My mother never complained about pain.
This is the first thing you need to understand about her, because everything else follows from it. She was sixty-one years old and she had been managing discomfort with a kind of cheerful stubbornness since long before the diagnosis, since the years when she worked double shifts at the hospital administrative office and still made dinner and still showed up to every single one of my school events, even the boring ones, even the one where I played a non-speaking tree in the fourth-grade production of a play no one remembers, and she sat in the second row and took three photographs of my tree costume and told me afterward that I had been the most expressive tree on the stage.
Her name was Ruth. Ruth Eleanor Calloway, though she went by Ruthie to everyone who knew her before sixty and by Ruth to the various doctors and nurses and specialists she had accumulated over the preceding six months. She was small, five-two, with the kind of posture you only get from decades of conscious effort, and she had my grandmother’s dark eyes and a laugh that could fill a room without trying.
The diagnosis had come in November, at the end of a year that had already been long.
I will not use the clinical name of it here because it is not the point and because my mother would find the clinical emphasis tedious. She would say, as she had said to me in December when I had spent forty-five minutes reading research papers aloud from my laptop at her kitchen table, that she was more than her bloodwork and that I was treating her like a case study and that I should close the computer and have some soup.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
