To Lose a Mother (and Then Get Her Back Again)

Originally written May 2012 • Uploaded to Facebook on May 24, 2012, 12:31 AM

I remember it starting with the pains my mother got one day—pains in her legs that never went away, keeping her up at night crying and screaming while the rest of us stood by, unable to do a single thing. Or maybe the real indicator was the time she fainted in the bathroom, miraculously suffering little physical harm. It was after that scare that I jokingly offered her my motorcycle helmet to wear wherever she went around the house.

I think I have the timeline clear now. It was right after my mother took me on a trip to the big mountain ranges of northern Mexico. She had arranged a magical train ride into the Copper Canyon, starting from a night in beautiful Chihuahua. The passengers were mostly an eclectic mix of older, wealthy Mexicans and boisterous German tourists. At the height of my eighteen years, riding around in a passenger car for days on end wasn't quite as thrilling as I had anticipated; train rides are built for unwinding and nursing a glass of wine, and at eighteen, the absolute last thing I wanted to do was sit down and relax. We stopped in desolate mountain villages with names I’d never heard of, places where the indigenous people were kept at a distant view, remaining unseen and unheard because we were insulated tourists on an organized itinerary.

It was shortly after we returned from Chihuahua that a mysterious, aggressive illness struck my mother. It was something we could not comprehend and definitely did not expect. She began screaming at night from the agony in her legs, wracked by alternating fevers and chills. The house was thrust into confusion. I was consumed with high school, homework, and teenage obligations, utterly unbalanced by my good grades but deep unhappiness at not having found love there. Her nightly wails disoriented me. My mother has always had a natural knack for theatrics, and at first, I naively assumed this was another one of her vivid performances. I was entirely wrong.

She was given an endless rotation of medications to calm her down, to help her move, to sleep, and to eat. Our live-in maid, who was somewhat of a traditional healer herself, chipped in with home remedies and alternative medicines. Nothing worked. My mother was rapidly wasting away. When she was finally admitted to the hospital, she was in critical condition. The doctors told us she was hovering on the brink of life and death. In stubborn adolescent denial, I brushed it off, thinking, *Yeah right, my mom is invincible, who are you to say she’s going to pass away?* But the threat was real. She grew weaker by the hour, and the physicians were completely baffled by what was driving her decline.

Days blurred together under a mountain of heavy pharmaceuticals until one doctor confidently claimed he had discovered the culprit: Leptospirosis. It’s a rare bacterial disease transmitted via rodent urine, typically contracted from the tops of old soda cans in big, forgotten warehouses. It functions like a "ghost pneumonia," mirroring all the respiratory symptoms without actually being a lung infection. Because cases are so rare, very few general practitioners know how to properly diagnose or treat it. True to his theory, the doctor pumped my mother full of aggressive medical steroids, and for a fleeting moment, she actually seemed to improve. Then, the bottom dropped out, and she got drastically worse.

I don't fully remember who finally ordered the right biopsy, but cancer was uncovered, quietly attacking her system. The doctor who had proudly diagnosed the rat-urine disease instantly became enemy number one for his catastrophic misdiagnosis. My mother was subjected to a million different tests to identify the exact strain of malignancy and figure out how to fight it. The agonizing suspense during that period was unbearable. My once vibrant, independent mother had succumbed to an illness that was eating her from the inside out, and we were powerless to halt it. That was when a real, icy fear of losing her set in—far worse than when she first entered the clinic, worse than the childhood trauma of her accidentally losing track of me at the zoo when I was two years old. It’s a reality you format your brain never to think about, and when you are forced to look it in the eye, it breaks your heart, turns your morale to dirt, and leaves you terrified.

When the results finally came back certified, sealed, and confirmed, the verdict was lymphatic cancer. Her treatment plan would be a grueling, incredibly costly marathon. There is a strange, structural comfort in receiving a definitive diagnosis, but there is absolutely no comfort to be found in cancer. Never. At least now we could point our fingers at a distinct culprit, hating it with all our hearts, praying for a cure, and obsessing over survival percentages. As mere mortals, we had no idea how to navigate the war about to be waged inside her body. We read, researched, asked questions, and called experts until cancer was the only vocabulary left on our tongues. It consumed our minds completely. Cancer is a feisty beast that claims countless lives every year, but I refused to accept that it would take my mother—even if my internal terror caused me to lash out in anger at everyone around me. In my irrational guilt, I secretly believed that her taking me to the Copper Canyon had somehow triggered the sickness.

