The story I wish that my mother could have narrated is the one about her leaving the earth -- the moment when life passed out of her. I can almost envision the dramatic tones she would use, the details, the wit. She would tell it like it was, in her blunt and humorous fashion. I wonder if the tall man in a suit who carried a briefcase that she often glimpsed in her bedroom -- an apparition -- finally came to get her. Once, at MD Anderson Cancer Center after a particularly rough bout of chemotherapy, she told me that she had seen a thousand or so nuns sitting in a circle in her hospital room.
"Do you think they're all waiting for me to die?" she asked.
I had to choke back the tears. "No, I don't think that," I said. "I think they're praying for you."
A month before her death, chatting with her at the kitchen table while my dad was immersed in a movie in the next room, she told me about another vision that involved a man in white robes standing high up on a mountain, or the ledge of a wall -- she couldn't tell which -- beckoning to her.
"Do you think he was coming to get me?" she asked.
"No, mom. I think that he was watching over you. Blessing you," I said.
When she spoke of the presences she saw, there was never any drama. She was both intrigued and slightly haunted by these spirits that had visited her while she slept for decades. She spoke about them matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing the weather. My mother loved to talk about the weather. She called me on the phone at least three times daily, if not more, and she started off each conversation discussing the weather. If one of my colleagues or friends happened to pick up my phone, she would let them know the upcoming forecast. She left me voicemails at times instructing me to take an umbrella or to wear a heavy jacket. I often thought she missed her calling as a meteorologist.
To me, my mother exemplified grit. Her ability to keep smiling and keep being her authentic self, despite her failing health, put her into a category that I will perhaps aspire to the rest of my life. She lived her days, instead of bemoaning them. She never complained throughout her journey with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML). Another blood transfusion: okay. Another clinical trial drug: I'll try it. Another trip to MD Anderson: it's what I need to do. She refused to let anyone but her immediate family know about her sickness. She didn't want it to define her. I would overhear her consoling friends who were ill. When they told her how lucky she was to be healthy, she smiled. Her head-on battle with cancer was perhaps her greatest achievement, and while cancer won, to me, she was and will always be the hero.
Her own mother, my grandmother, passed away from Lymphoma at 68 years old. My mother was 38 years old at that time, and although I was only a little girl, I know the loss was tough on her. But she kept going, raising three children, and being active in the community. She was involved with Hadassah and our Temple's Sisterhood Society. She volunteered for years at Kings County Hospital as a patient liaison. She enjoyed keeping the waiting people informed about their loved ones. She was comfortable in a hospital, as long as she wasn't the patient.
My mother was a blend of no nonsense and nurturing. She said the things that everyone else thought, and often, even if I didn't want to hear it, her honesty helped me with my life. Then there were her idiosyncrasies: waiters who didn't bring food in a timely fashion were losers. If they got an order wrong, they were written off as jerks. Sometimes, though, she could be incredibly kind. She liked to bring the nurses in the blood transfusion unit scarves and pocketbooks and fun jewelry. She brought them nail polish shades that she felt were right for them. She adored her oncologist at MD Anderson and was always on best behavior with him. "What miracle cure do you have for me?" she asked each month. She was unfaltering in her insistence on an antidote.
The day she lost her hair to chemotherapy, she cried, but in her typical fashion, she adapted overnight, and grew excited with each wig that she bought. Back in Florida, when strangers in restaurants complimented her on her gorgeous hair, desperate to know who cut it, she would smile and say, "Oh, I have it done in Texas." My mother wasn't afraid to wear hot pink nail polish and bold jewelry, but she could also be conservative and classy with flair. She didn't care what people thought about her, but at times, she was incredibly sensitive. I believe that I was one of the few people in her life who she allowed to see that side of her.
