The only thing I knew about cancer when I was a kid was that you could die from it. Adults always explained cancer away as God’s will. I never had to meet it face-to-face and didn’t know it could touch the ones closest to me. Until it did. I was too young to feel anything when my dad’s father died from it about six years before my mother got sick in the summer of 1991. I remember my mother slowing down and not laughing as much. She had a cough that wouldn’t go away, and her energy decreased more and more by the month.
After a stay in the hospital for exhaustion, the doctors gave us the words we dreaded. “Cathy, you have colon cancer.”
I didn’t even know where on the body that was. I thought my mother would get better even if things might not be the same. I tried to do everything I could to make her feel happy while deeply burying my own fears. I thought that if I could make her laugh it would ease her pain, but I never knew how much pain she was in because she hid it from me.
Eventually, she stopped going to work. The physical demands and stress of her job at Rikers were far too much to bear. She began to have difficulty using the bathroom and climbing the stairs. Her appetite diminished almost to the point of nothing, and she had trouble digesting the food she did manage to eat. With my mother’s reality becoming bleak, Dad began showing up to help out around the house.
By April 1992, she could no longer be cared for at home and was admitted to St. John’s Hospital’s cancer ward. There she continued to wither away, like she was disappearing right in front of me . . . literally being erased from my life.
The thing that hurt the most was that she was barely able to speak. Her beautiful voice had been stolen from her, and she could only offer a whisper. It didn’t sound like Cathy; it was as if I were speaking to a stranger.
In the last few days of her life, I visited her nearly every day, and she tried to talk to me as much as she could. I could tell it was important for her. Sometimes she just whispered my childhood nickname over and over: “Mookah . . . Mookah . . . Mookah.” She did her best to muster every last bit of strength from her tired body.
One day near the end I was sitting on her hospital bed as she clutched my hand. It startled me because her grip was tighter than it had been in a while. She opened her eyes halfway and spoke. “Be nice to everyone, Mookah.”
My aunt and I got up and left the room so she could rest. I would never hear my mother speak again.
“She might be gone before we get home,” said Aunt JaNean, after talking with the doctors.
We drove home in silence. I could see the world pass by outside the car window. It was silent and cold to me. I felt so small and alone. I was afraid. What would I do? Where would I go? When we got home the phone rang as we climbed the stairs to the front door. Grandma Mildred rushed to answer it. She sat down in the kitchen, talking quietly. She hung up the phone. I stood in the doorway, looking at her with a blank face. “She’s gone,” Grandma said quietly. She began to pray.
I went upstairs, numb to everything around me, and sat on my bed. I picked up my basketball and left the house without anyone knowing. I sprinted up 131st, dribbling the whole way, the ball an extension of my hands. I got to the court and began to shoot. I took each shot desperately, as if each release of the basketball would somehow hold back the wave of pain and sadness that was heading my way.
I took shot after shot. The ball left my hand and floated, hanging there as if time didn’t matter, before falling through the rim. The same hand my mother had held for the last time just hours before. Another shot. Then another. I’d been there for an hour when word began to circulate through the neighborhood that Miss Cathy had gone away.
Then a strange thing happened. Slowly, people began showing up at the court. At first, they just watched. They were classmates, neighbors, and old hoopers who had never even spoken to me before. Then they began to join in one by one, most never speaking so much as a single word. There were hugs and embraces, but few words. I could feel everything they never said.
We got you. We are here with you, Mookah.
My mother’s funeral was a blur. I stared at the floor the entire time. I tried to block out the low sobs that cascaded from the first pew to the back row. I had been to funerals before where people were wailing and falling to their knees because a loved one had been taken too soon by the anger of the streets or the unforgiving finality of an anonymous bullet. But no one cried out at Mom’s funeral. No one asked God why. Except me, although I dared not say it out loud.
Death was a cage for me, but it was a release for my mother. It was simply God’s will. I guess didn’t need an adult to tell me that.
We got you. We are here with you, Mookah.
The neighborhood had my back. Queens had my back. For the first time in my life, basketball had saved me. I could feel it lift me off the ground.
If only for a moment.