want to pin them. I want them to fit right,”
I sulked, and folding my arms, sat on the bed and cried to the wall.
When I finally looked over at my mother, her eyes boring into mine, I realized that I had to pin my pants. Without saying a word, she was telling me: No matter how much you pout, cry and stomp like a mule, these pants are not going to fit right without these pins. You are sick. Your body is not the same. You have to accept this.
It was then that I learned to compromise with my mother, and with a force larger than myself—a force I could not see, or hear, or touch, but a force that nonetheless had taken control of my life.
Though I left the hospital knowing the doctors believed that I would only return to die, none of it ever felt completely real. My body was disintegrating, I could barely walk and I couldn’t keep food down, but death felt as far away from me as grandmotherhood. I don’t know why I had this feeling. Maybe it was because my fourteen-year-old mind couldn’t grasp the concept of mortality, or perhaps I felt something telling me that this wasn’t going to be the end.
I quickly slipped into the normalness of everyday life at home, surrounded by my mother and my sisters. And my mother and I, in the face of my illness, discovered a special way of being together.
We knew what was destroying my body, but we never said the words cancer or death. Still, on a day when I was too weak even to feed myself, I looked up at my mother as she was feeding me some mashed food, and something in me felt that one, if not both, of those words needed to be spoken.
“Mommy,” I finally said after about the third swallow, “am I really going to die?”
My mother dropped the bowl of food, spilling it all over me and broke into uncontrollable tears that would not stop, no matter how hard I pleaded with her.
I was frozen with fear. I couldn’t take back what I had said. Besides, I really wanted to know. If my mother would just confirm it one way or another, whatever she said would be what was real.
Finally, she looked up at me and said, “My baby is not going to die. Do you hear me? I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. Do you hear me?”
I heard her. I never said it again. I simply went about the business of fighting for my life.
Yet as my body withered to eighty-two pounds and my hair fell out, I could see how helpless my mother felt. Her hair grew grayer. She even matched me, pound for pound, with the weight she lost. And yet, it was her strength that jump-started my will to make my frail body walk instead of ride in a wheelchair. It was her strength that helped me walk into school wearing a wig amidst stares and whispers from pretty, healthy-bodied girls. And it was her strength that made me see that in the larger picture, those stares and whispers didn’t mean a thing.
More than a year went by before I finally went into remission. When the doctor called my mother and me into his office after the last chemotherapy treatment, we didn’t know what to expect. Somehow, though, we knew we didn’t need to expect the worst. He went through a longwinded dissertation about shrunken tumors and good cell counts before he told us, essentially, that I was in remission.
My mother and I didn’t cry tears of joy. We didn’t get swept up in a whirl of happiness and giddiness, hugging the stuffing out of each other. We just smiled and squeezed each other’s hands. The doctor was really only telling us something that we already knew: that I was not going to die.
Patricia Jones
Learning to Say Hello
E ach handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase, and when you ride up to it, if you throw your heart over, the horse will go along too.
Lawrence Bixby
It was December 1986. As I looked out the window of Chicago’s O’Hare International terminal, the sunlight seemed unusually bright and warm. This helped to soothe me and remove some of my anxiety. The precious passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight
I sulked, and folding my arms, sat on the bed and cried to the wall.
When I finally looked over at my mother, her eyes boring into mine, I realized that I had to pin my pants. Without saying a word, she was telling me: No matter how much you pout, cry and stomp like a mule, these pants are not going to fit right without these pins. You are sick. Your body is not the same. You have to accept this.
It was then that I learned to compromise with my mother, and with a force larger than myself—a force I could not see, or hear, or touch, but a force that nonetheless had taken control of my life.
Though I left the hospital knowing the doctors believed that I would only return to die, none of it ever felt completely real. My body was disintegrating, I could barely walk and I couldn’t keep food down, but death felt as far away from me as grandmotherhood. I don’t know why I had this feeling. Maybe it was because my fourteen-year-old mind couldn’t grasp the concept of mortality, or perhaps I felt something telling me that this wasn’t going to be the end.
I quickly slipped into the normalness of everyday life at home, surrounded by my mother and my sisters. And my mother and I, in the face of my illness, discovered a special way of being together.
We knew what was destroying my body, but we never said the words cancer or death. Still, on a day when I was too weak even to feed myself, I looked up at my mother as she was feeding me some mashed food, and something in me felt that one, if not both, of those words needed to be spoken.
“Mommy,” I finally said after about the third swallow, “am I really going to die?”
My mother dropped the bowl of food, spilling it all over me and broke into uncontrollable tears that would not stop, no matter how hard I pleaded with her.
I was frozen with fear. I couldn’t take back what I had said. Besides, I really wanted to know. If my mother would just confirm it one way or another, whatever she said would be what was real.
Finally, she looked up at me and said, “My baby is not going to die. Do you hear me? I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. Do you hear me?”
I heard her. I never said it again. I simply went about the business of fighting for my life.
Yet as my body withered to eighty-two pounds and my hair fell out, I could see how helpless my mother felt. Her hair grew grayer. She even matched me, pound for pound, with the weight she lost. And yet, it was her strength that jump-started my will to make my frail body walk instead of ride in a wheelchair. It was her strength that helped me walk into school wearing a wig amidst stares and whispers from pretty, healthy-bodied girls. And it was her strength that made me see that in the larger picture, those stares and whispers didn’t mean a thing.
More than a year went by before I finally went into remission. When the doctor called my mother and me into his office after the last chemotherapy treatment, we didn’t know what to expect. Somehow, though, we knew we didn’t need to expect the worst. He went through a longwinded dissertation about shrunken tumors and good cell counts before he told us, essentially, that I was in remission.
My mother and I didn’t cry tears of joy. We didn’t get swept up in a whirl of happiness and giddiness, hugging the stuffing out of each other. We just smiled and squeezed each other’s hands. The doctor was really only telling us something that we already knew: that I was not going to die.
Patricia Jones
Learning to Say Hello
E ach handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase, and when you ride up to it, if you throw your heart over, the horse will go along too.
Lawrence Bixby
It was December 1986. As I looked out the window of Chicago’s O’Hare International terminal, the sunlight seemed unusually bright and warm. This helped to soothe me and remove some of my anxiety. The precious passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight
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