Her energy and passion for living was contagious. For her, life was where the party was, and I believe she held on for the ride as long as she possibly could. When she was healthy, she loved to travel. The Caribbean was her favorite. Puerto Rico, Saint Martin, Saint Thomas. "Life is a beach," she would say, and during all of those trips, with her lounging about during the day and going out for dinners, it was a beach. Regardless of where we were abroad or in New York City -- if there was an opportunity to shop for handbags or jewelry or clothes, she was up for it. My father and I are still working through her clothes and handbags, these four years later. Sorting through them is both painful and necessary. I understand the need to part with a vast majority of her things, but giving them away seems so permanent. As if the traces of her will be dispersed into the universe and forever gone.
She survived over five years of chemotherapy. Sometimes a drug worked in her favor, other times it did not. Her myeloblasts counts rose and fell, like the tide. She endured endless cross-matches and blood and platelet transfusions. All of those hours in the hospital. Waiting, persevering, even when it became clear that there was never going to be any escaping her reality. But she made it fun, gossiping with the nurses and other patients, discussing reality TV shows and the like. When her Florida doctors told her no manicures and pedicures, no going out to dinner every night, she nodded yes to them, and then laughed about it after she got a manicure and we were out to dinner.
"Maybe you should listen to them, Mom. Maybe you should take it a bit easier."
"Are you kidding me?" she said. "Do you think I am going to sit home because they say so?"
Throughout my life, she encouraged me to just do it! Should I go with my girlfriends to Jamaica for spring break? Absolutely. Should I go abroad to London to study? You have to. Should I leave my job? It's how you carve your next chapter. In the final years of her life, the thing she worried about most was my going off to run ultramarathons (race distances over 26.2 miles), a sport that commenced for me during the depths of her illness. She was always concerned for my safety. 48 miles into Destin 50 mile beach ultra, my girlfriend ran out onto the sand with her cell phone to tell me that my mother, who was on the line, wanted to talk to me. But I was too focused on finishing and assured her I would call her later, after the race. That was when I still believed there would always be a later to call her back. When she was in the clutches of her illness and I shared my life fears with her, she said, "What should I say?" and it humbled me. I was still tied to life, whereas she had crossed over to a world where mortality was a fact and everyday choices were not as dire. It was five months after her passing that I ran my fist 100-mile race, with my dad there to cheer me on. I never doubted for a minute that my mother was there with me. I knew that she would never let me go through that cold, rainy night alone in the Arizona Mountains. I trusted that she would infuse her grit in me, and that together, we would battle the miles. As rain plummeted, I felt her there, leading the way.
We never know in life if we did enough, were enough. We hope and pray, but our deepest thoughts are dark alleys that we rarely, if ever, let others travel. I knew my mother, but there's so much about her that I will never know. What it felt like to walk home from school in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn those winter days while her mom, a single mother, worked away. What it felt like to grow up without a dad -- to choose to never know him. I will never know what it felt like when chemo rushed through her or what it felt like for those joyous few months she went into remission and was free from the chore of cancer. We rarely know in life what is ahead of us. That's the good news at times, but also the hardest part of living.
The week prior to her departure, I felt her leaving me. It was mid-May. My birthday had recently passed, and right after it, Mother's Day. That June would mark her and my father's 50th wedding anniversary. That July, her 71st birthday. I had just returned from running a rough 50-mile race in the Florida Keys. It was rough because within my being, I knew it was time for her to go, and I was still clinging. Logically, I wanted her suffering to end. Selfishly, I wanted her for a few more years, months, days. That Friday, I sat with her for an hour mid-day, while she got a blood transfusion. "I'll miss you," she said. "I'll miss you, too," I said. When it was time for me to go back to work, she cried, and I couldn't hold back the tears. It was the first time in all of her years of survival that she had ever cracked in public. I canceled my next appointment and stayed on 30 minutes longer. I didn't want to leave her. But more than that, I didn't want her to leave me.
She passed away that Sunday afternoon, at home, in her bed. My father and I were in the kitchen at the time, chatting away, making plans for the future, while she headed off to her next chapter. I know that is just how she would have wanted it: all of us together, looking forward.