What no one warns you about oncology is that chemotherapy doesn't just target the sickness; it wreaks absolute havoc on healthy cells and vital organs alike, reducing the strongest human beings to hollow shadows of their former selves. Cancer treatment is like stepping into a dark funhouse mirror: you look in and suddenly see yourself completely bald, emaciated, pale, and entirely exhausted. There is nothing to laugh about. The disease severely impacted my mother's legs; she could barely navigate the hallways or transfer in and out of the car. I felt utterly devastated because I couldn't just lift her into my arms and carry her weight effortlessly. Everyone copes with chronic illness differently, but I was fighting internal demons and paralyzing fears—evils that ultimately caused me to emotionally alienate myself from her when she needed me most.

She underwent monthly chemotherapy sessions, a topic the family preferred to avoid discussing. She would sit hooked up to an IV line while the medication—brought in strangely wrapped in aluminum foil—was pumped into her frail veins. We would wait by her bedside or sit in bleak waiting rooms watching nurses and doctors buzz past without ever exchanging a single word with us. After a couple of months, she underwent surgery to place a port directly into her chest so the clinical team could access a main line without destroying the veins in her arms. Seeing that plastic and metal bump beneath her skin was jarring, but it was a far more efficient delivery system for the toxic chemicals.

In modern hospitals, they invoice you for every breath. No tissue goes unaccounted for; no modern amenity is free. My mom absolutely despised the generic hospital shampoo, which gave her a nasty, painful rash. After a few visits, you learn to adapt, much like when a mother sneaks outside sandwiches, sodas, and candy under her heavy coat into a movie theater. We started packing our own towels, our own gentle soaps, and frankly, if we could have managed it, we would have brought our own nurses, too. Her treatments took place in expensive, high-profile medical centers with fancy names that promised superior care. I quickly realized that under the branding, all hospitals look exactly the same inside, eventually blurring into one giant, sterile maze. I distinctly remember my parents bickering incessantly over the mounting financial debts, arguing over how they would ever settle the balances.

One of the few moments where we were powerfully reminded that we weren't fighting alone occurred during a lunch at my Uncle Albert’s house. Albert was my father's cousin, but they loved each other like biological brothers. After the meal, Albert called us into a side dining room. Gathering around the table were my mother, my father, my Uncle Philip, my Aunt Nina, and myself. Albert stood up and declared that regardless of the nightmare we were currently enduring, we were a family, and families stick together through hardship and decay. He told my father that he viewed him as a true brother, which made my mother his sister, and he would never let his sister face bankruptcy or illness alone. He looked us in the eye and guaranteed that our bills would be taken care of, no matter what we required. My mother wept open tears, and I felt an immense wave of pride. A few short months later, Uncle Albert tragically suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack inside a hospital—a crisis that felt entirely preventable. My father was broken. I was devastated to lose an uncle, but a darker part of me terrified itself with the thought that our safety net was gone, and we were totally alone again.

My Aunt Adriana also stepped in frequently, showing incredible kindness to my mom. She would take her on short trips to far-off places to break up the monotonous, suffocating routine of being housebound. Because my mother's immune system was entirely compromised, we were forced to get rid of all the family pets. It was a heartbreaking blow for my father, but what hurt him even worse was having to sell off his massive collection of grandfather clocks. He had spent over twenty years collecting and meticulously repairing them. At every single hour of the day or night, they would synchronize to create a beautiful, deafening racket. Once they were cleared out, the eerie, dead silence in the house became almost unbearable. To complement the clocks, we also had to give away an array of exotic birds of paradise my dad had bred for years; their mechanical morning choruses were suddenly gone, too.

The oncology regimen transformed my mother into someone I could barely recognize. The early steroid misdiagnosis left her body and face incredibly bloated and swollen. As her hair began shedding in clumps, she finally took control and asked to have it shaved completely so she wouldn't have to watch it fall out day by day. Her face was altered, her head was bald, and she could no longer walk. I wouldn't have been able to spot my own mother if she were standing completely alone in an open field wearing a bright yellow jacket. She had zero energy to move, speak, or play the traditional role of a mom, yet she fought with everything she had.

