For my entire adult life I have lived at least 600 miles away from my parents and siblings. Right out of college I was stationed in Colorado and then Idaho with the Air Force. After that – Ohio, California, Texas, Illinois, and now Ohio again (since 2004). When I was in my twenties and thirties, I was so busy living my life that I didn’t really think about the physical distance between me and my family. I think I probably called home whenever I thought of it, certainly not every day and I’m sure not even every week. If I’m honest, it was probably closer to quarterly.
As I got older, my calls to my parents were more frequent but not frequent. My mom would answer the phone and say something like, “I knew you’d be calling me soon.” That frequent.
Fast forward (as life seems to do constantly these days) to 2010, with my dad’s cancer diagnosis. It was a bad one – mesothelioma. He was told that a radical surgery would extend his life about 3-4 years. Without the surgery he had about 9 months. He chose the surgery, and did stay with us four more years as promised.
It was around this time that my calls did become pretty frequent. Around this same time my first marriage was ending, and I needed my mom. I called about once a week, which felt frequent to me after so many years of benign neglect. Four years after my dad’s diagnosis, I got my own diagnosis. And that, of course, is when my perspective was totally changed. I didn’t know how long I had left (which I didn’t know before the diagnosis either – but as my friend Katie has said, “The clock has always been ticking, but I hear it now.”)
My dad died when I was in the middle of my cancer treatment. I was recovering from my mastectomies and was about to begin a course of 30 radiation treatments. Nearly everyone in my life praised me for how positive I was and said what an inspiration I was. Only a select few knew how much the cancer had messed up my mind. Post traumatic stress, oh yes. For a year after my treatment ended, I was absolutely certain that I was dying and it would happen fairly soon. Any day now they would find out that the cancer was in my brain, or my lungs, or somewhere else really bad. It took me a year to simmer down and realize that even if the cancer WAS still around, I should probably just enjoy life and get on with it instead of ruining absolutely every moment I had left.
At that moment of getting out of my own head I realized, “Hey, Mom’s alone now. She’s probably lonely.” And I began calling every day. My two sisters were doing a lot to help her, and were there to celebrate all of the special moments with her – birthdays, Mother’s Day, holidays, etc. I managed to visit her about 4 times a year, but that didn’t feel like enough. I decided that while I couldn’t help or be there in person, there was one thing I could do. I could keep her company every day with my voice.
And so we talk every day. We talk about the past (a favorite) and the present, but not so much about the future. I have certain stories that I love to hear, and so I will often prompt her to retell them. We also talk about how we spend our days, but speaking every day has the drawback of only 24 hours of living to recount. There are many times when one of us will say, “Hmmmm – what have I been up to since yesterday? Let me think…” My mom will often say, “I wish I had something exciting to tell you” to which I always reply, “No! We hate exciting, remember? We love boring!” And then we laugh. We laugh a lot these days, and I am keenly aware of the fact that these are the good old days, and they are numbered.
I won’t ever be one of those people who say that cancer was the best thing to happen to me. I’m quite certain that it is the worst thing to happen to me. But there are lessons and silver linings in such abundance that I can safely say that cancer has deepened my life. It has brought me to a place where I am sure of what is important, and I’ve acted on that knowledge. Some people never have that. And so I am grateful.
