Someone who has lost their glasses may be seeing the world a little fuzzy that day. A moment in time captured before digital photography entered the world may be unclear. A television set that still possesses two bunny ears may be blurry. My memory is filled with photographs; I can tell you what color t-shit my dad was wearing as we drove to Vermont eight years ago, but I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast a week ago. I am used to attempting to line these photos together in my mind, while simultaneously trying to piece them together, to form a complete memory. That almost never happens though, especially since thirty five percent of our memory is false and twenty percent isn’t our actual memories, but rather the memory we have of the story someone may have told us. The above statements are all true, but this one memory, one recollection of mine that is completely my own, contains no gaps whatsoever, and it something I desperately wish to forget.
It was a particularly cool night for October in Atlanta, I had turned five that passed summer and thought it was unbelievably cool that I could hold up just one entire hand to express to someone my years on this planet. My mom thought it would be a good idea, seeing how we hadn’t seen much of my first step father Rick, if we all sat down and watched a movie. This idea brings about the classic movie night scene with a family like the Brady Bunch, but what this actually means is my mom wanted all of us to sit down and watch one of the four Peter Pan movies she owned, for the hundredth time. I agreed on one condition, we get kettle cooked popcorn.
Two hours later, one trip to the grocery store, and a quick change into sweats, the three of us were about ready to begin. But, seeing as how we are only human, we had forgotten something, the most vital part of any movie night, the multi color Sweedish Fish. They were the mini ones, my mom’s favorite, and the assortment of different colors, seeing as how that was my favorite. I volunteered to venture back upstairs to retrieve them, and after descending back down the basement steps I had one of those moments, like some people have when they feel the need to do a cartwheel in an aisle of a grocery store if no one else is there; but of course they don’t because more often than not they don’t possess the skill to do a cartwheel. My want was in that type of category; I felt the ultimate desire to be like the kids on T.V. and jump onto the couch by hopping onto it from the back, simultaneously propping yourself up with one of your arms. I chose not to, at the risk of losing the Sweedish Fish. So I settled for jumping onto the couch from the front, after handing the bowl to my mom.
“Ow, shit Tori, why would you, ugh.” I looked at my mom, eyes wide like a bugs, trying to figure out if she was okay. I had ended up letting my arms flare out when I jumped and my elbow ended up coming in contact with my mom’s left breast.
She was bellowing over, taking in deep breaths while Rick kept repeating her name. “Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.”
My mom propped herself back up after about two minutes of whimpering and told us to start the movie. I asked her if she was hurt and she smiled at me, kissed my forehead, and replied with a simple no. I wondered if she was aware that her fingernails were furiously digging themselves into a throw pillow or not.
Two weeks later, a Tuesday in fact, my grandmother and I were in the middle of a very serious sock hunt in Nordstrom’s when my mom’s phone rang. She ventured to the other side of the department stores floor to answer the call; I paid no attention to this, seeing as how I was slightly rushing to get my hands on a pair of white socks with a line of color on the end. I was so preoccupied with them that I didn’t notice my grandmother lock her eyes on my mom. That’s when she fell, let me be very clear about that, she didn’t trip, she didn’t get her foot caught on something, she physically fell.
I didn’t understand what was going on. My grandmother ran to my mom, who was crying so loudly two sales associates were about ready to call someone. My grandma just crouched down next to her weeping body and held her. They stayed like that for almost twenty minutes, and then my mom slowly got up, wiped her eyes, looked at me, and began to sob once again. On the drive home everyone was silent, my grandmother offered to drive and my mom gladly shoved her keys at her. We pulled up to the driveway; I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t want to get out of the car. Our black ’92 minivan was familiar, I knew where all the good CD’s were hidden, I had my sketchpad behind one of the seats, and it smelled like a combination of my mom’s weekend perfume and my dog. When you move around as much as I did, you find it easier to become attached to something that can move with you. I have said goodbye to over eleven houses, but that minivan was my home. I didn’t have a choice though, before I could say that I didn’t want to go inside, my mom was opening my car door. She let out her hand and told me that we should talk. I quickly grabbed onto her painted fingernails, ring barring fingers, and warm palm, as I followed her lead. She started explaining to me, while hunting for the coffee ice-cream in the freezer, that a doctor had called her in Nordstrom’s.
That’s when my world turned silent. My mom continued, not daring to look at me. She told me that she had felt the same pain she felt last weekend when she was taking a shower a few days ago, and that she went to the doctor on Friday to get it examined. All I could see was a man with a white lab coat asking my mom to take a deep breath, how bad could that be? He had called her today to inform her that she had stage three breast cancer. I had no idea that that meant cancer cells had been contained in her left breast due to the location of the tumor, were beginning to spread to her chest wall, and may have come in contact with the axillary lymph nodes. Clinically, she had been diagnosed with the second major component out of three components of stage three breast cancer. Radiation had just been developed and was much too risky at that time, so she was going to begin chemo therapy within the next week because of the aggressiveness of the cancer cells. All I could think was, ‘I made her get this.’ I thought if I had never hit her with my elbow that she would be fine, that she wouldn’t be damaged.
That was the last day we used the word death in my house. I had a million questions and the only answer my ears heard was something along the lines of, “Not right now Tori, you wouldn’t understand.” So I decided to make myself understand, that was the first day I directed myself to Google in search of information. I sat in front of that computer every day afterschool from one-forty-five to four-o-clock. I typed into the searched engine every word I had overheard that week, chemotherapy, hair loss, breast implantation, cancer, and Neoadjuvant therapy. After reading through WebMD, Wikipedia, dictionary.com, and cancercenter.com, I felt myself become truly terrified for the first time. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike when I was little, but I could type eighty six words per minute. As the chemotherapy began to wipe out my mom, everyone could see how much I understood about this life threatening disease, especially since I asked the doctor if tamoxifen was truly a good medication to reduce the chances of a reoccurring tumor. After that, I memorized eighteen of my mom’s major medication labels; I later organized her weekly pills, and spent the next six months sleeping in a hospital chair every night because I was too scared to go home.
*This is a true story*
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