxtrot: My Mother’s Last Dance”)