The Year My Mother Died
A Memoir
by Sherry Scott
Copyright
2012 Sherry Scott
Smashwords Edition
This
book is available in print from most online retailers.
Smashwords
Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away
to other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and
purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.
Connect with the Author Online
This book is written in honor of my mother and dedicated to my children: Donald Aaron, Madison Gail, Tyler Caleb, and Aubry Alla Elise.
The author gratefully acknowledges the kindness and support of the following people: Stephanie Lane, my editor, for her professionalism and dedication. Margo Smith, for her believing. Rebecca Richey, Bonnie and Bill Neeley, the “first” readers and cheerleaders. Cliff Scott, for his patience that surpasses understanding. My first family: Vinson Shields, Alla Fay Shields, David Shields. Connie Turner, who has always believed. My palliative care friends: Cindy Beckwidth and April Coldsmith, as well as our team at Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital. Dr. Anthony Infante and Dr. Javier Kane, for giving me the chance. The staff and physicians at The Howard Britton Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, including: Dr. Howard Britton, Dr. Anne-Marie Langevin, and Dr. Paul Thomas. My professors and mentors in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Dr. Marion Primomo, a “giant” in her field. My extended family and friends, for the treasure of memories. To all the artists mentioned in this book and otherwise who have inspired me, comforted me, and drawn me into their circle of creativity. Lastly, to David and Ginger Cook for photographs appearing throughout the book.
In preparation for my new position as a palliative care pediatrician (a field whose mission it is to alleviate the physical, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual suffering in children with chronic and terminal diseases), I was given two books that proved most beneficial. The first was a booklet published by the Texas Cancer Council: Pain Management in Children with Cancer. The other one was Primer of Palliative Care, by Porter Storey, M.D., approved and acknowledged by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. I viewed the first book as a bible to approaching and maintaining adequate pain control in my patients and carried it with me always. I also kept the other one on hand and referred to it often, because it concisely covered the basic principles of hospice care and also addressed other distresses—outside of the physical—that plague the patient. In the Primer section on psychological, social, and spiritual distress, the opening paragraph dealt specifically with the common denominator of fear, common in people who are approaching death. The author quoted several experts in the field dealing with this phenomenon that is often repressed into our subconscious. The paragraph ends with this sentence: “A hospice worker who has examined his or her own subconscious fears is able to be much more helpful to a dying patient.”
I felt that I had been adequately prepared and positioned for this job by previous life events. I had lost a best friend to cancer, and I had seen firsthand what compassionate care directed toward managing her pain and addressing her emotional fears had done. More importantly, after coming through a dark period of my own, I had been released from a long-held fear of death and its consequences. Out of hopelessness had come hope, and I now saw death as simply a door rather than a brutal end with pending judgment on the other side. In fact, I felt so prepared that I had no problem in understanding the passage on transcendence: “When experienced, transcendence locates the person in a far larger landscape. The sufferer is not isolated by pain, but is brought closer to a transpersonal source of meaning and to the human community that shares those meanings. Such an experience need not involve religion in any formal sense; however, in its transpersonal dimension, it is deeply spiritual.”
During my pediatric residency I had stood at the foot of beds watching children die, and in the recesses of my mind I knew this place in medicine—end-of-life care—was really where I wanted to be. But it wasn’t actualized until years later, until I was no longer afraid of the mystery of death. People have often asked me questions or made comments regarding “the special person it must take to work in such a field,” or “How does one work in an environment with so much loss?” They fail to understand what all persons in hospice experience time and again: joy, inexpressible joy in the midst of pain and suffering, a transcendence. It’s what keeps the hospice nurse, social worker, volunteer, and doctor coming back to do what they have a passion for doing. I found it a privilege and honor to be invited into the inner sanctum of a family and witness with them the completion of the circle of life, a resolution like none other.
I had been prepared to do my job, but, some years later, I was not prepared for the death of my mother. I had grieved over people before: the loss of loved ones, friends, those with whom I was loosely associated, and others far off and unknown to me. Even as a child I was familiar with death, or rather the rituals associated with it. It seemed I was always frequenting family night visitations and funerals with my family. Most were distant relatives of my parents, but, whatever the case, I attended a lot of funerals as a kid. Finding a babysitter for me didn’t even appear to be a consideration. I just tagged along and didn’t think anything of it. As I grew older, however, and unexpected tragedies took away people with whom I was closely or distantly associated, the stakes got a little higher. There was no more familiarity with the state of death. Instead, it became a dark and ominous intruder that clouded my mind with confusion and fear, causing me willfully to suppress feelings in dealing with my own mortality. Over time, even this proved surmountable, and so I thought I had made my peace with the aspects of life and death completely out of my control. However, I was not prepared for my own grieving over the sudden loss of someone with whom I had experienced a lifetime of relational ups and downs.
I found myself in a distant land that seemed both familiar and strange at the same time—a recollection that played out somewhat like a dream I couldn’t quite recall after awakening from a deep sleep. The past seemed strangely close, yet far away, and my suffering over its loss was tightly wound up within the loss of my mom. And so my journey truly began. No guidelines, no maps, and no distractions came forth that would have allowed me to disembark from the path laid before me, for a while, that is. All I thought I knew about bereavement quickly vanished, and as I ventured into unchartered waters, all the words I had said to comfort others, the very ones I had written to console, seemed to come back and taunt me: “You know nothing of this.”
