The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke

“That’s highly unusual,” he drawled.
    Then, gathering himself, he said, “I’m sorry to be clinical about it. I know this is your mother, but that is fascinating. This rarely happens with colorectal cancer.” Another pause. “And you’ve been dealing with this long enough now that you have a sense of what is taking place.”
    â€œYes,” I said, stunned into monosyllables by his assumption that I could think clinically about the fact that renegade cells were devouring my mother from the inside out.
    â€œI mean, when I was a boy, OK, not a boy, but a long time ago, you read the clinical lit, there was nothing about mets to the brain. But that’s because so few people make it as long as your mother. She’s an outlier. She’s rare. We’re learning things about the disease from her and people like her. We have seen this type of development, but almost never. In the past, patients with her diagnosis would never have lived this long. We used to think it went just to the lungs and liver, and not to the brain—unlike say, breast cancer.”
    â€œRight,” I said.
    â€œWell, I am sorry to hear the news.”
    I gathered myself. “I’m calling to see if we can take her home. I’d prefer not to leave her here in the hospital overnight, as you might understand.”
    â€œYes, that should be fine. They’ll probably give you some steroids to reduce the swelling around the lesions, and discuss surgery options. Give us a call tomorrow.”
    But he didn’t say that this new development would mean the end of her experimental therapy, which left me a ray of hope—like the sliver of light as a door is closing. I got off the phone allowing myself to think that after this surgery, she’d be mentally tip-top again. And then she could go back to the therapy. And perhaps the therapy would work, and six months from now she would be running the school once more and being my mother, taking care of things.
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    She was released that night, after another doctor delivered the good news: The tumors were “operable” through radiation surgery. It was cold and rainy outside and I bundled her in a warm scarf and walked in front of her to protect her from the wind. My father had ordered pizza, and when we got home we sat in the den and ate while she lay on the sectional where she always lay. The dogs nosed around my feet and wagged their tails. Liam told her funny stories about school. It felt strangely normal, part of a life that had vanished some time ago.
    But the next day the liaison called to say my mother would no longer be part of the experimental treatment. She would be discontinued. Like a TV show? I think. Is this how it works? Sorry, no one was watching that show, so we have discontinued it.
    It was up to us now. Only we believed.
    What did we believe?
    The options had dried up. No one had actually said the words yet: Your mother is going to die. And yet our mother was going to die. We were clinging, for the moment, to the possibility that the radiation surgery would make her better, even if only temporarily. It was another thing to do, another way not to talk about that thing growing inside her, invading her bones like little rotten spots on a vegetable, all soft and dark.
    I am still looking for the alternative outcome to this part of the story—as if had I pushed harder at one of these moments, had I been more aware, all would have changed. Choose Your Own Adventures were a fad when I was a kid. I had a sense of special providence, and if, reading a story I liked, I made a bad choice, I would pretend it hadn’t actually happened. I had, in essence, to lie to myself about my own poor outcomes. This was what I was doing then and it is what I am still doing, rummaging through the bric-a-brac of my mind for possible alternatives, the family silver that was put aside in the attic but still gleams unseen in the autumn