The grinding monotony of the clinic lasted a little over a year. In our desperation, we even dabbled briefly in the alternative and occult. My mother hired a shaman to perform spiritual cleansings and offer energetic counseling, though she let her go after a few sessions. I even attempted to cook up a crude marijuana balm to soothe her aching joints, but it failed entirely since I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Eventually, she bought a couple of realistic wigs and started applying makeup to feel pretty again; I was foolish and insensitive enough to tell her that I preferred her natural, unaltered look. To top it all off, we experienced a sudden resurgence in our Jewish faith, staying in close contact with our rabbi. My mother prayed, my father prayed, and I'm pretty sure our Catholic maid was constantly praying to the Virgin Mary. I prayed desperately for her recovery, though there were many nights I wasn't entirely sure anyone was listening.

The trauma of cancer didn't magically unite us or bring us closer in the way people tell you it does. If anything, the constant terror alienated us, spinning the household into a tense spiral of harsh, defensive arguments. We were all unconsciously trying to offload our pain and blame one another; I even unfairly blamed my brother for being away traveling for a year, though he was entirely innocent. None of us were guilty, but chronic anxiety creates a toxic environment where any minor detail becomes an excuse for a screaming match. But fighting doesn't make the tumors shrink, it doesn't accelerate the chemo appointments, and it certainly doesn't pay the mounting bills. My mother began grocery shopping entirely over the phone, constantly lamenting that she couldn't inspect the produce herself, while eccentric, unreliable delivery drivers turned up hours late. Just when we thought we were going to lose our home, a modern miracle arrived: the incredibly gracious, kind-hearted Katharine Miller stepped in and helped clear our massive medical debts. We will hold an eternal debt of gratitude to her for changing our lives when we were entirely up against the wall.

The intense hospital rotations lasted just over a year, but the entire saga spanned nearly two full years of touch-and-go uncertainty. I distinctly remember the day the doctors finally announced she was in official remission. We decided to entirely purge the home medicine cabinets, which had become a literal pharmacy. There were boxes piled high for nausea, pain, migraines, inflammation, artificial hunger, cramps, depression, and severe anxiety—an entire alphabet of labels, with multiple unopened duplicates of each. Because we had no health insurance, each of those boxes had been bought at the value of gold, making the act of throwing them away feel deeply surreal.

But beating cancer is rarely a permanent, absolute victory. No oncologist will ever promise you that the disease is gone forever or that you are permanently immune. It can return with a terrifying vengeance. You are simply categorized as "in remission," which means living under the constant shadow of routine checkups to ensure it hasn't crept back. We have been incredibly fortunate that her illness took a permanent hike and has never dared to return.

When the dust settled after those two years, my mother initially looked and acted like a fragile, broken bird—the kind you find shivering on a concrete sidewalk and bring indoors to carefully nurture until it regains the strength to fly. The inability to take her daily, brisk walks was a severe blow to her identity. Her hair eventually grew back, though it had lost all its original color. It took an incredibly long time for the steroid bloating to recede and for her facial features to look like the mother I remembered. But as the fatigue from the chemotherapy finally left her system, she didn't just return to normal—she came back a total lioness.

Waging a successful war against mortality gave her an urgent, unfiltered hunger for life. The moment she regained her physical strength, she immediately began executing every single dream she had previously deferred for the future. She booked international trips, reconnected with old friends, cleared out decades of clutter, remodeled the house, and began fiercely doing her own thing, completely independent of whether the family supported it or not. I remember the pure joy she felt the first day she could drive to the supermarket and pick out her own fruit without relying on a delivery truck. She returned to work looking like an absolute powerhouse, and she flat-out refused to tolerate my father smoking anywhere near her atmosphere. Her renewed vitality transformed her into a brand-new mom—one who would never accept a casual "no" or wait around for permission. She became the absolute master of her own destiny.

The battle with cancer was an absolute nightmare, and it rarely matches the sanitized versions you see on television. It didn't instantly unify us, but it forced us to recognize that we were a unit, and we had to do what was required to survive. We never abandoned hope. It was excruciating to watch her slip away, and I will always carry the heavy guilt of the moments I emotionally retreated into my own adolescent anxieties instead of offering her open affection. But it also taught me that we are not the invincible, immortal beings we pretend to be. My mother completely shed her fear of death on that hospital mattress, trading it for a profound, unparalleled fullness of life. My father carried the crushing logistics with quiet, stubborn pride—even if he did kvetch a lot along the way. We fought the monster together as a family, and as a family, we won.