~*~
Time that seemed to drip like honey on certain days, true to its nature, did pass, though, and one September morning I sat down to look back and record my thoughts and experiences over the year that had passed. It had been a surreal year that had brought significant changes with the loss, a year that would eventually lead me to reclaim parts of myself I had left behind or forgotten. The year had been affected by Mom’s death, but, more importantly, her life had affected the way I lived my life, and the recalling was interwoven with the grieving.
I didn’t think October would be the last time I would see her. I remember watching her slowly walk back up the walk in her bare feet after retrieving the evening paper. She wore a long white, sleeveless cotton gown over her blue jeans. Her new tomboyish haircut accentuated those voluminous brown eyes, somewhat glossed over and shaded by her drooping eyelids due to the medication she was taking. After having known her for so long, I was still struck anew by how beautiful she looked. My friend Gail had fought an off-and-on battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma for the past thirteen years, and on this particular mild late September afternoon, I thought she had a lot more time. I thought we had a lot more time. I thought her decline would be gradual, allowing time for drawn-out goodbyes, nighttime vigils, and a wearing down of the body, mind, and soul to the point of one agonizing last breath; after all, it was what she had always feared. But in typical Gail-like fashion she decided to forego all the wasting away and bedside drama and slip quietly away one October afternoon in the same room she had slept in as a teenager.
Gail officially entered my life in the summer of 1982. While at work, I had often seen her come through the hospital lab, usually stopping to talk to her husband for one reason or the other. Barker, as everyone called him, short for Tom Barker, worked in a wing of the hospital’s medical laboratory adjacent to the pathology lab where I worked. Though Barker and I became good friends during the time I worked for the hospital, I was more intrigued by Gail’s story. I learned from others who had worked there longer than I that she had been diagnosed with cancer in her early twenties and, after completing several tough rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, was now cancer-free. I also learned that her family owned a respected business in an adjacent small town; she had apparently lived a more privileged life than many of us, although she and Tom never put on airs. But she looked different than the rest of us, and she brought a certain presence into a room that I couldn’t help noticing. My curiosity eventually won out over my awe. Little by little, I took advantage of chance meetings and conversations to learn firsthand more about her and forge a friendship that would become mutually important and binding to us both.
That particular summer, I was recently divorced and had a one-year- old son. She was in the middle of her last separation from Barker, which would eventually relegate her to the same ranks as me, though without a child. The couple had been unable to bear children following Gail’s total body radiation treatments.
Gail was like a breath of fresh air to me. I had never been acquainted personally with someone so glamorous and with such a background of stories and experiences. I was enthralled with her history, medically as well as biographically, and I questioned her relentlessly about her diagnosis, treatments and life-changing events brought on by her illness. I think she welcomed the unabashed inquiries from me. Others around her intentionally avoided the subject due to her previous history of bitter outbursts and stubborn refusals over different treatment schedules. At the time, neither she nor I knew that our days spent together were probably preparing me for a life in medicine and were responsible more than anything else for instilling in me a passion for the spiritual and emotional well-being of the patient, aside from the research-proven models of medicine. She had lived a life outside of anything I had even come close to experiencing, for example, witnessing the Beatles’ first appearance in Houston among a bunch of screaming junior high girls that her mom had transported to the floor of the Sam Houston Coliseum in 1965. I had never met anybody who had ever seen the Beatles in person, much less survived cancer! I was fascinated with learning more about a life that held far more interest than anything I had to share.
For starters, she was adopted as a baby from a Catholic orphanage in the Bronx. Her adoptive parents were returning from an overseas assignment and stopped in New York, on their way back to southern Oklahoma, to “pick out a new baby.” She was told that her father was smitten with her big brown eyes from the start and announced, “That’s the one!” Hearing her tell the story in her southern drawl made the place of her origin seem all that more surreal. In fact, as a child she dreamt of finding her real mother, most likely a movie star or legend, like Ingrid Bergman, and made elaborate plans with her two girl cousins to travel to New York one day to locate her; charting their course carefully on road maps spread all over the floor. Years later, when the time would come for her to make a decision to pursue bone marrow transplant as a last measure for treatment, she would refuse it, owing to the fact that she did not want to risk the possibility of rejection again, if indeed she was successful in tracking down her biological family. Though she often voiced that God had given her the mother she needed the most, the best mother she could ever have, and that there was no longer any need to look for her biological parent, her adoption was something she would never get over or fully resolve. Listening to her stories from childhood that revolved only around finding her biological mother who had given her up, I was given the impression that she believed her adoption resulted from the inability of a young, single girl to care for her properly. I learned from her adoptive mother after Gail’s death, such was not the case; she had been just another mouth the family could not afford to feed, a fact that was never disclosed to Gail.
She had also lived in places I had not: Japan and even Houston! When she was eight years old, her adoptive father, who had been a fighter pilot in World War II, committed suicide during a bout with depression. He had abused alcohol for many years and spent the time just before his death living alone in an apartment where Gail would visit him on weekends. After his death and for many years afterward, she blamed her mother for the suicide, goaded by loathsome tales from her aunts on her father’s side of the family. Her animosity was further fueled by the fact that her mother, Virginia, had started dating a man who had been a fellow pilot of her dad’s and a family friend. The bitterness Gail harbored for years was only matched by her mother’s patience in waiting for her to heal.
