The fight.

I took my mom to the hospital this morning.  

It’s a familiar drive, one we’ve become accustomed to over the past year.  We talk about the family, my dad, her doctor.  We talk about how far she’s come, and how acupuncture has been pivotal in supporting her through the intensity of modern medicine.  We talk about me opening a practice again someday.  She says I can make a difference.

I do not ask her if she is scared.  It is not a question worth answering.

Since the diagnosis last year -- Stage 4 Undifferentiated Pleomorphic Sarcoma -- her 77 year old body has endured two major surgeries, six weeks of radiation, six rounds of chemotherapy, experimental immunotherapy, multiple biopsies, and countless blood draws, CT scans, and MRIs.  Today is what we hope will be the third and final surgery to remove a large mass in her right thigh, a mass that materialized five months ago out of nothingness, ghost cells that played silently on a seemingly clear MRI before building a spiral around her nerves and vessels.  We can be thankful, at least, that they decided to say hello.  To give her a chance to fight.

​We walk through the inpatient entrance and hang a left down the main corridor to the E elevators.  I notice the passage of time, and how a hospital can remind you of the changing seasons.  The gift shop, once dark and shuttered due to covid, is now a beacon of light and color in an otherwise sterile place.  The cafeteria is bustling with people, in line for coffee or huddled around little tables, the wood fire oven ablaze.  Three months ago I pushed Mom down this corridor in a wheelchair, and today she is walking.  By dinnertime she’ll be in a wheelchair again.  Outside, the daffodils are in bloom.  

You never get used to the feeling of leaving a loved one at the hospital, knowing what they are about to step into.  The unknown of so many things -- will it work?  Will she recover?  Will there be damage?  Will it come back? -- stacked against the certainty that this is the only thing to do now, there are no other options left.  Like watching vial after vial of red poison fed slowly into her body, asking it to please take only what it needs.  

But my mom is calm.  She is ready.  I am thankful for her resolve, and I wonder if she knows that her grace and determination are the backbone of our family right now.  She makes it okay, so that we can be okay.  She is fighting for us.

By fight, I don’t mean with brute force.  This is willpower, inner strength, surrender without resignation.  Fighting without fighting.  When I ask her how she’s feeling, she says, “oh, nothing unusual”, which serves to protect me from her fear while remaining honest.  It is nothing unusual for her to be afraid of cancer, of chemotherapy, of low blood counts, of surgeries.  She has learned to meet her fear with resolve and tenacity, giving her body every chance of survival while finding acceptance in the things that we cannot control.  The outcome of cancer is not up to us.  

No matter how natural it is for children to outlive their parents, we can’t imagine a life void of the humans who birthed us, whose dreams and traumas became us, whose arms and hearts first held us.  When George passed at such a young age I considered this loss to be the absolute darkest, second only to losing a child; but no death, anticipated or otherwise, is uncomplicated.  If we are lucky, if they are lucky, our parents will not survive us.  But we will never be ready to say goodbye.