Why Memoir?
My Story
Everyone thinks their life is unique. But of course, to each person, life is unique.
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At our rehearsal dinner, my husband made a speech looking forward to our life together, highlighting the attribute of mine to which he was most attracted: loyalty. Before marriage, and indeed for the first two years of it, that loyalty was given to my original nuclear family of four, and in particular to my mother, Nan.
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Nan was a hoot. She was loud, she was a feminist, she never shied away from a lively debate. She ate cake for breakfast, believed education could solve the world's problems, kept friendships alive for a lifetime. She also selflessly battled breast cancer for eight years.
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TROUBLED WATER is a 93,000-word memoir about cancer, but it's about life too, and life is so much more than cancer.
TROUBLED WATER shows the gentle unraveling of mental stability that a long-fought terminal illness subjects to its caretakers. It takes a deep dive into the micro-world families create in the final weeks of a loved one's life: the isolation; the support offered from afar; the shutting in and shutting down of time, space and bodily function. It's about dying Christian as a genetically Jewish woman. About how my mother's jumbled faith affected the ways she reckoned her soul in the days before death, and how these mixed beliefs affected how I felt about "looking Jewish," genetic testing and what I studied in school. It's about the life and love that happens between a mother and daughter when they know time is of the essence. It's about how a constant stream of medical tests colored what should have been the most carefree years of my life, resulting in rising anxiety for my personal safety as well as a multiplying of IBS incidents that happen to humorously plague my family.
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Fans of Kate Spencer's THE DEAD MOMS CLUB (about the aftermath of losing one's mother), will find in TROUBLED WATER a story of what comes before that loss showing why it is the hardest of them all; the everyday and extraordinary ways my mother made every day special.
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Memoir Excerpts
“Your mom wanted to postpone a brain MRI indefinitely,” he says, sitting in the only chair in the now deflated little ER room. Jack and our bags are crammed in one corner, Elizabeth and Gray in another.
“What do you mean, Daddy?” Elizabeth asks, shaking her head in disbelief.
“She wanted the possibility to remain hopeful, Elizabeth. She didn’t want a scan to show the return of an inoperable brain tumor.”
Hopeful. My heart sags thinking how brave a person would have to be to remain hopeful in her current physical state and disease progression. My hands ache and I decide it’s not indecent for me to lay in the fetal position on the hospital bed.
Our refrigerator is a sea of Tupperware. I have never seen so many ready to eat meals in my life. Each night we pull out leftovers and whatever new home-cooked meal was dropped off that day. Pattie and Shirley must have set up a meal train because meals are so consistently delivered we put coolers in the driveway by the garage to receive them. No one wants to ring the doorbell for fear of disturbing Mommy, and almost no one dares enter the house. It’s a very odd combination to feel such love and support by so many people but also like a house of lepers upon whom most are afraid to lay eyes.
“Mommy, you look beautiful!” I gushed on the day of the wedding. She was buttoning a gold St. John skirt suit that was no doubt the most expensive thing she’d ever bought for herself while swallowing an Ativan dry.
“Powder and paint make you what you ain’t. Better living through chemistry, too. I may need two of these.”
Considering my own relatively mild experiences with religious taunts, there was something disconcerting about being scientifically confirmed a Jew by a genetic test. Could such a test be used against us?
"I'd just be so embarrassed. I'm trying to only eat things I know won't hurt my stomach, and yes, I'd like to be thin for my wedding day, I'll admit it." (I'd suffered from acute belly pain between Thanksgiving and Christmas, pain worse than my constitutional IBS state, and it had come to a head the morning of one of Mommy's chemo appointments. Instead of taking her, Daddy took me to the ER where an x-ray tech indelicately said it looked like Crohn's disease. Crohn's is manageable, but it's a chronic condition that would require lifestyle changes and I was terrified. Naturally my first question was filled with doom, "Will I be able to have children?" Yes. Then I considered my current bodily objective of being a tiny bride, "What do people with Crohn's look like, I mean what do their bodies look like?" Yours. The gastroenterologist had treated me instead for diverticulitis, an inflammation of the digestive tract usually found in senior citizens, and ordered a two-week liquid diet which had heightened both my weight loss and neuroses about what I could eat.)
"Oh for Lord's sake! Save the TaTas? TaTas? I really don't understand the need to make breast cancer cute. Grown women get this disease, no? How about, 'Cut the TaTas Off If You Need To Do It To Save Your Life?'" Mommy spouted, securing a beige bra around her unnaturally high, round, low-profile prosthetic breasts.
Weighing the relative bliss of my childhood against my family’s current situation is like comparing a deep breath on a cool summer night to suffocation. We got here through the cumulative weight of Mommy’s eight-year, anxiety-ridden odyssey of surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy treatments and scan results. Along the way it’s been hard to take deep breaths, never knowing what would stand up against her breast cancer, but now that we are fully submerged in this end-of-life micro-world, we are all locked into staccato half breaths of anticipation and fear. It’s hard to imagine having a calm, restorative breath ever again. Surely I will find no peace once the weight of Mommy’s fight reaches full maturity. When. When.
If Mommy had chosen to shower by herself when I was young, it wasn't for the peace and quiet. I used to sit in my parents' tiny bathroom on the closed toilet seat to chat with her. She'd rub Lubriderm lotion all over herself, then stroke the underside of her chin while looking in the mirror and saying something funny like, "Good Lord! I look just like my grandmother!" She'd fasten three hooks behind her back while stooped over, then shimmy as she stood up and arranged herself into a beige underwire bra, adjusting the shoulder straps with her thumbs. Same shimmy, same type of bra, every single time. I could easily visualize the way she got into her bra even in my early morning foggy fear of what might come. Why had I paid so much attention to her little dressing routine? Breasts would be the only thing on my mind until her biopsy came back. I realized I was still squeezing my chest, so I gave these puny boobs a break and let go. I was hopeful, I could be hopeful. But my right hand tingled and my stomach threatened.