For some time, Gail lived with her mother in an apartment in Houston, where Virginia held a teaching position. When the beau came to town on weekends, he courted Virginia at some of the city’s finest restaurants and theatres with Gail in tow, always sporting a stiff upper lip. Only once did she let down her guard when out with her mother and future stepfather. He had secured tickets for the stage production of The Sound of Music, and throughout the night Gail sat on the edge of her seat, gripping the rail in suspense. She was so taken by the chapel scene that she left the theatre pledging a burning desire to become a nun: within the Baptist order, of course. One weekend during the special visitor’s stay, the precocious, guarded, young girl made the casual observatory remark, “Aren’t you guys ever going to get married?” The couple followed her lead, frantically scurried to make wedding arrangements, and was married a week later. It had taken six years to woo Gail into giving them permission.
Life changed for the new family rather quickly. They moved back to a small town in North Texas where a family business, Carl’s Tasty Sausage, was headquartered. Gail went from living in the big city with just her mom to living in a Victorian four-story home with two older stepbrothers and all the shenanigans they were capable of, e.g., driving a fast car through the showcase window of the local Ford dealership in the middle of the night and knocking out a couple of the floor models at the same time. Gail’s life soon became interwoven with the small town of Whitewright, population around 1,500. She showed cows in the Future Farmers of America program, made the cheerleading squad, became a class favorite, and eventually dated the head football star. She carved their initials into the railroad overpass before heading off to college at Southern Methodist University to pursue her education and high school sweetheart.
She belonged to organizations and enjoyed perks I only imagined. While at college, she was accepted into a prominent sorority, which she represented as “most beautiful” on campus one semester. This was back in the day when girls lined up for fashion inspection before leaving the dorm to attend social night functions and parties. After football season was over, she traveled around the state and country with her boyfriend to different fraternity and sorority events. She was not totally naïve to his semi-longsuffering. After obtaining a long-awaited engagement ring, she surrendered to an intimate relationship with him. “Yeah, he used to drop me off after a date and go off and have sex with a girl just down the street from me. Used to upset me real baahd,” she’d drawl, which made her tale of woe sound a little comical while at the same time maddening—until she told the rest of the story.
Gail remained at SMU, and the fiancé eventually transferred to another school in the region in order to continue to play football. During this time of geographical separation, plans for a summer wedding in their hometown proceeded through the telephone lines between school and back home. After the wedding invitations had been mailed, Gail’s sorority sisters decided it was high time to let her in on a little secret, and, in this case, “better late than never,” would not have sufficed.
Her girlfriends approached her collectively to tell her that not only had her fiancé been having a relationship with another girl on campus, but that she was pregnant and their wedding was to take place that evening. Gail made a mad dash to his campus, more than an hour’s drive away, and arrived just in time to confront him. She ended the face-to-face encounter with, “What are we gonna tell Whitewright?”
Needless to say, the illusion of the life of a campus queen was forever ruptured. She left school. Gail stayed in her paid-for apartment the rest of the semester, leading her parents to believe that she was still in school; her tuition money was not refunded. After living for a time as the broken-hearted-one-gone-wild, she returned home one summer to live with her parents, but not before more life-changing events occurred.
Soon after the breaking news of her fiancé’s betrayal, she learned that she, too, was carrying a baby of his. She kept the news somewhat to herself and did not reveal it to him, but, upon learning the truth, he confronted her one evening. She was around four months pregnant at the time. Their argument took place on the landing outside her second-story apartment, and, sometime during the heated exchange, she slipped and went down the stairs. When she finally landed at the bottom of the steps, (in her words) “the blood gushed.” Her roommate helped her into the bathtub while her ex-fiancé sat devastated on the couch. “It was all a blur. She took care of me. I don’t know what she did with it, but it had a form.” she told me. “It was more than just bloody tissue.” It would be the only pregnancy she would carry.
Sometime after returning home, Gail was introduced to the son of a distant cousin on her mother’s side of the family: Tom. He was smitten with her, and old wounds healed to the point that a fall wedding took place in a small Whitewright church. She was every bit the beautiful bride, intent on starting a new adventure with someone she would forever love. Her intentions were true, but the adventure would turn out to be more than she had bargained for and would challenge the young couple in ways they could have never foreseen.
She was diagnosed with endometriosis shortly after being married and was advised that, if she wanted to have children, sooner would be better than later. Frustrated over not getting pregnant during a set time period, she insisted that they see a fertility specialist. In the meantime of planning for their own family, Tom and Gail became foster parents to a little boy who had been removed temporarily from his dysfunctional home by a court order. During one of the boy’s follow-up doctor visits about a sore throat, Gail happened to ask the doctor what he thought of a large lump on the side of her neck. She was hospitalized that same afternoon following a “curbside” consultation by an oncologist in the same clinic. The biopsy obtained the next day revealed Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
One of the most bittersweet pictures in her collection is a snapshot taken the day the biopsy was done, before the pathology report had been released. She is in a hospital gown, hair pulled back in a ponytail, a piece of surgical tape visible over the biopsy site. She is leaning forward to kiss her foster child who is being held up to the bedside by her husband. They are lip-locked with big smiles on their faces—seemingly unaware of the others around them. Shortly after the bad news was delivered, the small boy was returned to the foster system, while Gail was ushered through more tests to determine just how invasive her disease was before beginning chemotherapy.
