Written by Kate Dernocoeur, this essay was first published in the anthology, Saying Goodbye, edited by Julie Rember and Mike O’Mary (Downers Grove, IL: Dream of Things, 2010)
It was midafternoon Wednesday in January when the phone rang. The winter light through the windows was clinical white, and I was alone in the house. It was the doctor.
“Just wanted to let you know...” he began. I could sense warmth in his voice, a smile. I sat up straighter, pressed the receiver against my ear. “Your pregnancy test was positive.”
It is a cruel and relentless joke, infertility. Anyone I’ve met—then or since—who is stuck in this unwelcome club calls it infertility shit, and for us, six years after our wedding, four years since we started “trying,” it was finally over. Recent weeks of fatigue and a sudden aversion to the smell of diesel and the taste of radishes vindicated years of taking my basal temperature before moving in the morning, charting hormonal currents, love-making on a schedule, one surgery for Jim, two for me.
No more would we have to endure the probing questions: “When you gonna have kids? You guys are trying...aren’t you?” Or the outright push—“Have you heard? Mary’s daughter is having another baby!”—from parents pressured by the notion of grandparenting.
The day of the phone call, Jim was away on business. He wouldn’t be home until Saturday, and I wanted to tell him in person. Although I was at home by myself, I realized I was not alone. It was me and—who? A girl? A boy? Didn’t matter. I nicknamed whoever it was “The Cub” and for those several days, it was just the two of us. I laughed, cried, danced to gentle music, imagining the days and years ahead.
A couple of weeks later, my mother’s right kidney was removed. A biopsy had suggested cancer. I wonder now why something that in most families would create a tsunami of concern barely caused a ripple in ours. Maybe it was because she was a surgical veteran: two total hip replacements, knee surgery, ankle surgery. In typical fashion, she had shrugged off the news that the blood in her urine would involve an operation that would leave her with a scar that looked like they tried to cut her in half. Her philosophy, and thus ours, was that they’d take out the kidney and that would be that.
The evening before the surgery, we visited her in the hospital. She was pale, and seemed small lying against the white sheets. The head of the bed was raised and she was resting, but as soon as she saw us, she transformed into her favorite role: hostess. First came her famous smile, then the inevitable questions: How are you? What’s new? Are you going to the mountains this weekend? I’d long-since figured out her method—pitching questions until they led to an interesting conversation. I interrupted her.
“There’s something we want you to know before tomorrow,” I said. I was probably sitting on the edge of her bed, might even have been holding her hand. By then, I had learned to touch people, to hug, things I’d never done willingly as a kid.
She looked at me, curious, her eyes squinting a little. “Okay...” she said, pulling the word out long.
“Well, it’s just that normally, we’d wait another month or so before telling,” I said, “but in September, you’re going to be a grandma.”
My mother’s name was Janet. I began calling her that, usually, instead of “mom” after she remarried and took on four grown stepchildren who called her by name. By the time 1986 rolled around, I was 32, and time had ironed out most of the wrinkles of my childhood. We were both too busy with our adult lives to hold grudges over old bumps and bruises.
The pathology report after surgery suggested that her cancer was gone. We were told there was no need for chemo, no need for radiation. With her typical get-on-with-it approach to life, Janet regained her strength and resumed her routines. As she healed that spring and summer, my own abdomen swelled until we were finally able to share the news with everyone. I quit my job as a paramedic; it was not worth the risk of being out in the knife and gun club of the Denver streets.
“Let’s do a mother-daughter overnight before the baby arrives,” she said in August, “just the two of us.” We had started doing such things now and then. I had even started looking forward to such times.
So we booked a night at a bed and breakfast in the Colorado foothills. The plan was to leave the city mid-afternoon, poke around the town of Evergreen, eat out, and spend the night in a cabin by a river outside town. It would be a relief to escape the searing heat of Denver.
It was only a 30-minute drive, but she must have asked me the same question four times. It might have been about whether I knew the way to the B&B, or what names we were thinking for the baby. I knew the way, and she knew we had decided not to reveal the names we were considering until we told the baby first—she’d known that for weeks. I remember thinking, “Why is she asking me this again?”
