We Only Talk Of Death

Lately, we only talk of death. Its uncomfortable and I always want to be exactly where the conversation isn't. My mind wanders and I think about a movie that I liked watching the other day. I liked how the main character smiled and said the word "Frosting".

"When I die, you have to take care of Dublin," she says, like she has the last seven times she's mentioned her death. Of course I'll take care of her dog. I helped her raise the damn thing.

But I don't say that. I just nod and look back out the window as the car zips down the highway. The silence stretches as long as it take to pass the next exit. I can feel her looking at me in glances.

"Have you heard from the oncology guy?" I ask, trying my best to sound upbeat, even though the word 'oncology' makes me want to jump out of the fucking car. She sighs and grips the steering wheel a little tighter.

"No," she says. "No one will return my fucking calls. I've tried calling them three times and it just goes to an answering service."

It's the same story as a week ago. Its now been four months since they found the cancer and, yet, there's not a single ounce of support from anyone who isn't me. Its as if the doctors in our small town think the tumor will stop growing because it's Christmas; that people just simply don't get cancer during the holidays.

I found out about the cancer in our driveway one afternoon as I handed her a prescription I had gone to get for her. I admit, I read the label on the bag and recognized it as an anti-viral. Google said it was used to treat shingles.

She admitted to the shingles right away, saying it was from the stress. And after enough needling to effectively draw blood, she finally admitted that the stress was from knowing she had ovarian cancer. She had known about it for a while.

She had said she didn't want to "get me going" about it. What she meant was: 'I didn't want to watch you have a mental breakdown so I didn't tell you'. She hates when I get emotional; doesn't understand why I can't not cry about things that upset me. She seems to be incapable of understanding that I lack the ability to erect structurally sound emotional walls around myself. My therapist tells me that's from a lifetime of being told to 'suck it up'.

"Have you called the other place? The one in the city?" I ask as she cuts over into the exit lane, narrowly missing a blue Nissan.

"They have to look at my insurance," she replies, sighing again and angrily flicking on her blinker. She always drives angry. She does everything like its a personal affront to her. "I don't know how I would afford to live in the city anyway. And if I'm doing chemo--"

"You think you'll have to do chemo?" I ask before I can stop myself. I try not to roll anything down a hill where I can't see the bottom, but this time I can't seem to stop myself. Chemotherapy is a titchy subject. She has told me before that she has no idea how my mom got through it and that she never would if it came to that. So, now, faced with the angry red of her own words, I wonder if she will even bother.

"Well, if no one will help me now it wont just be a simple surgery," she replies, her words wavering a little. I don't say anything. What do you say to that? What do you say to any of this, really?

When the cancer got really bad for my mom, I moved back to my hometown. I came back to try and make myself feel better for all the time I had wasted while she was well. I wanted to spend every moment I could with her because I didn't want to spend a single fucking second without her.

I remember sitting at the dining room table of my parents house one day, making jewelry to sell on Etsy for rent money. My mom was just sitting across from me, too sick to do much of anything by then. Her eyes drooped with exhaustion and her pale face was stretched thin, like it was covering nothing but old paper mache. She reached across the table slowly and fished out two purple beads from the mess in front of me and said, "These would look good." I made a pair of earrings for her with them. She wore them the last time I saw her outside of Hospice. They don't creamate you with jewelry.

"We need to go to the funeral home next week so you can sign some paperwork," my aunt says, changing the subject. I wish she would change it again. I nod out the window as she parks the car in front of a lawyer's office that looks far too much like someone's home.

"What is this for?" I ask, though I'm sure she's already told me.

"My will," she replies, annoyed.