I Never Said Goodbye

When I was ten my mother picked me up from school in her little blue Mitsubishi Mirage and told me that she had cancer of the liver. She was wearing a very ugly tee-shirt with turquoise cats on it and as she said those life changing words to me I was fixated on those crazy blue cats.

Liver cancer is a very slow growing cancer as far as cancers go, but she’d had it since I was born. She’d been told that she shouldn’t have anymore children, but she had my sister, who is two years younger than I am, anyway. 

My sister and I fought in our early days like any other sibling team.

“She’s stealing my friend,” either of us could be heard saying whenever we had play-dates, which was usually every weekend.

The cancer news really brought us together though. I could look at my sister and know that as much as I might be pissed that she was wearing my tank top, deep down she got me. We were on the same journey.

No one else I knew had a mother who spent hours a day giving herself holistic treatments like coffee enemas or reading books on reflexology and naturalistic cancer treatments. Macrobiotics became our life. We no longer ate yummy homemade chili and meatloaf. Now we lived on leak soup and barely cooked fruits and vegetables. I began to look forward to the weekends when we would head into the city to go to Kaiser Hospital. The city visits meant McDonalds and Grandma’s good cooking. 

My dad was an eighties commuter. He worked all week in the city at the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner Building. He was their chief engineer and he worked hard to make his money, but it left very little time to really know each other as a family.

So in part my parents lived very separate lives. My mom stayed home with us kids in our lovely mountain home shooting herself full of interferon to shrink those bad cancer cells and my dad, bless his heart, lived in a tiny camper shell that was meant to fit on the back of a truck that he rented from my grandmother, not ideal to say the least. It couldn’t have been very much fun for either of them, but they did this, for the most part, so that my sister and I could have an amazing education.

My dad created a tiny utopia to come home to on the weekends. He made himself an archery range because he is an avid bowman. He busied himself growing tomato plants over bricks and inventing crazy contraptions. He has a brilliant mind that doesn’t really ever turn off. He builds cars from scratch, and windmills, and has a music library that could be worthy of a museum. In many ways he is amazing, but he was often missing from our daily lives.

I imagine that my mother must have been pretty scared. She was a thirty-four year old woman living alone with two young girls and she was literally dying. I used to get so angry watching her gasping for air as she walked up the stairs into our house. I thought she was faking it, just seconds before she’d been belting out Sweet Baby James in the car and now she didn’t have enough energy to walk up the steps. I didn’t understand the congestive heart failure that came with her cancer was what was really killing her. Slowly creeping up, sucking her life and air out one beat at a time.

My mom had always been a big German woman, strong and competent with a sweet gentle save the world mentality. The cancer was making her tiny. Tiny and yellow and lost. 
When the holistic approach failed to work she threw herself more and more into prayer. Our lives then became about bible studies, and speaking in tongues, and following cars because she felt that God was sending her a sign. Some of it was fun. Some of it was crazy. And some of it was terrifying. Thank God I had my sister with me through all of it, the good and the bad. The weak body and the slipping mind and the grasping at anything you can find to hold onto because the thought of leaving your two babies alone in the world is just too much to bear.

Most of the time I tried to pretend that everything was normal, but there were many times that my panic attacks would send me outside of school to the pay phone to call home just so I could make sure that she was still alive. I didn’t really talk about her dying out loud to anyone, but I always knew that she would and that it wouldn’t be too much longer. I would try to imagine things like prom or my wedding and my brain would never let me imagine her into the scenario. There was always a black void where my mother should have been.

It soon came to a point when my parents realized that two pre-teen girls couldn’t take care of a dying mother and a dying mother couldn’t care for two pre-teen girls so we all moved to a rented house in the city. It was a hard adjustment. I was too used to running the show by this time and my dad was too used to being alone. We butted heads about everything. I was mouthy and creative and opinionated and he didn’t understand anything about me.

My mom cried a lot.

My sister hid from the world in her stories and her music.

I on the other hand, yelled and screamed and fought. I wanted to be heard in all this craziness. I wanted to fix everything. Heal my mother of her cancer, reteach my almost fifty year old father too be present, and mother my thirteen year old sister. The thing I hadn’t quite realized was that I was only fifteen and I hadn’t figured any of those things out for myself yet.

The very last day I saw my mom, she was hardly there, her body was present, but her mind had already left. She lay yellowed and limp in the hospice wing of the hospital and I was preoccupied with planning a shopping trip. I never got a chance to tell her goodbye.

The call came at five o’clock the next morning and sadly my sister answered. My dad had already left for work that morning.

When my sister woke me up to tell me I felt like I already knew. “Mommy is dead,” she said as she crawled into bed with me. “The hospital just called.”

The rest of the day was a daze filled with lots of relatives and Grandma’s house. A day that was crazy with a hectic love and even joy.

It was good to know that she wasn’t in pain anymore, it was good to understand that one small life could effect so many people. My mother was loved, and she is still remembered as the woman who sang crazy songs, and took care of the world in her own special way.

She taught me the true strength of a woman and that every obstacle in life could be met with some anger and fear, but pushed through with a lot of laughter and even more love.

I find that I’m glad that I never got to say goodbye to her, there is no goodbye because she will always be with me.