Then, when we were browsing the quaint shops in town, a different question got stuck on recycle. I’d answer, we’d wander some more, then she’d repeat the question. At dinner, it happened again. She would ask something, maybe about whether we had purchased a certain stroller, or my next doctor’s appointment. I’d answer, we’d eat some, and then again, the same question. It got annoying.
After dinner, I sat on the porch of the cabin as daylight faded, watching the stream. My feet were perched on the porch railing, and I lounged as comfortably as I could beneath my near-term baby belly. There had been some upset words, and I was trying to calm down by slowly breathing the mountain air tinged with the scent of pine.
Janet was fussing inside the cabin; I could hear her moving around, perhaps unpacking. Everything felt off-kilter. Was it then that the word “Alzheimer’s” first invaded my mind? Well, her birthday was just a couple of weeks away, and she was turning sixty. Birthdays were always a big deal and this one involved extra-big plans. Her brother was even flying in from Massachusetts. After her birthday, I thought, I’ll think about this again.
At bedtime, things were more cordial, but still strained. Just before we turned off the wall lamp hanging precariously on the varnished pine paneling, Janet suddenly turned and walked over to me like a penitent with an offering. She thrust a small white box into my hands and mumbled some words about wanting me to have something special to remember this time of my life, meaning, I think, the part where I was about to become a mother myself.
Inside, I found the beautiful, thick, gold-link bracelet chain with a disk charm that I had always loved on her. I had never imagined I’d own it. My father had given it to her around the time I was born, she said, and now she wanted me to have it. To this day, I regret not thanking her fittingly when I put it around my wrist.
Janet was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts banker, an ancestor of Mayflower stock and Revolutionary War generals. As such, she dutifully learned the rules of society: be a good daughter (more than that – be a perfect daughter); join the Junior League (better yet, be an officer); stage a memorable social debut (and be the most dazzling girl at the debutante party).
She was in the generation of young women in the 1940s who were allowed to go to college, but not encouraged to do too well. She went for an associates degree from Briarcliff Junior College, where she was a member of the choir and the chorus, served on both the Athletic Board and the War Service Board. She was president of the freshman class and edited the yearbook senior year. But most importantly, she went there because she could easily get away to the Yale or Princeton football game, or up to Williams for the weekend.
The real job of college girls in those days was to find a man, get married, have babies. She had an impressive string of boyfriends with good names. Janet chose my father after just six dates one romantic Cape Cod summer because he was dashing, and because it was still patriotic for a girl to marry a soldier home from the war. My father married her because she was the most beautiful, the most popular, and always the most fun at a party. At their wedding in 1950, her satin dress was rimmed with pearls, and they were each surrounded by seven attendants. There was a printed guide to the festivities that swirled for days around the main event. The nuptials were mentioned in the Worcester Telegram, the Boston Globe, the New York Times.
But then came the dusty brown of west Texas, where her husband’s work took them. The demands of his newly-founded company meant he was seldom home, and when the kids came—my brother in Dallas, and me, two years later in Denver—the belle of the ball was two thousand miles from anything familiar. She was terrified of the fragility of babies, of my toddler brother, of the specter of germs in the era of polio.
When my own husband proposed marriage, we were camping for five days in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. We were standing on the Continental Divide on a windless summer evening. Maybe it’s best that the camera malfunctioned and only in my mind’s eye can I still see the hues of an unusually grand sunset.
I don’t remember Jim’s exact words, but when “married” was one of them I was only mildly surprised. I’d met Jim seven months earlier, when I was new to the Denver Paramedic Division and he had moved into a room in the household I was sharing with a couple of other medics. As we went from being roommates to being in love, he was resoundingly clear about one thing: “I want kids. The woman I marry has to want kids, too.”
Jim grew up in a place alien to me: a happy, loving home. None of his family lore involved shouting or fighting, was ever about tension or meanness. In his stories, dinner never ended in abrupt, angry departures from the table. Never were the children sent off as a matter of routine to boarding school.
