“I never saw this doctor before,” Ma went on. “He stood way over by the door, his arms crossed over his chest telling me his name.” Then he said, ‘If you have any radiation at all, it will destroy any good organs you have left. You won’t get any better, and you’ll be left in excruciating pain.’ He turned and marched out of the room.”
I suddenly wanted to strangle this doctor, smash everything in the hospital. I leaned into the bed and grabbed Ma’s arm. “Maybe the doctor’s wrong, Ma. Maybe if we just try…I’ll…I can go with--”
“I can’t stand it anymore, Toby,” Ma interrupted. “Please don’t ask me to do it. I can’t take it. I can’t stand the pain anymore. Honey,” she said, softly, her eyes sinking into mine, “the only way out of this for me is to die.”
Suddenly something in me made a giant shift. I leaned into her bed, and barely above a whispered—“I’ll do anything you want, Ma.
She grabbed my hands and squeezed them.
It was painfully clear – I had been forcing my mother to stay alive no matter what the cost. Other situations flooded back, like another operation where she could have died - I ran alongside her gurney on the way to the operation clutching her hand, whispering in her ear. “Take my strength with you Ma; use my strength to get you through this. You can do it, Ma. You can do it.” When she came out of the surgery she said, “I had to get through this. I knew how much you were all counting on me to make it.” Now I realized that if she had died in that operation she would have been spared months of pain and anguish. At least in the last year of my mother’s cancer, I had been so wrapped up in my own fear of losing her that I didn’t want to hear the unspeakable – that she was too weak to keep going, that her pain was unbearable, that she was going to die. No, I insisted, this is my mother, she’s strong, she can do anything if she tries. It’s almost unbearable to realize that all through this process, never once did I ask my mother what she wanted to do, that I had blocked her from making the decisions she needed to make for herself. She was doing what I needed her to do. I had, in fact, prevented her from participating in her own process of dying.
In her last weeks my mother and I listened to each other for the first time in our lives.
