"When I'm 64"

When H and I married, we were not young lovers in the first blush of infatuation. We had known each other for many years as colleagues, then as friends, and then as partners. At each phase, we learned new things about each other. That gave us a substantial base on which to build. When I got sick in North Carolina with my ruptured appendix, he was waiting as I was unloaded from the ambulance, and he sat with me through the 14 hour wait in the emergency room. He was the one to call my mother, and he was there with fuzzy leopard dice for the IV pole, and a necklace to welcome me when I was released. In between, there were scenes of varying degrees of gruesomeness. It was not a pleasant time. 

But apart from that, and a full panoply of headaches and viruses and ingrown toenails, we have been pretty healthy and pretty lucky. Our chronic medical conditions are manageable.

But our minimal encounters with the medical community are about to change. My mother has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I hesitate to write this on a blog where some of you who are reading this may not know about it. But we have made a commitment to chronicling the first year of marriage. And this is what the first year looks like, in part. At a time when I might otherwise be preparing for a new semester, at a time when H and I should be celebrating still, we are in separate states, geographically and emotionally.

I have spent two days with good, caring medical people, who have done "it" all right. I have been in a lead lined room in a sub-basement below New York's Park Avenue, listening through the walls, to the banging of the MRI machines, and I have laughed with "Ma" and "Sonny,” the nuclear medicine trained techs, who helped Mom through the PET/CT and CAT scans.

H has been in Boston, coping with the pending report for the accreditation agency and evaluating portfolios that will allow students to move from their first course sequence to the more advanced level.

We have been alternately saddened and hopeful by the news of the past week—can so much happen in so little time?

• “yes it is cancer, probably breast or lung, and if it is breast cancer with estrogen receptivity, it is treatable.” Who would have imagined that we would be hoping for breast cancer.

• “But it is lung cancer, stage 4, the tumor having infiltrated the pleural cavity between the outer wall of the lung and the ribs.” They aspirated 1.5 liters of fluid through a needle in her back.

• “She will need a CAT scan of the brain and a PET/CT scan of the whole body to determine whether there is spread to brain or bone or …”

•  “It has not affected any of her other organs but it is still metastatic disease.”

Then there is the reading between the lines on the promise and threat of chemo, the cost of pills, the statistics (none) on 91 year old women. We DO however know that some drug is 80% effective in women of a certain age who have never smoked and are Asian.

We take pleasure in news that is less bad than what might have been.

As a good child of the liberal left, I am susceptible to all the logical and politically correct narratives about equity and the disparities in the health care system. My mother has access to great physicians on short notice when millions of others have no access to health care, and children die every day because they have no access to medicines that could cure relatively minor diseases.

As a person with a broad social network, I am also aware of how many people are living with major medical histories: friends with cancer in various stages – active and in remission, a friend who was diagnosed as HIV positive at 29 and is now 50 something--he wasn't supposed to live this long.

And so I know at the same time that we are coping with this, that we are truly lucky. My mother is 91 and could have died years ago if she hadn't had heart surgery; or could have been crippled if she hadn’t had a dual hip replacement a decade ago.

But I am sitting now in her living room... the same spot from which I wrote my message to Herb for our wedding day. The last time I sat here, I wrote: “I am sitting on Mom’s couch in New York after a long day of errands…to find THE dress for the wedding, to get my hair cut, to find the right paper for our letters to each other. I am 8 feet from the window sill I sat on to watch people walk through the park... Probably like most girls, I spent a fair share of that time on the radiator imagining what it would be like to be married, and who I would marry. ..But whatever I imagined, and whatever I saw of the marriages of friends, our marriage will be shaped by the days and nights to come. That is what I have learned in the years we have shared.”

I am sitting now in the same spot, worrying what the next months will bring for my mother, and for those who care for her. I am sitting in the same spot, looking out at the same scene I watched decades ago, where no one knows what is happening 18 stories above, and we don’t know what is happening below. I am sitting in the same spot, tired from lack of sleep, lonely for the man I married, and wondering where we will be when we are 91—or I am. I will be there before him. I am wondering what we will know about each other then.