The brutal MOPP chemotherapy regimen would be her undoing. Her treatment (using a combination of the drugs Mustargen, Oncovin, Procarbazine, and Prednisone) took place years before the newer anti-emetic agents were available to patients undergoing treatments known for causing severe nausea and vomiting. Some things were within her control. Others were not. She was bitter from the get-go and routinely had angry outbursts while threatening to discontinue treatment. After dropping down to eighty-something pounds, she finally got her wish. She adamantly refused the last two treatments of the protocol and started radiation. She never regretted the decision, believing she would have died from the chemo and its devastating side effects if she had continued as scheduled.
To say she was a difficult patient would be putting it very mildly. She threw fits, argued with the staff, took the whole situation out on her mother and husband and ranted and raved in the emergency room at all times of the day and night for analgesics, which she managed to obtain, for a while. A standing order existed for her to receive Demerol when she would show up requesting “something for the pain,” until the nursing staff began to notice her frequenting the ER before the allotted time dosing interval, demanding her shot be given and arguing with the nurses over the last scheduled administration of the drug. Alarmed, her physician put an immediate stop to her scheduled doses. She was thrown into a drug withdrawal, which, at the time, felt more destructive than the cancer she was battling. During the subsequent weeks, she would throw herself down in a fashion similar to a toddler’s throwing a temper tantrum: hitting her head repeatedly on the floor and demanding her Demerol.
When I first met her, some of her darkest days were behind her (days that had included relapse diagnoses, more treatments, more surgeries and procedures), though there would be more to come. She was in remission at the time and so there was a break from some of the things she would never get used to that were required for living with cancer, things such as needle sticks, for starters. Another friend of mine once told me that it was common knowledge to scatter and run when Gail showed up in the hospital lab for a blood draw: “Nothing or nobody could please her.” Starting IVs on her was a whole other experience. Specialists such as anesthesiologists usually had to be called in while she sternly warned them, “Don’t probe.” Another psychological stumbling block was losing her hair.
She had been in remission for several years when I began to get to know her and discovered that she kept a full head of hair tucked under the huge wig she had worn since her first round of chemo. Her big hair gave her some kind of false sense of security. My big mouth and I eventually started harping on the subject with remarks like, “Doesn’t that thing get hot?”; “Why don’t you just go get a cute style done? You’ve got plenty of hair”; or, better still, “What are you going to do when you start going out again and end up going to bed with somebody? Are you gonna wear your wig or take it off?” I don’t know what did the trick, but one summer day she came over to my parents’ home proudly sporting a new bi-level haircut.
I’ll never forget it. We were sitting in the backyard watching my young son play in the water. She walked through the gate wearing a pink cotton sundress. Her smile seemed to signify something new was about to begin, even though her divorce proceedings would soon be in the works. She felt a little braver, a little freer, and it showed.
The summer that heralded the beginning our friendship felt like my first summer of love. I was excited to have someone new in my life: a new best friend. We were to each other like sisters we’d never had. Six years my senior, she passed her wisdom and experience on to me; she taught me a lot about fashion sense and makeup and was with me when I bought my first box of loose facial powder. She introduced me to potpourri by Ben Rickert and designer perfumes such as Shalimar, her favorite since age sixteen. She wore her clothes and jewelry uniquely, stating that she liked to be different. She always mixed the colors of her jewelry, dismissing the rule of only wearing gold with gold and silver with silver. What she couldn’t afford she made up for in creativity and style. She kept her dishwashing soap in a beautiful, tall, glass decanter and arranged petite books of sonnets by Shakespeare on her living room shelves. The clutter she kept evidenced her interest in different cultures and lifestyles and included nostalgic artifacts of favorite stars and musicians. I was glad to get whatever she handed down to me. It was as if donning something of hers made me feel a little richer inside, even if it was something outdated, such as an old football jersey she once handed me.
I wore it to class one night at the junior college and after getting out sometime around 9 p.m., I dropped by to see Gail at her job before going home. She took one look at me and started laughing, “I can’t believe you wore that out in public!” I hadn’t even bothered to notice the huge double digits, “69,” printed on the front and back of the shirt. I thought it was just somebody’s football uniform number. “No wonder that guy kept smiling at me.”
The fashions, hats, makeup, and wigs were her trademarks. Thus, some people who were familiar with her in the medical setting (in and out of the clinic or in the hospital) had trouble relating to her suffering. “If she felt so bad, how could she look so good?” She took great pains with her appearance, because that’s where the good fight was fought. There were times when she didn’t have the strength or will, but, when she did, putting on her makeup and hiding under that wig was her way of stalling the enemy and putting forth an effort to carry on and not give up.
As leery as some people were over her past history of tantrums and demands, I found her appeal unmatched. Her charm got us in and out of scrapes and seemed to have an equal effect on others.
One night on our way to a Dan Fogelberg concert we ran into a huge traffic snag in downtown Dallas. We were in a yellow Monte Carlo coupe with a brown rear-quarter vinyl roof, an early ’70s model that had seen better days. Running late and finding ourselves in the wrong lane, we were held up at an intersection by a Dallas police officer directing traffic in all four directions. Gail stuck her head out the window, flashed those big brown eyes, and in her unmistakable southern drawl asked if we could make a left turn from the far right lane. Without a moment’s hesitation, the cop—honest to God—blew his whistle, stopped all lanes of traffic, and waved us through! We made the concert just in time.
