It’s technically spring but it feels like winter. That terrible time of year when the holiday decorations are long since gone and the ever-increasing afternoon light fools you into feeling hopeful that the blood-chilling cold will fade overnight like magic, as it sometimes does. But it hasn’t yet. And I’m home from college — not because I’m on break, but because my mother has cancer.
I’m twenty-one years old. Emotionally, I’m … oh, eleven? I don’t know it yet but I’m an alcoholic. (I’ll make this fun discovery and get sober three years later.) At this point, I’m drinking a bottle of cheap wine by myself every night just to make the very cruel voices in my head go to sleep. Luckily, I fall asleep with them. I wake up every morning and the voices are back. Luckily, I know I can drink again that night. It’s a good system, I think. Or, good enough. Reliable, anyway. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s all I know.
I’m in an impressive amount of denial about how unhealthy I am, how basically doomed I am, how I’m swapping out my dreams for $7 lukewarm rosé that comes in a box. (Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it!) (Actually, knock it — don’t try it.)
My mother has the best sense of humor of anyone I know — an uncanny ability to find the funny in almost any situation, the darker the better. One time she threw a Stalag 17 theme party. No occasion — she just loves the movie Stalag 17. She made a cake with a POW camp on top, complete with barbed wire and little toy soldiers standing guard as other toy soldiers try to scale the fence and escape into war-ridden Germany. She invited her friends and my friends. Our friends were confused. Mom and I yucked it up.
But Mom isn’t laughing now. She’s asleep in her hospital bed. I’m glad she’s asleep. She’s exhausted. She’s had an awful week: a hysterectomy a few days ago to treat cervical cancer, which unexpectedly revealed masses of ovarian cancer, too. We’re waiting for more tests results, to determine essentially what kind of life Mom will lead from here on out: one in which she’ll have to succumb to vicious rounds of treatment to end up ultimately very likely okay — or one in which she will have to start saying her goodbyes.
I’ve taken the bus over here from the apartment I grew up in on the Upper West Side, every morning since the procedure. I try to arrive early, since my mother told me they wake her up around five. I stay with her until she falls asleep. My sister is still a kid — ten years younger than me — and my father is charged with caring for her while I care for Mom. I am trying to be helpful, however I can be. And I don’t know how I can be. Because the only tool I have for soothing myself is $7 box-wine rosé.
What’s that? My mother’s roommate on the other side of the curtain. What is she saying? Muttering in her sleep. The painkillers make her somewhat delirious, I think. She’s in worse shape than Mom. She’s older — maybe seventy. Bald, from chemo. Years of it, maybe. Alone. Where’s her family? No one’s visited her yet, the entire time I’ve been here. Maybe she’s been here so long — maybe in and out, so many times — that they’ve all grown tired of coming. How sad. I don’t know. I’m just making stuff up. Mom is sleeping, and I’m thinking of stories. I wish I could actually write down stories. But I can’t. Because I’m drunk or hung over all of the time.
A noise — a voice, on the other side of the curtain. A nurse? A visitor! The roommate does have a family. Could it be — what if it’s — oh God, wouldn’t it be funny— am I a terrible person if I — oh God, I wish it were her son! Her cute, college-age son — maybe older — just a bit older — someone I could flirt with — sneak off with — kiss a little bit, even, in the handicap bathroom! And then —
What’s wrong with you?
The voice in my head. The cruel one — one of them, anyway. Only this time I can’t make it go away. Because there’s no rosé here. There’s just me and Mom.
What is wrong with me? What am I doing? Sitting here in a visitor’s chair at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, looking at my sleeping mother — so pale and small in her wrinkled hospital gown — fantasizing about having an affair with the imaginary son of my mother’s roommate in the oncology ward.
I’m sick.
I hate myself. I listen to the voices on the other side of the curtain while I sit here, hating myself. It is the roommate’s son, I think — but he doesn’t sound cute at all. He sounds old. Middle-aged. Angry. I don’t want to have an affair with this guy. I just want to sit here, hating myself.
You’re sick. The voice in my head is so mean! But it’s right. But then —
Another voice. Again, in my head. But it’s new — or maybe not new. Maybe old — but new to me, in a way, since I’m not used to it. Because it is so much quiet than the other one, than the very cruel voice — than all of the cruel ones. And it says: You’re sick, okay, but you’re not bad. You’re just scared, that’s all. And that’s okay.
And it also says: This would be a good premise for a play.
And the other voice says: We’re not here to think of ideas for plays! We’re here to take care of Mom.
And the other voice says: But maybe we can do both. Maybe Mom would want it that way.
And the other voice says: Who are we kidding? We don’t even write plays!
And the other voice says: But maybe we can.
And before the other voice, the cruel one — or one of the many cruel ones — can pipe up:
Mom’s awake.
And I look at her. And I suddenly sort of know what to do.
This is a beautiful hospital — the walls are a soft pink, adorned with photographs and paintings of flowers so succulent you can almost smell them; but when you do inhale, it’s the chemicals in the air you smell: the disinfectant, the metallic aftermath of so many drugs being pumped into so many veins, in so many rooms, all over this floor. And I know in this moment that my mom just wants company. That she just wants my company. That she just wants me. That even though I don’t know how to soothe her, I do, sort of — because all I have to do is be with her. Is be myself. Because it’s me that she loves — even if I do drink a bottle of rosé by myself every night and even if I do feel utterly unequipped to take care of her and even if I was just sitting here imagining a passionate embrace with a man who doesn’t exist on the other side of this curtain so that I could escape this unbearably painful reality, that’s the part of me that Mom loves most of all, maybe. Because that’s the part of me that comes from her. The part that can find light — find the funny, even — in the most horrific of circumstances.
And maybe that’s the part that I like, too.
“Do you want some water?” I ask my mom. She nods. And I bring her some. And turn on the TV. Our favorite show: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. We take turns betting on which episode this one is (we’ve seen them all): the one where the AIDS patient screws half the men in New York City as part of a twisted plot to spew disease to the farthest corners of the earth? The one where the young woman with Down syndrome is forced to have sex with her boss when he tells her it’s “exercise”? The one where —
Oh my, and now we’re laughing! We’re laughing, here in the hospital. On the other side of the curtain, the roommate and son get quiet. What are they laughing about? They might be thinking. Or maybe not. Maybe the roommate has fallen asleep. Maybe the son is fantasizing about having an affair with me! Probably not. Probably he’s not that fucked up. Probably that’s just me. And probably that’s okay.
And Mom and I are still laughing. And we watch Law & Order. A commercial comes on. Mom dozes off again; the sun starts to fade. I don’t like the darkness — it makes me want to drink. But at least the sun is setting later and later these days. And even though it doesn’t feel like it, soon I know that it will be spring. And Mom won’t be in the hospital forever. And if we’re lucky, she won’t have cancer forever. And maybe I won’t be sick forever, either — with whatever it is that’s wrong with me. And maybe, maybe, I can even —
It’s back! SVU. I watch, while Mom sleeps. And I reach out. And I hold her hand.
—Halley Feiffer, February 2018