The Long Goodbye: The Moment I Heard My Mother's Diagnosis

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

There is this, though. It's early May of 2006, and I have taken the Metro-North to Fairfield, Conn., to spend the day with my parents. They have moved to Connecticut from Brooklyn, N.Y., to start a school, which my mother is running. My mother is very good at this job, in part because children instinctively love her. She is an extremely calm, open person with a strong sense of justice.

The day is unseasonably warm. My mother and I go out into the yard and sit by the pool, rolling up our pants and dangling our feet in the cool blue water. Leaning back, she pushes her sunglasses up over her thick, dark hair, and turns her face up to the sun. She suddenly looks extremely girlish to me. I haven't seen her in several months, because I've been finishing a book and she and my father have been busy cleaning out their old apartment. As we sit together, she tells me she has been under a lot of stress; the pressures at school are enormous, and selling the apartment where she and my dad lived for 20 years wasn't easy. Mostly, though, she is quiet, and seems content just to sit in the sun with me as the early dragonflies skim the water. Her two golden retrievers nose through the grass around us. A spell of stillness radiates from her. I am content just to be near her; I have, I realize, been anxious about her for reasons I can't identify.

The next Friday, I leave work early because I feel sick to my stomach. I've just lain down in my small, blue bedroom—like a little ship—when the phone rings. It's my mother. "Meg?" she says, her voice rising. "You're home?" I tell her I left work early. "Well, there's something I want to tell you," she says, with a deliberateness that alarms me. "And I wanted you to hear it from me." I take a breath. "I haven't been feeling well," she says, "and I went to the doctor for some tests, and she found a tumor." "Where?" I say, stupidly. "In my colon," she continues. "They don't know what it means. It could be benign. They're running tests and we'll know more about it on Tuesday." The way she says "they don't know what it means" makes me feel hopeful, as if the tumor is something that can be interpreted. Like a passage in Shakespeare, its meaning is up for debate. It's not a disease; it's a pound of flesh. I can hear that she, too, wants to think of it this way.

The next week she calls as I am walking back to my office on 57th Street after a business lunch. I pause beside some scaffolding, the end of the lunch crowd bustling around me, and she says, bluntly, "The doctor got the results. The tumor is cancerous." My knees feel weak—a cliché, but true—and I lean over the scaffolding, the cold metal bar hard against my stomach. "I'm going to need to have surgery and then maybe radiation and chemotherapy, and we need to do it soon. But they think they can treat it," she continues.

I can't remember whether I got any work done that afternoon or what, exactly, came next. I remember crying in my office and calling a former colleague and friend who is an oncologist to ask him for advice. I remember fighting with my parents on the phone because they scheduled surgery right away but they had done no "research." In my view, they didn't know very much about the doctor they'd chosen or whether surgery was even the right approach. This bothered me. I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist. I couldn't fathom this approach. It's cancer, I thought. What if the surgeon is third-rate? We can wait a week to find out more. We need the best surgeon. We need a perfectionist of a surgeon. No; we need me to be a surgeon. I was being a nightmare.