She has fought, like a warrior not on a conventional battlefield, but stealthy, guerilla warfare, where she had to sneak up on the enemy to kill them. Where she had to attack in small groups, small doses, against a much larger enemy. Her enemy being cancer. Multiple Myeloma, a painful little fucker that likes to attack the bones. Still, she brought everything she could to this battle but even the greatest of warriors must know when to bow out and try to find peace.
She has entered a new stage in this fight, one where she is told there is nothing else to be done. The cancer is “not responding” to the chemotherapy anymore. What is that like, to be told that there is nothing else to do but prepare for death? We will all be at death’s doorstep one day, one way or the other. How will we respond?
I sat across from her and talked about quality of life. I ask her, “Have you accepted your fate?” She replies with a confident, “Yes.” Talking about death is nothing new to us. It’s something we have talked about for years, most of my life in fact. So, when she says that she has accepted her fate and that she is eighty four years old, ready, and her life is now behind her, I breathe deeply. I breathe through my belly and accept it too.
For the past week I have had pressure at the backs of my eyes, a scratch at my throat, and a deep feeling of subdued emotion laying at the surface of my chest. I have been unable to cry. I have been numb. Numb from it all, the reality, the mindfuck of it all, knowing that my mother’s last days are before me. We have stepped into a new phase of her cancer, one that we knew would come someday, and now that it’s here, all I want to do is cry, but I cannot.
I go to the woods, my sacred place, where the world makes sense to me, or maybe where I attempt to make sense of the world. I walk the hills in the rain and listen to the drops hang onto the leaves above me. It’s like a wonderful symphony, my own personal concert, where water hitting the leaves brings calmness. The drops rarely reach me, the trees are my umbrella, holding off the wetness. Ever since I was a kid, I felt like the trees have protected me. It is why I used to climb them and sit on their branches, high up above the world below, where I escaped the demons, the things that could harm me. I built forts among them and sometimes slept calmly, knowing the trees stood watch. Even at fifty-three, I still feel this way, and sometimes, when walking alone, I venture off trail and climb them again. On this day I sit quietly. I sit and listen to the rain as I breathe and want to cry. I want to release the emotion within me and cry for my mother. I think for a moment that maybe I will cry with the trees but I still cannot. So I sit and breathe among them and am grateful.
I leave the woods and go to her. She asks me about the information that she has been given to her from her oncologist and as I sit before her, talking about death, her death, I break. My numbness and inability to cry seized and I wept like the child in need of his mother. I wept as she held her arms out to me and held me, crying with me, telling me she loves me. “You are strong and will get through this too,” she says. Yes, mom, I am strong and I will survive this too, but for now I am a son who is trying to navigate the thought of a life without his mother.
I realized why I have been numb. Why I lost the ability to cry and show emotion, and became numb. I was waiting to cry with her. I needed the moment to hold her and for us to feel one another’s pain.
“We have always been close,” she says.
“Since I was a little boy,” I tell her.
There are truths that are spoken, and one is the love and bond between mother and son. Like all relationships, they can be complex, not always perfect, but I have always been protective of her and that has drawn us close. I was not strong enough, or had the power, to protect her against such an adversary as cancer or age. It is a part of life that we eventually have to submit to and tap out. Death is something that we all must accept. We must do so in order to be mindful of the joyous times that we are currently in, and aware of what will come. I know this, life will hurt us at times. It will take us through a great deal of suffering, but as the great teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, says, “Without suffering, there's no happiness. So we shouldn't discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.”
For now, I have given myself permission to weep. I have accepted my mother’s fate as much as I have accepted mine. We are all impermanent and we all owe a death, but it does not make it any easier to let go. Perhaps, when her final breaths come it will not be “goodbye” that will spill from my tears. Instead, maybe whispering, “I will see you again,” is more appropriate.

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