We seemed to have an unspoken thread of recognition and humor between us, particularly when we had been drinking. Gail never tried to be funny, but sometimes her observations, voiced with an even slower twang after a few drinks, were so perfectly timed to what I was thinking, she would make me howl. One particular afternoon, we accompanied a friend to the airport to drop off their significant someone and ended up with a lot of time on our hands while waiting for the flight to depart. Gail and I headed to a bar within the airport (long before 9/11 security regulations), leaving the couple time alone before having to say goodbye. It was a cold, rainy St. Patrick’s Day, and the margaritas we were drinking had been colored some God-awful green to commemorate the day. We jokingly referred to them as “swamp water.” After enjoying a few while engaged in conversation, we looked up around 5 o’clock to find the place beginning to fill up. Business flights were beginning to arrive, and we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a Love Field happy hour.
Sitting somewhere in the back of the room was a businessman wearing a three-piece brown suit. As he got up to leave, he lost his balance and took the whole length of the bar trying to regain it. He came hopping toward us on one leg and crashed into our table with his leather briefcase and all. After his momentum was abruptly stopped, he straightened himself up, adjusted his glasses and satchel, and, without uttering a word, turned and headed for the door. Sitting there in a “Margaritaville haze,” and a very green one at that, Gail glanced at me and asked, “Did that just happen or whaaht?”
That was a great day despite the rain and a parting goodbye at the airport. I lay down in the backseat, sleepily content all the way home, listening to music playing from the back speakers just over my head.
As difficult as she could be as a patient, Gail was just as difficult when it came to interpersonal relationships. Probably stemming from her childhood and the mystery behind an adoption she never understood, she had a way of putting up walls without purposefully willing them into place. Her fight with cancer only fueled the fire. In order to survive, she sometimes emotionally cut herself off from those she cared for and needed the most. She had learned to distance herself from others in a variety of ways. She could be stubborn and unyielding, evasive and cold; she played the role of the spoiled brat beautifully when she demanded certain needs of hers be met. Just like any other couple of friends, we had fights and makeups, sometimes punctuated by long periods of silence, but she wasn’t above making the first phone call.
To end one of our mutual not-speaking terms, she called me after hearing the news of a friend’s tragic death in an automobile accident. He and I had dated briefly, but Gail knew him as well. She had been out of town and called me as quickly as she could after finding out; the funeral had already taken place. After months of grief and confusion, it was Gail who brought some perspective into the web of chaos my mind had woven in order to understand the mysteries associated with death. While sitting on our favorite beach, she listened to my anxiety-filled rants, empathized, and then stated matter-of-factly, “Sherry, you’re asking questions no one on this earth has the answers to.” And just like that, I cleared and went on living a little more peaceably with things I had no control over, as well as sleeping better and keeping my food down.
Our lives would continue to parallel, intertwine, and move apart only to intersect again at some important junctions over the next six years. Our shopping sprees, music concerts, dinners out, and trips to the lake somewhat stalled after she met and started seriously seeing her second husband-to-be. We rekindled some of our fun times together when she started preparing for her destination wedding, which was to be held on St. Thomas Island in the Caribbean. I have some great pictures and fond memories of our day spent together in Dallas shopping for lingerie and making happy hour at the original T.G.I. Friday’s on Greenville Avenue, Gail’s old stomping grounds back in her SMU days.
The lady working in the boutique where we purchased her negligee wouldn’t let us take pictures in the store for some bogus privacy/legal reason. As she was wrapping up our purchase, the young sales person began to talk about her own upcoming nuptials that were scheduled to take place outside in some park or square. Gail and I left the store and while walking down the mall corridor, we looked at each other and said in unison, “I hope it rains.” I ended up taking a picture of Gail provocatively holding up the black teddy in front of her while coming down the mall’s escalator.
The best part was that she wore my dress on her wedding day: my little handmade wedding dress for which I had paid a little over $100 to replicate a bridal magazine dress I couldn’t afford. It was a far cry from her first wedding gown, which was exquisitely beaded and had been modeled professionally for a designer’s bridal show before Gail purchased it. Of course, she looked much better in my dress than I ever did, and though the couple had a very private ceremony in the Virgin Islands, I was there in spirit.
They had been married more than a year when Gail faced another relapse and more chemotherapy, but this time things were different. Her husband had already made it clear that he had no intention of committing to a long-term relationship unless she was committed to taking care of her health: no more bargaining over treatment protocols and schedules. They were both in their thirties, and Gail was considerably more mature and wiser than when first struck with cancer. He had remained a bachelor up until age thirty; the fact that his job took him out of town often also seemed to mesh with her recurring need for distance. The couple remained close and sloshed through the rigors of chemo and more oncology appointments; Gail went out and purchased the biggest wig she could find. They weathered the storm. She survived and life went on, for a while. During their second fall together, she relapsed for the last time; this would be her final run.
Gail always struggled between two opposing forces: the desire to remain close and find companionship, and the impulse to separate and disconnect from those who loved her best. There’s no question that Gail could be a shit, but then cancer had been shitty to her. It had destroyed her first marriage, taken away her foster child and the ability to have children in one fell swoop, scarred her body, and robbed her of her youth and her future. Over time, she had gotten better about voicing her impulses rather than icily removing herself, but it had taken some work on her part.
