The time had finally come when even my mother, with her decreased mobility

and inability to safely shower or even grab dresses from hangers in her closet, couldn’t

argue that she was unable to live on her own. We went through a series of home health

aide services that offered only very exorbitant hourly prices and times of the week that

their staff were happy with but that were too many or too few for my mother’s needs and

comfort. One assigned a young woman, who showed up and did some dusting and

emptied my mother’s dishwasher for a few minutes and then spent the next four hours

and forty-five minutes sitting in the living room scrolling social media on her iPhone.

Some charged very little but also gave us very little, like a teenager who said one week

that my mother would have to provide her with all the cleaning supplies she would need

and then ghosted her the following week.

A turning point came when my mother and I had a FaceTime chat with her

oncologist. He told my mother that the chemotherapy she was taking wasn’t really

working to control the growth of her tumors, and if she didn’t consider enrolling in a

special clinical trial that she was eligible for, she would have at most six to nine months

to live. Despite both of us getting choked up, her oncologist remained businesslike and

quietly waited for us to calm down.

A memory came to me from a decade earlier, when my mother had first been

diagnosed with cancer. I had accompanied her to an oncology appointment.

“Is this it for me?” she had asked the oncologist, sitting on the edge of an

examining table in her johnny and looking terrified.

That moment had sat with me for a long time. That moment made me cry and

feel embarrassed in front of a nurse when I got my very first mammogram, several

years before my diagnosis. It had surfaced during my own battle when waiting for test

results that would tell me what I had and how treatable it was. That moment made me

see just how scared my mother was of her disease and what it could do to her, and it

was that moment that drove me to try to protect her from everything she feared for as

long as I possibly could.

Up until the FaceTime chat, my mother had been reluctant to agree to the clinical

trial because it would have meant the inconvenience of being driven to Boston once or

twice a month. The call with the oncologist soberly gave her an idea of what a real

inconvenience could look like if she didn’t allow herself to be enrolled.

She raised holy hell during her first few appointments and basically terrorized the

clinical trial nurses who were trying to assess her. I received an irate phone call from the

head clinical trial nurse who accused me of forcing my mother against her will to do the

trial and who urged that my mother be removed from it. I had a “come to Jesus”

conversation with my mother that resulted in a serious change in attitude that led to her

continuing the trial and the head nurse getting off my case.

(stay tuned for part 6 of “Foxtrot: My Mother’s Last Dance”)