The Decade of Strong Women
On December 29, 2020, Mom is wearing a soft turban-style covering on her head that she says hurts her where the seam meets the tender, radiated skin of her scalp. She tells me that my sister has been rubbing lotion on her head every night. We agree that means she is very loved and I make a mental note to send her some seamless caps.
We are in our fifth interview, talking about the years 2010-2020. When she initially got her diagnosis of small cell lung cancer, I did my homework and understood right away that even though they had found her cancer very early, there was to be no miraculous overcoming or cure. Small cell is so small that typically by the time it shows up on scans, it has spread to every part of the body. It’s not unusual for patients to receive a diagnosis and then die weeks later. Mom’s had been found while it was still stage one—that is, localized to one organ—in a chest x-ray that was a perk of the smoking cessation program she had successfully completed the year before. After 50+ years of smoking two packs a day, she had finally kicked the habit. There’s your miracle. And your crappy coincidence. Your cosmic dark humor. To find you have one of the most agressive forms of cancer, that you got from smoking, on the anniversary of your finally quitting? It sucks. And it also gave us another precious year with her….during a global pandemic when we mostly couldn’t get to her.
Where’s that menacing laughter coming from?
I knew we would be lucky to have months with her. We ended up with a little more than a year, and on the day of this interview, that year is more than half over. It struck me hard as I watched the replay that I seem awfully calm for someone who knows her mother’s death is fairly imminent. I’m smiling a lot. But on the other hand, my questions betray that calm. We are through the hardest years and have come to the last ten years of her life, during which time she commits fully to her sobriety through AA and forms strong friendships with women in her groups. This part is especially unexpected to me, especially sweet, because, despite some lifelong friendships she has maintained, her overarching attitude towards women has always been one of skepticism at best, derision at worst. She had often shared with me the adage passed down from her mother (who had birthed 9 boys and 3 girls), that “girls are sneaky and deceitful.”
I saw this in action more than once during my life with her, the most memorable time being when we shopped together at Lowes for a charcoal grill (her gift to us on our first wedding anniversary). We had pulled the car up to the front to load the thing and she was busy securing the trunk hatch quite expertly (this is my mother, a woman who gutted and re-did an entire kitchen by herself while my father was away on business), when I saw a sneering man begin to approach us from across the parking lot. I knew what was coming and steeled myself.
“Want some help with that?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I replied. “We got it.”
“Well, but you’re not doing it correctly. It’s really not that hard.”
“We got it,” I replied, with more force and less thanks. He turned with a huff and left us to the task at hand, which my mother had more than successfully completed. I was pulsing with anger and thought, surely, she would be too. I expected to get into the car and share a mother-daughter moment of indignation. Instead:
“What a nice man, offering his help like that.”
“Mom, he wasn’t offering his help. He was criticizing you. Could you not see that?”
“Oh, Sheila,” she spat, disgusted. “You are SUCH a feminist.”
I was. I am. Proudly so since my mid-twenties. But it was a moniker she would never adopt for herself, even after my husband and friends patiently explained to her over dinner the night of the Grill Incident that being a Feminist did not mean eschewing makeup or hating men but was instead the belief that that everyone (even men!) have equal rights and privileges. Still, during this interview, she tells me that the most important thing about this decade is that,
“I've surrounded myself with adult women. That are absolutely incredible, phenomenal, supportive in everything that I do. Give me strength and power at every step I take. And there's so many of them. You know, of course, that the top of the list are my daughters and my sister, of course, and my step daughters, Sarah and Kelly. And it's just the list just goes on and on. Including Gary's mother, Rene. There's just so many strong women in my life that that's what this last 10 years has given me. There's nothing like a group of sisters, Sheila. Women need women. Women need women. Because that's where we get our strength and our power. And we are a powerful. Don’t forget that.”
I mean, sounds pretty Feminist to me?
In any case, I agree with her and promise not to forget.
While viewing the interview I make a note that it feels like we are running out of things to talk about. Or maybe it’s that she’s already said the things she planned to and now it’s up to me to pull more specific things out of her. Though I came with guiding questions for each session, she really directed the flow of our conversations. As we move forward in the interview, I realize I am asking her questions meant to capture wisdom and advice, and also something more:
“I guess this is a little bit of a selfish question, but I want to know what is it like to have grandchildren. Can you think of any of your favorite memories with Lauren and Rudy and Josie?”
I am trying to get her to give me something emotional and material that I can hand to my niece and my kids after she’s gone. This feels a little manipulative to me in retrospect, but on the other hand, why else are we doing this excrutiating work?
At the end of the interview, I say,
“I think maybe let's stop and I'll just say that let's do one more of these. And for the last one, I want you to think about what you want to say, what you want, how you want us to remember you.”
Yes, I knew the day she shared her diagnosis with me that there would be no miracle. So I’d had months to get use to the idea, to steel myself. Still, how?? With the volcano of grief hotly welling up inside of me, how was I able to be so calm and smiling as I said this to her? I am using a tone that is almost motherly with my mother, and I’m reminding her that we’re doing this because she’s going to die. But in this moment, in 2024, I am sobbing and gasping for breath, screaming internally, irrationally, “No! Don’t admit to it! Don’t say it out loud or it will come true!”
When my father’s parents died, I remember my mother cleaning out their home on the West coast of Florida. We were in my grandmother’s closet, going through her cotton house dresses and sensible slippers, stick pins and screw-back earrings. Bibles and boxes of Mass cards. The ephemera of 88 years of life. Mom remarked that, with their deaths (her own parents had died years before), she was relegated to a new role, a new stage of life. She was standing on the leading edge of mortality, which to her felt natural. She said she wasn’t afraid of it. She was ready for it. (Fun (?!) fact: one of Mom’s first jobs was an assistant in a funeral home. She did makeup for the deceased before their viewings.)
As I continue to explore this project, I will of necessity have to grapple with the way we (Westerners) deal with the inevitabily of aging and dying. I will, I am sure, spend time comparing my reactions to my father’s death to my mother’s and reflecting on how all of this connects to the moment when I eventually go “back in the pulse” (Fiona Apple is my spiritual guide), which feels closer and more real to me every day. How could it not?
Even at the age of 53, it’s a surreal and deeply sad thing to realize you are an orphan. I don’t feel ready for it, to be honest. And I do feel afraid. But here I am anyway—out on the leading edge of mortality, as grown up as a grown up can be.
Thanks for reading along—
Sheila
❤️😢