Sometime during the winter of ’88, we went to lunch at our favorite restaurant on the lake. She was undergoing chemo treatments at the time and had gone back to wearing a cute pageboy wig; she didn’t have the need for all that hair this time around. We had the best time reliving old times while enjoying our meal, and we laughed even harder when our waitress brought us two shots of Grand Marnier, compliments of somebody at the bar. From the lackadaisical look in her eyes, I knew that she had just taken an analgesic, and that the liqueur would only enhance the effect. It reminded us of days past when, in the middle of a good time, I would look over to find her glassy eyed. I’d demand to know what prescribed med she had taken just so I would be forced to drive her home early.
While sitting with our drinks, she began telling me about a recent experience at her oncology clinic appointment. (At this time, I was in one of the most pressure-packed semesters of my academic tract. I was enrolled at a local liberal arts college, pushing toward my goal of entering medical school.) She had been introduced to a college student who attended the same school as me, Austin College. The student was enrolled in the pre-med program as well and was following the doctor around as part of a clinical exercise for one of her classes. The young girl wanted to be a doctor in the worst way and was excited and confident about her future in medicine. Gail related how she had sat in the exam room alone (maybe waiting for a blood draw) where she couldn’t help but overhear the bubbly young girl’s hallway conversation with the staff. “I can tell you this: I hated that girl at that second,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you feel the same towards me?” I asked. Her eyes widened and honed in on me as if the effect of her medication had suddenly worn off. Without blinking, she responded, “I have.”
No, it didn’t spoil our lunch or the rest of the day. In fact, I was quite proud of Gail. I felt privileged to be included and accepted as a friend to whom the truth, the naked truth, could be told. She had come a long way and had never looked more beautiful. I would have preferred her blunt honesty, a willingness to share her pain with me, over her abrupt dismissals any day. I realized in time that her impulse to separate herself from others with harsh words and withdrawal was, in part, preparation for her own death; however, it would rival my tenacity for holding onto our friendship in the face of hurt. Our last fight took place the summer before her death, and, strange as it may sound, it remains an endeared memory of one of our many times together.
Gail and I had a dear mutual friend named Kyra. Kyra was the executive director and one of the founding members of the local nonprofit hospice in our area. I had known Kyra for some time before she was appointed to this position. She was a licensed counselor and had a very successful private practice before making the hard decision to leave it and follow her passion for hospice. She had been instrumental in getting the organization funded by the United Way; I had been at her office the day she returned from submitting the paperwork. I was there to see her as a patient.
While undergoing her last round of chemo, Gail’s doctor insisted she get some counseling support, and, when she mentioned this to me, I told her enthusiastically, “I know just the person.” Kyra had stopped seeing individual clients due to her new duties and responsibilities, but I think she knew that Gail would eventually be a hospice patient. Whatever the reason, Kyra made an allowance and took Gail on. An immediate bond developed between the two. Kyra gently guided Gail into comfort care when she decided to forego further invasive therapy. Kyra insisted Gail’s pain management be hospice managed on a continual oral basis rather than periodic injections. Kyra firmly but tenderly confirmed Gail’s suspicion that she was deteriorating beyond a point she had ever gone before and had rocked her as she sobbed at the news. Kyra gave Gail’s eulogy at her request, and it was a cross belonging to Kyra (a metal cross that could be hung from the IV pole, one Kyra had purchased for her own mom while she lay ill in an ICU) that Gail requested be pressed into her hand to be buried with. It was Kyra who helped me understand Gail a little better.
Every year, hospice put on a huge gala to raise money and awareness for the organization; it was a big event supported enthusiastically by the medical community as well as businesses and individuals in the surrounding area. That particular summer, the gala’s theme was a luau, and it was held at a resort on our area lake, Lake Texoma, with plenty of food and drink, decorations, wild outfits, and lots of limbo to see just how low you could go. Gail was looking forward to going but became ill with an infection and had to be hospitalized for a couple of days. She wouldn’t be released in time to make it and wouldn’t have the strength to go anyway. Kyra extended an invitation for me to attend, knowing that I couldn’t afford a ticket.
It was the summer before my last fall term. I was taking a physics class on a campus a little over an hour’s drive away and preparing to take the MCAT (medical school entrance exam) in the fall, while continuing to work at a Holiday Inn private restaurant and club where I had been employed since beginning classes at Austin College. Apart from my shifts during the week, I worked every weekend, including Friday and Saturday night and Sunday buffet; my social life was pretty much nil at this point, so I was excited about the invitation. My excitement was overshadowed a little by my own intuition, to which I should have listened. In my bone of bones I knew not to go if Gail couldn’t go. After all, this was her baby, and she felt very strongly about her life’s purpose somehow being tied in with hospice.
Toward the end of my shift at the restaurant, one of my coworkers encouraged me to go on to the party. So I drove out to the lake and arrived pretty much at the tail end of the night, with only enough time to grab a plate of what was left on the buffet and watch the limbo contest. I stuck around and helped clean up. Just before I left, Kyra grabbed a beautiful Hawaiian floral centerpiece off one of the tables, handed it to me, and told me to take it to Gail since she had not been able to come.
