There, I will stake my last like a woman of spirit … I am not born to sit still and do nothing. If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it.
—Mansfield Park
On a bright Friday morning my cell phone rang. I was in my bedroom and instinctively knew to sit down when I answered. When I’d flown home I’d arranged with the doctor to call me directly, and not my grandmother, as was her wish because if there was anything complicated she wanted me to understand and explain it to her. But the call came faster than I’d expected.
“It’s cancer,” the doctor said without hesitation. “I’m sorry. I’ve made your grandmother an appointment with an oncologist on Monday and he’ll explain the options to her. But where the tumor is, it’s very difficult to treat, especially at her age.”
I don’t remember what I said to him. I simply sat on my bed, half-dressed, and looked out my window at the trees blowing lightly in the breeze. I thought what a beautiful sunny day it was and I suddenly despised the perfect weather. I knew what I had to do. Nana, Iris, even my sister, Ann, didn’t need to know the truth, not right away. I wanted to give them one last weekend of believing there was hope.
When I came downstairs there was my grandmother on the sofa with her cookbook, plotting the weekend menus, which she now made solely for us since the pain in her mouth had made eating anything but soups and mashed potatoes impossible. Iris was sitting in the kitchen checking her lottery numbers yet again, still chasing a life of luxury. Right now the only luxury I wanted was time, time to spend every precious second with my grandmother.
“The jackpot is thirty-nine million dollars,” Iris announced as I came into the room and sat beside Nana. I held her hand; her skin was soft and warm. I’d always admired her hands; she had long thin fingers, “piano hands,” she would call them. But what I loved most was how elegant they looked. Even to dust or stir a pot, her hands were ladylike.
“Did you buy a ticket?” Iris asked.
“You know I didn’t,” I said but forced the irritation out of my voice. Now was not the time. “Do you want me to get you a ticket, Nana?”
“I’ve got mine, love,” she said sweetly and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.
“Do you want to come for a drive with me while I buy one?” I asked.
She looked up from her cookbook and gave me a puzzled look. Buying lottery tickets was out of character for me. But the great thing about my grandmother was she never asked questions. She always said that if I wanted to tell her something, I would.
It took all of five minutes to drive to the corner store and buy a ticket for the lottery. But I had another destination in mind.
“Want to go house hunting?” I asked, using our shorthand for driving around and picking out our “what if” homes.
“Yes!” she answered and clasped her hands together in excitement. I got behind the wheel and we were off. The weather was so oppressively lovely, we rolled down the windows and hung our elbows out as we cruised through neighborhood after neighborhood, street after street. We noted sale signs. We criticized poor taste. We discussed what we’d do if we won the lottery. We acted like there was a future with both of us in it.
“This is so nice,” she said wistfully. Her beautiful wrinkled face turned to the window, with a pensive expression that clouded her features. Was she worrying about her biopsy results? I wondered if she was afraid, like me, or if at ninety-three she was prepared for this. I wasn’t going to ask; there were too many beautiful homes for us to dream about.
Our drive took us into the countryside and onto a meandering dirt road. We passed farms with grazing cattle but eventually the road turned up a steep hill and ended at the driveway of a large Georgian-style mansion surrounded by fir trees. I stopped the car at the bottom of the drive. The rich red brick and black shutters were so welcoming. It looked lived in, it looked loved, the sort of house you’d want to spend your life in and you’d want to die in.
“Now, that’s what I call a home!” I said, grinning.
My grandmother nodded and pointed to the house. “You’ll have to marry a very rich man to live in a place like that.”
I chuckled, thinking of the article I had yet to start. “Nana, I think it’s too late for that. Rich men don’t want women my age.”
She turned to me, her expression serious. “It’s never too late, my love.” She smiled, her eyes never leaving mine. “Promise me, should anything happen to me, you’ll take care of yourself.”
“Don’t be silly,” I began, but she cut me off.
“Promise me!”
“Fine, Nana,” I teased, desperate to lighten the mood. “I promise to marry a rich man and live in a mansion.”
“Good girl,” she said with a laugh. “I just want to know you’ll be happy; that’s all the promise I need.”
Monday came abruptly and suddenly I was staring blankly as the cancer specialist sat perched on his black leather stool and gave my grandmother her prognosis. “You have tongue and throat cancer,” Dr. Wexler spoke succinctly. “We can’t operate.”
Nana sat facing Dr. Wexler as if she were a prisoner in an interrogation room. Iris, Ann, and I stood against the wall and listened, our arms folded, our backs stiff, as if we were police backup. But there was no good cop, bad cop, just a conviction and a death sentence.
“Are there any options?” Ann asked, her voice shaking as she spoke. “Treatment or something?”
He nodded. “We can do radiation. But it will be very painful,” he said solemnly. “And it will only prolong your grandmother’s life by maybe six months or a year.”
After he’d finished speaking my grandmother did what I had never seen her do in my nearly forty years—she cried in front of a stranger.
When she gathered herself, she said quietly, “I don’t want radiation. I want this to be over.”
I wanted to interrupt and force the doctor to convince her otherwise; even an extra six months would mean the world to me. But he listened to her, and he sympathized. I had known she was in pain but the extent of her suffering was only now clear. The tumor was torture and it hurt so much she wanted to die. Her mind was made up.
“I’ve had enough,” my grandmother repeated.
“I understand,” he said and put his hand on her knee. “You’re very brave.”
