The phone rings, my mother. The cancer has returned, stage four.
My cellphone vibrates, a text from my sister. Have you talked to mom?
After two lengthy and direct conversations, I convince my mom to consider other treatment facilities. Three days later she agrees. I jump on the phone to hospitals all over the country. Only one accepts her insurance. A National Cancer Institute hospital, not so bad. I set the ball rolling. They call her. She fails to include me in the new details. My sister and I text, talk, anxious, frustrated, worried. Back and forth, hold on, let go, hold on, let go.
And me with my first novel near to completion, the creative act so closely linked with the emotional center of my being, I am stumbling. That first day the pages laugh at me. Too close for comfort, the story is based on the WWII death of my mother’s father, the names so familiar, so comforting, before today. I feel like a child playing at a game of pretend. What is the value of this work in the face of life-threatening illness? And yet, this is who who I am, I write. I write to understand, I write to know. I write to answer my very own questions about life – both big and small.
I am writing this book to understand my beloved grandmother more, how she lived her whole life with the aching loss of her first love and never once spoke about it, at least not in the years of my life. She could be difficult, grumpy, critical, my grandma. She could be loving and fun, too. She confronted her own cancer with the same angry surrender I see in my mom now. I know these women, I love these women. They are survivors, surely, but are they fighters?
I work to separate the names from the actual people, they are characters, made from my imagination. The names are the same but I did not know them then, when this tragedy changed the very course of their lives. My mother’s father, my biological grandfather, I know only as a photograph of a smiling young man in a brown wool Army uniform bearing a striking resemblance to my uncle. But I am writing to know, writing to understand, writing somehow to save first my grandmother, and now my mother from their shared legacy of sadness.
“No one gets out of here alive,” they say, a blithe little blurb for the enormity of death. Of course it is true, but some leave happier, I think, more contented, a less tortured departure. And each soul who goes decides that mostly for themselves, I think. I feel selfish writing while my mother’s condition remains so uncertain. But I cannot think of another way to live. Writing is me. And sometimes, in the dark of an early morning, crawling out of bed to get to the work before my household wakes, I harbor a hope, a wish that somehow, maybe, my staying true to my work, to this untold family tale, sinking deep into the story and finding the small light my grandma managed to carry might lighten some load, ease some burden, if not for my grandma, my mom, but for someone somewhere who knows this loss and aches to be understood.
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Jessica’s piece “Aunt Ruth’s Purse” can be found in Issue 4: Mothers.
