Family Illness

I’m reading Anne Lamott’s biography “Traveling Mercies”. She grew up in an intelligent and somewhat dysfunctional family.

She was out of college when her father complained of feeling “odd” and said the words he would type came out very different from what he intended. He was diagnosed with a metastatic melanoma on the “word part” of his brain. He would have surgery to take out as much of the tumor as they could, but they couldn’t get it all (those brain tumors and cancers are nasty creatures with tentacles burrowing deep into all parts of a person’s brain). In addition, he had aggressive radiation and chemotherapy, and he would have one good year where he could “work on and off, walk every day, see his sons graduate, and his daughter publish a book”. As he declined, he was taken care of by his family until he lapsed into a coma and passed away.

Whenever I read stories of people who had brain tumors or brain cancer, I think of my mother and her short-lived experience with brain cancer. And now I realize it was short-lived for us, not her. She lived with it, suspecting, knowing something was wrong, and just said nothing. Nothing. She kept it tucked away and lived with it as her burden, so she wouldn’t burden us. 2 years? 3 years? I don’t know. But for us, we had eight weeks from her “diagnosis” to her death.

What would it have been like if she had said something maybe a year prior? Would surgery or chemotherapy have been available to her? It was Glioblastoma Multiforme after all, the nastiest of the nasty.

With eight weeks, my sisters, father, and I rallied around her and did what needed to be done. She was home with two aunts coming in every day while Dad and I went to work. In the evenings, he, my local sister, and I switched off, and on the weekends my out-of-state sister came to relieve us all. What would a one- or two-year journey have been like for her and for our family?

I have great empathy when I hear that people are going through illnesses with family members. I know the toll it can take on physical and mental health; with just eight weeks of it, I cannot imagine years’ worth.