“Can you get rid of the pain?” Nana asked and rested her hand on his.
“We can give you morphine,” he explained.
I don’t remember the drive home from the hospital. I recall only a blur of passing scenery, each red light punctuating the reality as it sunk in. My grandmother was going to die. I had kept the secret to preserve my family’s hope for one last weekend. But I soon understood that by withholding the truth, by not saying “cancer” out loud, I had also given myself two more days of denial. We were in shock, all of us, but somehow my family picked up that it wasn’t as much of a shock to me.
“Did you know?” Nana asked me point blank.
“Friday, when the hospital called,” I confessed.
“You kept it to yourself?” Ann asked incredulously.
“I wanted you all to have one last weekend thinking everything was all right,” I admitted quietly.
Nana patted my thigh. “Thank you.” And that was the last we spoke of it.
We pulled into the driveway but no one got out of the car. We were frozen to our seats with no clue what to do next. After several minutes Nana sighed. “I need to lie down.”
“Why don’t I go and get your prescription?” Ann offered.
“Thanks, love,” Nana said softly. Glad to have a task to perform, Ann darted to the pharmacy. Her slamming of the car door jolted the rest of us into action. As if on cue, we unfastened our seat belts, the click, click, click, slam, slam, slam, providing the sound track to our slow march to the front door.
Once inside, Iris’s mood shifted. She shuffled through the day’s mail and, tucking an envelope under her arm, practically ran upstairs.
“What’s that about?” I asked when she was out of earshot.
“Your mother is having money troubles,” Nana explained as she tried to make herself comfortable on the sofa.
This revelation wasn’t exactly news. Iris had been known to splurge. Often it was a wardrobe binge that would take two years to pay off. Once it was kitchen gadgets and stainless-steel appliances, though she never cooked. Another time it was running up long-distance charges calling Tasmania to speak with a man she’d met online. A small part of me was curious as to what bills she’d run up this time, but before I could ask, Ann returned with the morphine.
“This should help,” she said as she held the full dropper up to my grandmother. Nana opened her mouth, letting the tiny droplets fall onto her tongue.
“I’m going to my room to lie down,” she said softly and went upstairs for a nap.
Ann and I sat in the living room listening to each muffled step. When her door closed, Ann burst into tears. We are not an affectionate family by any means. We greet each other with the requisite hug and kiss but otherwise we aren’t big on physical displays. So when Ann collapsed on the sofa in sobs, I just sat there and watched.
“I know, this sucks,” I said, obviously. “I was a wreck all weekend. Still am.”
When at last Ann wiped away her tears, I sat down and put my arm around her. That’s when Iris came into the room, her purse over her shoulder; from her eyes I could see that she, too, had spent the past half hour crying.
“I’m going out,” she said and left without even looking at us.
“Bingo?” Ann asked after Iris had gone.
“What else?” I said. “At least she has some distraction. Maybe we should all take up bingo.”
“I couldn’t afford it,” Ann said matter-of-factly. “Not the way Mom plays.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went with her once and she spent close to a thousand dollars in one sitting.”
I was taken aback.
“Do you think she spends that much every time she goes?” I asked.
“I have no idea, why?”
“Nana said she was having money trouble,” I admitted. “What else does she spend money on but bingo?”
“And slot machines,” Ann reminded me.
Iris also took regular bus excursions to local casinos. I had thought it was just a good way for her to get out of the house.
“Do you think she has a gambling problem?” I asked, suddenly horrified.
Ann shrugged and changed the subject. “I brought over a new marinade to try,” she said and crossed the room to her overnight bag. She pulled out a mason jar containing a thick greenish substance with flecks of herbs in it.
“You’re doing marinades, too?” I said, part of me relieved to be discussing something else besides my grandmother’s cancer and my mother’s mysterious debt.
“Why not? Everyone is marinading now,” she said with authority. “Besides, I want five products to take to the National Food Fair in Chicago.”
I vaguely recalled this goal of Ann’s. It was supposedly a big deal for food producers because lots of grocery chains and specialty food store buyers showed up.
“When is it again?”
“January,” she said quietly. Neither of us spoke but I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing. Would our grandmother be alive then?
“Marianne is going to have her baby soon and I’ll need another lasagna,” I said sadly. It was strange the way things pop into your head during a crisis. Who cared about lasagna? Yet it was suddenly an insurmountable problem and I wondered how I’d cope trying to make one on my own. Ann touched my shoulder, understanding what I was saying.
“Don’t worry, there’s lots of sauce around here,” she said and opened one of the kitchen cupboards to illustrate her point. It was stacked with jars of the stuff. “I can help you.”
Ann moved in with us, and the extra pair of hands was needed far sooner than anyone imagined. The cancer seemed to have a life of its own, a parasite with a schedule. We had found Nana a palliative-care doctor who made house calls, which had become necessary because she became so incredibly thin and much too weak to travel. It was as if the diagnosis had slashed away every ounce of will she had. She accepted her impending death stoically, telling us that everyone’s time came and that after ninety-three years she was ready.
I wasn’t so ready. Every night before I went to bed, I kissed my grandmother’s forehead and turned off her light, but she no longer had a book in her hands. The morphine had seen to it that she didn’t need to read to fall asleep.
I buried myself in Pride and Prejudice, but even Austen held little solace for me. I found myself reading the same page ten times before giving up and instead, staring at the Smoked Trout walls until the color became a pinkish-gray blur, I switched off my light.