ChapterNine
ONE MORE DAY
Luca
Iwas a senior in high school when my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It seemed like it came out of nowhere. I had been talking to a Marine Corps recruiter the day that my mom got the news. She waited until I was home to tell me what the doctor said. It came as a shock to both of us. She was younger than most people with the disease.
“I haven’t signed anything yet,” I said. “I don’t have to join the Marine Corps. I’ll stay home and I’ll take care of you.”
She shook her head. “Don’t put your life on hold for me.”
That request made no sense to me because I didn’t see it as putting my life on hold for her. She was my mother, and she was all that I had. She had stayed strong and taken care of me when my father left. I refused to abandon her now that she needed me to take care of her.
“I’m not leaving until you’re better.”
She reached across the dining room table and clasped her hands over mine. When she spoke, her voice was soft but sure. “I’m not going to get better.”
“Don’t say that. People survive cancer all the time these days. You’ll do chemotherapy, won’t you?”
“I’ve discussed my options with the doctor,” she said. “I’m getting a second opinion, but Luca, it’s not good news. People don’t survive pancreatic cancer. Even with chemotherapy, the prognosis isn’t good.”
My throat tightened, making it difficult to speak. “How long do you have? A year? Two?”
She closed her eyes, and I watched as a couple of tears slipped down her cheeks. “Months, probably. Chemo might make me feel better, and it might help me live a little longer, but the doctor doesn’t … the doctor doesn’t…” She broke off on a sob. I held her hand tighter. When she began again, her voice was barely audible. “The doctor says that I would be lucky to make it past April.”
My mother’s second opinion confirmed the first doctor’s diagnosis. I was in denial those first couple of weeks after we got the news. She didn’t seem like she was sick enough to be dying. I was afraid that if she started chemotherapy, it would change her. I guess I was afraid that her doctors were wrong, and that she was healthy, and chemotherapy would only weaken her. But it wasn’t long before the cancer began to show its ugly face.
After I missed several days of school to take care of her, she insisted that I not miss another day. I argued with her about it. I only had so much time left with her, and I didn’t want to waste it by spending the better part of the day away from her. The chemotherapy made her feel a little better though, and she became determined to outlive the doctor’s prognosis by at least another month. She told me that her only goal was to live long enough to watch me graduate high school. She told me that if I didn’t show up to school every day, I would be taking that away from her. I stopped arguing with her after that.
It was hard to write mean letters to Naomi while I was watching my mother get weaker every day. When my father left, I had used my letters to Naomi as a pseudo punching bag. The letters were how I vented the anger he had left me with. But when my mother got sick, when it became clear that she was slowly dying, I didn’t feel that same anger. She wasn’t choosing to leave me. She was being taken away from me against her will.
When my mother got sick, Naomi’s letters became a much-needed distraction.
Dear Naomi,
You’re not going to get into any of the colleges you applied for because you’re not as smart as you think you are. Your parents and your teachers have been lying to you all these years. You probably aren’t even going to graduate. The principal is going to let you get all the way to the stage, and when they announce your name, instead of congratulating you like all the other students, they’re going to say that you failed and you need to start high school all over. All four years of it. It’s going to be really embarrassing, but not really that surprising to me.
Love,
Luca
When I wasn’t at school or acting as chef or chauffer for my mother, I sometimes found myself visiting Naomi’s Facebook page. I looked through all of the photos I had seen a hundred times before as well as the new ones I hadn’t seen yet. She posted something new almost every day. I wondered if she knew that her private thoughts were available to the whole world. I wondered if she knew that I could read all of these things that she didn’t include in her letters. Sometimes what she wrote was funny, sometimes it was an update about what she planned to do that day, and sometimes she vented about something someone had done to hurt her. Between snooping through her Facebook page, and the letters she had been sending to me since fifth grade, I felt like I knew her. I doubted that her friends knew just how dark her sense of humor was.
I felt a little jealous every time she posted a photo of her and some guy. I guess he was her boyfriend because some of her updates were about him. I wondered if she would stop writing to me if she knew how much time I spent looking at her photos and reading the things she wrote on her Facebook page. Sometimes I went to bed imagining that it was me holding her in that photo she posted.
Early one morning before my mother woke up, I typed my father’s name in the search bar on Facebook, but I couldn’t find a profile for him. I tried calling his old cellphone number, but the call went straight to someone else’s voicemail. I knew it would. It’s not like this was the first time I had tried his old number.
I didn’t miss him. He had made his choice. I threw my phone down on the bed and watched as it bounced off and hit the wall before settling on the floor. It wasn’t fair that my father left me to deal with this all on my own. I hated that he was out there somewhere having the time of his life without a care in the world about what my mother and I were dealing with.
I picked up my phone and saw that there was a new crack in the screen. I kicked the side of my bed and cursed. I was angry at my phone, at my father, and in that moment, I was even angry with my mother.
I was angry with myself for even having that last thought. I was angry at the cancer, not at her. And I was angry that I wished my father was here and helping us through it. We didn’t need him. I just wished that he would call.
My mother’s health had deteriorated further by the end of April. She wasn’t supposed to make it to May, but she was holding onto life as tightly as she could. She was adamant about living long enough to see me graduate. When she flipped the calendar to May, we felt like we had reached a milestone. She had surpassed her life expectancy, if only by a day.
And then another day passed, and another, and before we knew it, we were reaching the end of May. She wasn’t getting better. There was a hospice nurse in our house most days. It was her job to make sure that my mother was comfortable. Every day was merely another day of survival, another day of wondering if this would be the last.
On the morning of my graduation, she gave me a hug with tears in her eyes. She was so weak that I barely felt her arms around me. It was the first time she had managed to get out of bed in several days.
