Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Portending

(1980, 1997)

Question: How could I know that dying of cancer was my mother's worst fear, the thing she dreaded most?

Answer: Because she never said so.

It was one thing she never talked about. It is, I suspect, one thing even families unaffected by this disease tend to avoid, equal parts dread and superstition. Cancer still retains its awesome sway on our collective consciousness through successive centuries, in part-or mostly-because of the impunity with which it has extinguished humans of all ages, races, and creeds. Cancer is always capable of getting our attention, so much so that it's something many of us do anything we can to avoid even thinking about.

My mother talked about her mother. I vaguely intuited then, and fully understand now, that she was also talking about herself. Not just the ways her mother's death affected her, her family, and her future, but the ways the disease might affect her, her family, and her future. She spoke about the suddenness with which her mother's illness struck, so little time to prepare, how unspeakably voracious it became once it was inside her, how quickly she had to grapple with Death and living without the person she could never imagine Life without.

She never had to say anything directly, because every time she talked about her mother's death she was telling us exactly what frightened her the most.

So: did she come to expect the worst? I don't know. I think when she was first diagnosed, at fifty-four; she was shocked that it had come so soon. It hit her before she even had time to begin preparing for it, even if she acknowledged, on some level, that its presence was more a reunion than an inevitability.

I can't say I took any comfort in denial-however fleeting that distraction may be-because in some ways I was already preparing for this possibility before she got sick. I don't claim that this is typical, or even healthy, but it wasn't a conscious reaction. Once cancer has been introduced into your world it's impossible to eradicate it. Being old enough to understand how young my grandmother had been obliged me to grasp, if only at a subconscious level, that the disease took lives and didn't particularly care how rich, healthy, or old you happened to be.

Certainly this is true of just about any disease, but the more you learn about cancer the more you comprehend that it's just as content to claim a child as it is a senior citizen. That-aside from the number of people it kills each year and the often drawn-out, painful struggles it engenders-is what makes it such an insidious ailment. More, it's the kind of illness you can't isolate in the abstract: sure, you could die of a heart attack or an aneurism, but certain statistics and lifestyles make specific maladies more likely.

I didn't think my mother was destined to get cancer, so I was never resigned to the possibility. Rather, I absorbed the ways she still grappled, more than fifteen years later, with her mother's death, and the terror with which she regarded the disease. Cancer, as a concept, can become an eternally open sore, the psychic scar that could begin bleeding at the slightest touch. There were also the designated times throughout the year (her birthday, her mother's birthday, the anniversary of her mother's death) when the grieving overwhelmed all other consideration.

My father, being Irish, and a man, doesn't talk about his parents unless you ask him. And even then you need to ask specific questions (but never too specific). And even then there's an air of reticence, bordering on reluctance. When it comes to his past, he speaks on his own terms, and what he doesn't address sometimes says as much as what he does discuss. It is what it is, and I respect that he has his reasons for the way he's processed (or been unable to process) his past.

My mother, being Italian, and a woman, could never say enough about her mother. This was a relief in all the ways my father's stoicism is often discouraging. On the other hand, there can be too much of a good thing, especially if it ends badly and too soon. As such, the depths of her despair-the ceaseless mourning of her mother-could occasionally make my old man's reserve seem sensible.