I arrived at the hospital the next morning, just as Gail was being loaded into her mother’s car. Understandably, she was not in a cheery mood. I handed her the flowers and told her they were from Kyra. “How did you get to go?” she asked. I casually mumbled something about Kyra mentioning I could come out after work. Immediate silence as she got in the car. I knew right then that my reluctance over going in the first place had been proven correct. When I summoned the courage to give Gail a call a couple of days later, without much preamble, I got blasted. Just as she slammed the phone down on me, she screamed, “I’m sick of this sucking disease! You get to do whatever you want. I’m sick and dying, and I don’t get to do anything!”
I don’t know which hurt worse, the phone receiver in my ear or her screaming accusations; after all, I had known I shouldn’t go. But Kyra refused to let Gail shut her out, too, so she had a talk with her. Kyra also set me straight about the need some patients had to close off from loved ones and friends as a way of protecting themselves when they saw the inevitable approaching.
A short time afterward, I got a phone call from Gail inviting me over to watch a movie with her. She laughingly told me how Kyra had smoothed things over. “They were basically cleaning up by the time she got there,” Kyra had told her. “Take pity.” We had our last girls’ night together watching The Princess Bride along with her two cats sitting close by on the sofa. We never fought again.
The last time I saw her was on a Saturday afternoon in October. I was getting ready for work when I got a call. She was staying at her parents’ house, because her husband was working nights, and she had had some setbacks. They both felt better about her being with someone while he was away. She called me in tears, letting me know how down she’d gotten over not being able to get around well on her own, how she missed being in her own home with her music on, surrounded by her cats. (Gail was an avid cat lover, at one time owning as many as thirteen.) It had been a long time since she had called me in crisis; I couldn’t recall ever hearing her sound so vulnerable. I told her I was coming out. I’d just call in to work to tell them I would be a little late (later than usual was more like it). I didn’t have time or the money to buy her anything, so I grabbed some cassettes of our favorite artists and a magazine for her. Her parents lived about twenty minutes away from me. She was in better spirits than I had expected her to be when I arrived, and she was so thankful for the music I had brought her.
It was just like old times, discounting the fact that a toilet chair was placed next to the bed, a convenience she would not use up until the day she died. She told me to spray some cologne around after I stepped through the door into her old bedroom: Obsession, her current favorite. “It smells like a rest home in here,” she said. She was sitting up, and I sat next to her on the bed, surrounded by the French provincial furniture she had grown up with. I painted her fingernails bright red while we talked and looked through the magazine I had brought. I was amazed at how long her nails had grown. She said the chemicals in her body made her nails “hard as bricks.” The visit was like times spent with the old Gail. She pointed to this and that while flipping through the pages of the magazine, remarked how she liked a particular cut in a jacket coming out in the fall—that sense of fashion, still intact. We might as well have been sitting out by the lake talking shop, except that time was ticking, and I had to get to work, and she needed to stay in bed.
For some reason, I got a little shy when it came time to leave. Instead of hugging her goodbye, I grabbed her foot and gently shook it. “I’ll come by again later this week, on my afternoon off,” I promised. Even if I had known it would be the last goodbye, I don’t know if I could have acted differently. I think maybe it was because I knew how much it had cost her to call out to me for help, and I didn’t want to risk a breakdown on her or my part. I didn’t want things to seem desperate. She looked so good sitting there with those bright eyes and red nails that I didn’t want it to seem like it was any different from any other visit. But it was, I just didn’t know it at the time.
Gail died on a Wednesday afternoon, before any of us were ready, excluding her. That morning was the first time she couldn’t muster the strength to make it to her adjoining bathroom. Her mother said that “her little legs just shook,” so she resorted to using her bedside toilet for the first and last time. Shortly after noon, her mom sat by the bed and was in the middle of a conversation with her when Gail stopped her mid-sentence, shushing her with her finger over her own lips as if to say, “Quiet, I hear something,” or maybe “I’m so sleepy. I need a nap.” Whatever she fully meant we’ll never know, for her mom acquiesced the request and quietly left the room as Gail drifted off to sleep. When Virginia returned a few minutes later to check on her, she was already gone. Gail had dismissed everybody and had gently passed on, just like the way she had come to us in the first place: all by herself.
She had sent her husband off on an out-of-town fishing trip with some of his closest friends, reassuring him she would be fine while staying at her mom’s. Meanwhile, I was at the mall, taking the longest time trying to decide between a white cotton, long-sleeve nightgown trimmed in pink or a sleeveless, slightly sexy, peach cotton gown to bring her during my visit that afternoon. My plan was just to show up. Otherwise, I was afraid I would be turned away if I called ahead, and she wasn’t up to having company. When I arrived at her parents’ home, I was met at the back door by Kyra; Gail had been taken away a good two hours before. No last-minute goodbyes, no tears, no remorse. I swear, when that girl made up her mind to do something, she did it all her way.
Unless I pull out an old obituary, I can never remember the exact date. Gail died around noon on either the twelfth or the thirteenth of October. I established the precedent to forget on the first anniversary of her death. I was in my first semester of medical school and had just finished my dreaded first set of exams. A year to the day since she had died, I had planned to sit by the fountain in front of the school and mark the moment all alone. The setting was important because Gail had been one of my biggest cheerleaders when it came to urging me toward my goal of attending medical school. Even when she was sick, she would mail me cards telling me to let nothing stand in the way of pursuing my dreams: “Just strive.”
