My mother's cancer diagnosis hit me all the harder when I learned of the then very slim survival rate for sufferers of lung cancer: between five and ten percent. The grief was mixed with a certain anger. She had long been a heavy smoker. I remember when I was as young as nine years old being sent to the corner store at night, after dark, to buy her cigarettes because she couldn't be bothered to make the effort. Naturally I would also get bread or tomatoes or lettuce or whatever she told me to get in order to justify purchasing her cigarettes for her, and sometimes I was even allowed to get a chocolate bar or a box of Smarties. I remember this time as a kind of early initiation to young adulthood. I learned at an early age how to shop and how to buy cigarettes. Mommy's little enabler. I also recall the moon at its various phases from new to full and waning. The moon appeared to walk with me. When I stopped the moon stopped. When I moved forward it went with me. So began my friendship with our planet's satellite. When I turned twelve I drew the line. I had already heard and read about the cigarette-lung cancer connection. I told Mom I didn't want her to die, I did not want her to get sick. She ordered me to buy her cigarettes. I replied no way. She accused me of being disobedient. I said too bad. One evening after dinner she put in the usual order: bread, milk, cigarettes. I did not buy the cigarettes. She was not amused. I told her I was never supporting her addiction again.
I was devastated by the news of her lung cancer and I think selfishly since it was really my mother's tragedy and not mine. Simply I did not want to lose her. Even though I had lived almost entirely on my own since the tender age of eighteen I was still, like most young adults, more dependent emotionally on mother and on her unconditional love than I would care or dare to admit. I remember taking a long walk on the first evening that I knew and wandering onto English Bay Beach and throughout the West End. I tried to solicit the help of various friends but they were mostly used to me looking after their emotional needs and not vice-versa and quickly became very scarce. Given that I also had, unlike them, experience of caring for the dying it was naturally assumed that I would be able to take care of myself. But it was my mother.
Mom went in for radiation therapy and I joined a support group for relatives of cancer sufferers. I focussed intensely on my work though my emotions were already running rather thin and I met with some minor disasters but all the same disasters with certain particularly difficult clients. I took some time off. I continued the block walks and continued to fight off vicious dogs (both coincidentally black labs), I continued my prayer walks in the bush labyrinth where I continued to find suspiciously dead desiccated birds positioned strategically on the trails. I began to regularly attend the midday Eucharist at the local Anglican parish church. I cooked, I ate, I worked on the house. I supported Mom whom I talked to regularly, almost daily on the phone. She began to feel better, stronger. She began spending Saturdays visiting with me, hanging out together. I came down with a nasty case of hemorrhoids due to the stress. She insisted on driving me down to the local London Drugs where I bought with her (she paid for it actually) a tube of Preparation H. I mentioned sarcastically to the girl at the checkout: "Nothing more heart-warming than a mother and son buying Preparation H together."
Her courage, determination, and matter-of-fact approach to her cancer diagnosis and treatment I found nonetheless inspiring and I reckoned that I was having a worse time of it than she was, but isn't the way it often happens?
Her behaviour during this time, was on occasion, nonetheless strange. One night at precisely eleven something she phoned simply to tell me how completely in favour she was of universal access to abortion for all women, no questions asked. I didn't know how to get across to her how utterly weird this was, given that I'm her son, it was late at night, and she wanted discuss abortion with me. To this day I still don't know if that was a segway to something else she wanted to tell me but never quite worked up the courage. She did, shortly before her death, declare that she would be bringing a lot of secrets to the grave with her.
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