“Who would send a child away?” he said. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
“It was just how things were. It was normal,” I tried to explain. I grew up expecting to go to boarding school. I looked forward to it. Boarding school was my ticket out.
“Why wouldn’t you want to see your own kids grow up?” he asked.
Why indeed.
So by the time his proposal at sunset on the Continental Divide came along, I—who had never wasted time as a little girl imagining my wedding day or entertaining the notion of being a wife or mother—had learned that happy, close, loving families weren’t just Leave It To Beaver lies. His parents had chosen to have seven children for no better reason than because they loved them. Children there weren’t simply part of the script, a byproduct, a nuisance. They didn’t know that they should be seen and not heard.
At sunset on the Continental Divide, I was ready. I said, “yes.”
When I was six, my family moved to New England from Colorado. We lived in a cozy red farmhouse on Ingham Hill Road. There were neighbors, lots of kids, softball games in the goat pasture. There were paths in the woods, and Concord grapes you could reach from your bike along the road in fall, and a horse up the street that you could ride if you could catch it. There were sledding parties, birthday parties, skating parties on the pond.
When I was a kid, my mother worked a self-appointed job: full-time volunteer. In those times, it was the only option for a woman like her. Nature centers, Girl Scouts, Planned Parenthood, other causes consumed her time and attention. Before email or answering machines, she had a knack for pulling off fundraisers and consciousness-raising campaigns. Because of this, she was perpetually on the phone, twirling a clump of hair around her middle finger, around and around. She did it without realizing. The more intense the telephone conversation, the faster the finger twirled around the snatch of bobbed hair.
When I was in elementary school, I imagined that I could be the one to help her break this annoying habit. “Don’t twirl your hair!” I’d stage-whisper as I brushed past her on my way in from the school bus, my book bag bumping her sort of on purpose. She never greeted the school bus. I think she meant to. Instead, she tried to fit in just one more phone call. I’d walk in and there she’d be, standing beside her cluttered desk next to our cramped dining room, phone to her ear, twirling her hair. She might raise her eyebrows in silent greeting and throw me a smile, or maybe not. She seldom sat down, just hovered over the mess of papers, leaned over now and then to make notes. Did other mothers bake cookies and have a snack with their kids when they came in from school? That wasn’t her thing. Come to think of it, I don’t remember her ever baking cookies. And she never did stop twirling her hair.
When I was twelve, my grandfather died and suddenly we could afford a big grey stone house on tony River Road that my father had admired for years. It wasn’t visible from the road—the sweeping, curving driveway was a third of a mile long—but he’d seen it from his boat when he was doing research on the Connecticut River. To my parents, it was a dwelling worthy of their birthright, but gone for me were the sledding hill, the nearby friends, the skating pond, the neighborhood horse.
It was the era of nightly cocktails. I grew up hearing the chink-tinkle of ice filling a highball glass and the drone of conversation punctuated by high-pitched laughter. My mother had a way of turning every gathering into a good party. The role of hostess filled her up. When she entered a room, heads always turned to see who had come in. From the edge of things, I always wondered how she did it.
At River Road, cocktails were served on a silver tray, either out on one of the grey stone patios in good weather or in the large living room with floor-to-ceiling windows if the weather was bad. Either way, the river view was perfect.
Because my brother was already away at boarding school, I was the only kid around. I’d take a break from homework, wander into the party, say hello. I did this half out of boredom and half because it was expected of me. I could have perfect manners and still be thinking how much I hated being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. After a while, I turned it into a private game: I’d drum up future identities that I never intended—lawyer, doctor, aeronautical engineer. I could say anything, and did, and still the guests would nod, smile, act impressed. And ask me again at the next party.
Somehow I always knew even as a kid that this was all a script for my parents’ generation. Grow up, go to college, get married, have kids, live happily ever after. During the Fifties and early Sixties, everyone was trying to measure up to an impossible ideal. I was just part of an agenda, a vague social obligation.