The day came and went unrecognized, and the next day I sat dumbfounded on the side of the fountain wondering how I could have forgotten. This was supposed to be a big deal, for, in some respects, Gail had taught me more about medicine than any lecture or textbook ever could. I had made it to where I was in part because of her, and I was determined to carry her torch. More than anything, Gail had taught me that how a person dies is every bit as important as how a person lives, but she hadn’t taught me bereavement. That was something I would have to learn on my own.
~*~
My mother had been dead for several months when my grieving took a turn for the weird. I suddenly felt there was no one to talk to who could relate to me, no one to go back in time with me and remember who I was before I had become who I was now. All my friends who had defined a part of me, who had witnessed my life’s milestones were unavailable, or so it seemed: relocated, removed, too busy with careers, finances, family, grandchildren. It suddenly felt like we had grown up all too soon, and the past that I had taken for granted and had impatiently wished away was now infinitely precious but irretrievable and irrevocable, just like my mother’s life. My own mom’s death occurred nearly nineteen years to the day of Gail’s death. Out of the unexpected turmoil that resulted from the loss of my mom arose the painful reminder of my friend who was no longer. Even though I had named a daughter in honor of Gail, I had shoved her memory to the recesses of my mind in order to cope and get through day to day. Now that Mom’s death had brought this strange thing upon me, like the fiery ordeal described in a passage of Biblical text, Gail was vividly brought back to mind, and I missed her all over again.
Through a passing car window, a face in the crowd of parents watching their children perform, I began to catch glimpses of her: the upturned nose, the cut edge of her hair against her neckline, her eyes, the curve of her jaw, all viewed from a distance and in passing, yet startling near and very real to me. I missed more than just seeing her, for I longed to talk to her. I wanted her to give me some advice. I kept thinking, If I could just talk to Gail, she would straighten me out. She’d know what to do. If she could just sit down with me and offer me some words that would bring everything back into perspective (words that would bring me peace when nothing else could), then I’d be okay. In my darkest times, dismissing what she had been through, she had shared such casual observances founded in understanding that she became my mentor, the sister I never had.
After my mom died, I accepted that she would no longer be there for advice. If I had any questions, I would have to draw from memory or look to how she lived her life for answers. I didn’t realize that, in the months to come, it would be Gail from whom I would want answers.
For as long I can remember, I had always forgotten Mom’s birthday. Without fail, the first day of October would sneak up on me, and I would remember too late to get a card off in time or call until a day or so had passed. It was always celebrated, though usually not until the next time we saw each other, and so belated birthday cards were the norm for me. Six months after mom died, Dad corrected me on the date of her death. We were in the middle of a conversation, and I said something about the fifteenth. “No, fourteenth; it was the fourteenth,” he said. I should have known. After all, I was there. It had been a very long day, one I would never forget, yet I had remembered the wrong date. Maybe being a day or so off when it comes to remembering the day I lost someone significant means something, just like my tendency to be fifteen minutes late for everything. Or maybe I’m just a day off.
I was born November 20, 1959, in Honey Grove, Texas. Located in Fannin County, it sits in the middle of the blacklands about an hour and a half northeast of Dallas. A sign on the southwest corner of town greets motorists: “Honey Grove, the Sweetest Town in Texas.” Once rich in cotton farms whose subsistence were dependent on sharecroppers, where the land bosses were known to have carried pistols while on horseback, I’m not sure everyone agrees with the salutation.
My mother had such a tough time during her pregnancy with my brother that she wasn’t ready to think about having another baby for at least six years. My father took even longer. My grandparents once told me the story of my father having to carry my mother to the kitchen table for her dinner; my parents lived temporarily with my dad’s parents throughout the pregnancy, because Mom was too sick to care for herself. She would immediately start engulfing the bowl of soup set before her until she paused to throw up, right there at the table in a little cup, then would resume eating the rest of her meal ravenously before being carried back to bed. This meal-time routine went on throughout her entire pregnancy. Some ten or so years later, I was conceived at a Boy Scout retreat in New Mexico. This fact was verified by both of my parents at separate times. My mother mentioned it to me one day while on our way to do some shopping; my dad told the story after Mom had died, while we sat looking at old slide pictures together.
Over the years, I have met people in various places who staked some claim to Honey Grove. They would preface their story, “There’s this little bitty town located . . . ,” and I would interrupt, “Yeah, I know it. I was born there.” With a population of around 700 and holding, there is certainly no hospital for birthing babies, but for years a family practitioner held his clinic above the drugstore building, just off the Main Street square. One cold night my dad walked my brother, who was eleven and a half at the time, to the back gate where a neighbor was waiting to take him in for the night; my dad walked back home to take Mom into town. After coming to from a light dose of ether, my mom saw me lying on the table. A large, red-headed nurse gave my father the news. The doctor came out and asked my father the name. “Sherry,” he announced proudly. The doctor came back with, “If it had been a boy, would you have called him Bourbon?” Mom stayed overnight in one of the patient rooms above the drugstore with the red-headed nurse. She took me home the next day.
Today, the drugstore and clinic are gone, and the doctor who delivered me died a little over two years ago; the building itself still stands, vacated and boarded up in a part of town where bricks were once used to pave the roads. Every once in a while I turn off the main highway and take Highway 56 through the small town, noticing the laundromat, the park, the churches that still stand, before taking a right off Main Street and around the block to see the old stone building. The faded name of the last doctor who practiced medicine there is still etched on the door.