May 27: I’m glad Maretta and Kyle got married on Memorial Day weekend. It gives us a new association with the weekend, and I think that’s a good thing. The last several days, I keep finding my mind floating back to Memorial Day weekend 2005, when Mom was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
I no longer am stuck reliving and thinking through those last weeks of Mom’s life. For almost six months after she was gone, my brain was doing some sort of a backward coping thing…I thought back each of her last weeks obsessively, most especially the really hard conversations, the gut wrenching shifts. I think that at the time we just had to do what needed to be done and there wasn’t really the time or space to be sad or reflect too much. So I reflected afterwards. It was kind of a relief when my brain decided it had worked through, say the week of August 6 enough and we could move back to the week of July 30. Then I got back to the end of June, and these days, I don’t think about last summer much at all. I find I can think about the bigger picture much more. For quite a while, I couldn’t even really remember or focus on memories before Mom got sick.
On the Thursday before Memorial Day, 2005, Mom went into the doctor to check on what she thought was a bladder infection. She called me from the hospital at work and said, “I’m in the hospital, but don’t worry…they’re just checking on what I think is a bladder infection. You and Bryan can stop by this evening if you’d like.” The next day (May 27, 2005) when they did a catscan, they started using the word “mass” to describe a blockage that they found in her pancreatic duct.
I remember climbing into bed next to her before one of her tests, and I asked if she was scared. “Not scared,” she said. “Just sad.”
Today three years ago, I was just beginning to read about pancreatic cancer. It’s a horrible disease to learn about. I remember thinking, “This can’t be happening,” over and over. At one point, Bryan came over while I was reading, and I remember showing him some of the charts of median life expectancy. He didn’t believe it. It was just too terrible to comprehend. I recall reading this exact passage:
Median survival from diagnosis is around 3 to 6 months; 5-year survival is much less than 5% With 32,180 new diagnoses in the United States every year, and 31,800 deaths, mortality approaches 99%, giving pancreatic cancer the highest fatality rate of all cancers and the fourth highest cancer killer in the United States
amongst both men and women.
The upside of our story is that Mom got over two good years after diagnosis. I was eight months pregnant when she was diagnosed, and Mom lived long enough that her grandson remembers her. We had so many good times in the last years, and I’m grateful that we all had time to say goodbye. But it still just totally and completely sucks. And this weekend, which I always think of as the turning point between spring and summer also became in our lives the turning point between “ordinary” and “coping with cancer.”
I’m glad that it’s now also the weekend that Maretta and Kyle got married. It’s such a lovely time of year.
May 27: The last few years, my brother Joe has participated in Relay for Life to raise money for the American Cancer Society. He’s working on it again this year, so if you’re interested in supporting cancer research, click below to see how you can help.