Much later, when I was married and Janet somehow imagined I’d understand, we had a talk. I don’t remember how she broached the subject, but I know there was no careful build-up. She just launched into it, like a confession: she hadn’t wanted a second child. She hadn’t wanted the baby who became me.
I wasn’t surprised. Somehow, I had always known that had Janet married twenty years later, after the hippies and the women’s movement and Roe v Wade, I would never have happened at all. Intellectually, from the perspective of a grown woman, I could sympathize with what being a young mother had been like for her, coping with her disillusionment and my difficult brother, and west Texas. I could understand not wanting another child when the one you have is running roughshod over you in a place without friends or family. She told me how she had done things like push a heavy car out of the mud, exercise viciously, hit herself. I came anyway.
My mother never got over not wanting that pregnancy, tried hard to make up for it. She’d drive three hours to visit me at summer camp, watch me ride in horse shows. My friends all loved how attentive she was to them, how she always arrived with coolers brimming with picnic fixings. “Your mom is so cool!” they’d say. I’d wish I could agree, but even then there was a dead place inside where feeling treasured should have been.
Three weeks after the overnight in Evergreen, the big sixtieth birthday weekend was finally upon us. I hadn’t spoken to Janet much since then, mostly because I knew I’d see her that Friday—September 12—for lunch. A long-time friend had proposed a quiet get-together at her home in the country, just the three of us, before the weekend’s bigger festivities.
I arrived at noon. Cynthia and I chatted a few minutes, then went to her patio to wait for Janet. A half hour later, no Janet. We went to the kitchen telephone to call her house. No answer. We returned to the patio.
In another half hour, we’d run out of baby things to chat about, and I must have said, “Well, this isn’t like Mom to be so late. I know she was planning to be here. We talked about it yesterday.”
Could there have been an accident? A flat tire?
We called my stepfather. He hadn’t heard from her.
“You know,” said Cynthia, “I hope she’s OK. She’s been sort of... odd lately.”
I nodded. I had noticed. We began to compare notes. Janet had been forgetful. There were inappropriate outbursts. I told Cynthia how she kept repeating herself in Evergreen. The idea of calling the Alzheimer’s people after the birthday weekend returned to mind. I rested my 40-weeks-distended belly on my lap, felt hot and more than a little bothered.
Finally, she wandered in. We heard her enter the house, and we turned to greet her. And then she said in a small voice, “Am I late?”
As she came out into the light of the patio, I remember thinking, she looks so frail, so confused. Clearly, she was exhausted.
“Where have you been?” I was relieved, angry, baffled.
“I don’t know. I just couldn’t seem to get here.” She’d been coming to this house for decades.
She sat. We sat. No one knew what to say, there on the patio, framed by the cloudless Colorado sky. To say, “something seems wrong” would alter our world. The day was too nice. This was supposed to be a celebration.
After a lifetime in which Janet was the go-to woman, I tried convincing myself that this wasn’t happening. I remember thinking, Why doesn’t she take charge? I had a sensation of being on a threshold I didn’t want to cross. I sat frozen. Our hostess clearly didn’t feel it was her business to take the lead, so it fell to me. How to begin? All I could do was push over the edge—falling off a waterfall must be easier. Finally, I said, “Mom, something’s not right.”
We talked. I could tell she had probably known something was wrong in the three weeks since our overnight, but hadn’t dared admit it, even to herself.
“I’ll call Dr. Eiseman,” I finally said, getting up. Contacting our close family friend, a surgeon, was always a first step at a time like this. I left Janet, looking alarmingly tiny in her deck chair, in the sun with Cynthia, and retreated to the kitchen. The old-fashioned receiver hanging on the pastel wall phone was comfortably weighty in my hand. The long coil of phone cord swung heavily against my leg as I dialed. While I waited for the connection, I could hear Janet and Cynthia’s muted voices outside.
I got through to Dr. Eiseman right away. Standing there, linked by the phone cord to a person I knew I could trust, I explained what had happened. I told him about Janet’s changing personality over the past few weeks, about her being late and confused, about how exhausted she seemed. His reply was unhesitant: “This is metastatic brain cancer until proven otherwise.”
