That Lump was Real

About the time we were packing up boxes to move you from your home of fifty-five years to another part of the country, I felt a lump. In my breast. I told my sister about it, your older daughter, who was helping me pack all your dishes and tablecloths and mounds of linens and platters and purses and hats and oh so many books and all the things that made you, you.

But I could not tell you. I would never tell you. Not in your condition; distraught, forlorn, so sad to be leaving, so confused as to why you had to go. Angry and frustrated. I could not tell you about that lump. I could only try and comfort you, give you some answers that you didn't quite understand anyway. While your older daughter took charge as she usually did and efficiently packed and separated and tossed and labeled, I held your hand and tried to tell you why.

We had moved you to the bedroom on the main level. You could no longer climb the stairs. We hired a part-time caretaker. We heard from all your friends about how worried they were about you. "She is confused. She doesn't know where she is. She forgets. She frets. She's not herself. She used to be so smart, so outspoken, opinionated and well-read."

Yes, she used to be.

It was heart wrenching to hear them remember you as I did, as my sister did. And because your two daughters lived on opposite ends of the country, we had to move you to one of our ends. We had no choice, my sister said, and insisted it be near her. The medical care was better: her husband the doctor, immersed in its machinery. We (or rather she) wouldn't have to fly back and forth so often. Our lives would be less disrupted, although she was taking on the burden of your care. I did not agree and argued to keep you in your home with full-time care, surrounded by the things you knew, your community of Synagogue friends, the people you trusted and who loved you, even if you couldn't remember their names.

The elder sister, who always made decisions for the family, won. And so we packed you up and moved you to North Carolina. It was as foreign to you as when you first set foot in this country after the war in 1950. You and Dad, new immigrants from the refugee camp, hoping to build a new life you called the American dream.

In North Carolina, you settled into a nice, small apartment in a senior facility on a pond where the walkers with their neon tennis balls and colorful ribbons that identified their owner, were parked in a row in the dining hall. They had all kinds of activities for you to enjoy. I went to bingo with you when I visited. We ate the tepid lunch with your impeccably dressed tablemates and everyone sang Happy Birthday to Bill while he smiled through the oxygen tube in his nose. And still I did not tell you about the lump, which by now, had been diagnosed as breast cancer.

While you were adjusting to a new southern, genteel group of friends and complaining about the "trafe" food, I had a lumpectomy and was getting radiation treatments. I thought of you often as I got up early, went for a treatment and then drove to work. I thought of survivorship and prayed that the genes of survival passed down through generations, just as the trauma and the shame did.

How I wanted to tell my own mother that I had breast cancer. It seemed like a great injustice to keep it a secret, a hidden blight that was the most frightening and lonely time of my life. But the knowledge that you might not have the capacity to understand, that it might scare you and add to your already encroaching paranoia prevented me from doing so. If ever I needed my mother's comfort, it was then. Even though you were never a great comforter. Even though you filled my childhood with fear, intimidation and criticism. Even though you were not able to provide the emotional support and nurturing I needed as a child. I know in my heart you would have found a way to be there for me. You would have been at my surgery, you would have made me chicken soup and fussed with my pillows, you would have cared for me the only way you knew how.

Most times I feel relieved that I spared you from that lump because somewhere in your lost brain, I know you would have felt the pain. It would have eaten at you, it would have plagued you with guilt and more trauma because you couldn’t fix it.

You didn't need that mother, you were already so sadly gone and your mind so scattered. Eventually you stopped walking, you stopped talking, you stopped eating. It was heartbreaking to watch you wither away. You survived so many hardships yet dementia you could not survive.

Your younger daughter however, is alive and well.