Rick Fights Cancer

Five days before my mom puffed out her last little breath — fribrollating her lips as if they were a loose rubber flap, as if she were only snoring — and succumbed to renal failure, my sister and I had sat down in the local Steak ‘n’ Shake and discussed how to take care of her when she got out of the hospital. I’d move back home from Chicago and get a job in Indiana. Vicki would move in to mom’s big house. We’d take care of her.

The day before that when alone in the room with her I’d finally broken down sobbing and begged, “Please don’t go.”

“That’s the only reason I’d want to stay — for you kids,” she said. “But, Rick, I’m ready.”

For years, ever since leaving for Bible school in the early 80s, I’d been returning to mom and dad’s house to mow the lawn, to clean out the garage, to tar the driveway, to eat the world’s best macaroni & cheese, and yeah, to pick up some extra cash. Every three months, more or less, for almost twenty years.

After Dad died, Mom and I took some trips together. My freelance status allowed me the freedom to accompany her back to the town of her birth — where rambling ribbons of blacktop could still be uncontroversially named, “Niggertown Road” — to Disney World — where Mom nearly fainted in the Haunted Mansion and complained about foreign tourists not speaking English —  and to “The Holy Land” — where I jacked off to a “blue” movie with a butch Israeli tour bus driver while my mom and her church group praised god and shouted hallelujah a few meters away.

But when my mom told me on the phone that her liver was failing, I found reasons not to go home so much. They seemed Good Reasons, at the time. The Internet bubble had popped and I went from being a barely competent Web designer who nevertheless charged $5000 a pop for decent sites (and wore Comme de Garçons and Matsuda along with my thrift store garb) to delivering newspapers in a beat-up Chrysler mini-van. (Still wearing Comme, by the way.) I worked only a few days regularly and needed every dollar.

Mom never said the words, “I’m dying.” She never asked me to come home. My memory of those months is that my mom was just sick, as she’d been in the years before, but that she was not on the way out and that there was nothing to worry about.

I don’t know how much suffering this denial caused my mother. I know she often sounded confused and sad when I called her. But, even though I know it’s not true, I feel like the reason why my remaining family is paying so little attention to me now — except for my oldest niece — is because I didn’t pay enough attention to Mom when she was asking me to come home, if only indirectly. The only contact I’ve had with any member of my family since being diagnosed with cancer has been through Facebook messages.

Facebook messages.

I can’t think of another way to more effectively say, “We can’t be bothered to care any more than this.”

The dying of a loved one who’s far away brings death closer and no one wants death in the room. They want the good memories and the good memories only.

But the person who’s dying or even fighting to stay alive can’t help but ask, “But don’t you want to see me? Don’t you understand that we don’t have as much time as we thought?”