The cool, dim kitchen exploded bright and hot. He’s got to be over-reacting, I thought. How can he say such a thing?
But he was so sure. Somehow, I got back out to the deck.
“Mom, he said to come to the hospital.”
The silence during the drive was broken only by the fan set high, blowing cold. The windows were up, and in the passenger seat a woman I barely recognized sat still, like an obedient child, staring ahead, hands folded in her lap. We did not speak. When I glanced sideways at her, I could see nothing of the woman who was my mother, only an abruptly ancient person. She was as unfamiliar as a hitchhiker. Ahead, the asphalt shimmered in the mid-September Colorado sun, but we were chilled by the air conditioning and the unknown.
A few hours later, I leaned against the wall of a side hallway where I’d ducked away from the rest of the E.R. for a few minutes. The cool ceramic tiles felt good, siphoning the heat off my back. I had told my mother I was going to see whether the CT scan was back yet, but really, I just needed a break. Because the head of the emergency department was my husband’s boss, because the director of nursing was a close friend, because I had come through those doors a thousand times in my own work as a paramedic, it had been an overwhelming parade of well-wishers wearing their professional game-faces.
But it was quiet that Friday, and the ER was dead. The CT scan of my mother’s head seemed to be the most interesting thing going on. It would arrive soon, and nurses, doctors, even clerks, were gathering nearby.
I wrapped my arms around my belly, held it like a schoolgirl’s armload of books. I was full-term, due Monday. I flattened my aching low back against the cool tiles. For a few minutes, I stood motionless, staring vaguely at something far away in the off-white linoleum floor.
Someone in a white lab coat arrived with the films and slipped them into the opaque clips of the backlight with that unmistakably efficient sound. The group pressed forward to see the film. They were huddled in front of me, and I had to stand on tiptoe to see.
“Look at that...” someone muttered. Even to the untrained eye, the two large tumors were obvious, like translucent white eggs nestling in the murky shadows of her brain.
Time, motion, sound stopped. For a moment, there was only that hallway, and the ghostly light, and the people staring into it, mesmerized. Then the group disbanded, walking past me, eyes down, summoned by sudden and indistinct urgencies.
What I had been trying to see as I rested against the cool tiles of the hallway was the future. I wondered what it would be like to see my child learn to smile, to sit, get teeth, speak, feed herself, walk. At the same time, I wondered, what it would be like as Janet gradually stopped speaking, walking, feeding herself. She would eventually just sit, then stay in bed all the time, become increasingly vacant. One day, she would be gone.
The birthday parties were cancelled, of course. The oncologist started radiation and they gave her diuretics and other medications, returning Janet to near-normal by the end of the week. My due date came and went, but it didn’t matter. On Wednesday, I arrived to take Janet for radiation, only to discover she had walked away from the hospital. The police found her four hours later, sleeping on the porch of a house four blocks away.
By Friday, Janet was like new. “You ready to go home?” I asked, and was rewarded by a clear-eyed, rested, with-it, “yes!” She was walking strongly and the vagueness was gone. There was a lightness to the day that went beyond the perfect weather. We settled her at home in the care of my stepdad. Then Jim and I went home for some time to ourselves. That evening, we were watching a movie when my turn came. We drove back to Rose Hospital, so I could be admitted to Labor and Delivery. The next day, at 8:08 p.m., I became a mother.
Was there something to it that Janet, who always loved a good party, died on St. Patrick’s Day? Was there something to it that we buried her ashes three days later, on the first day of spring, the day my daughter was eighteen months old? Every year, these dates loom large. Every year, I think about that pivotal time.
The morning Janet died, I planned to be with her at the inpatient hospice where she’d been for six months, but the babysitter was late. The morning was warm, spring-like. Sunlight was streaming in the kitchen’s bay window when I answered the phone at about 9:30. When I hung up after hearing the news, the sun had disappeared, obscured by a sudden shower of huge white snowflakes, like a snow globe. Each flake wavered back and forth, slowly, dropped lightly to the ground. For just a couple of minutes, the snow shower filled the bay window, and then it was gone, like a whisper.