Breast Cancer in the Family

When I returned home, I had no idea of what had happened during my three year absence. I was greeted by my mother who felt somehow softer and more fragile than I had remembered her. My brother looked in and he the strain of simply existing was evident on his face.

Later, my mother pulled me into the kitchen and told me that she had her breast surgically removed because Maria had told her she had too if she wanted to live.

Living with what was presumed to be a life saving procedure was difficult. My mother's sessions with chemotherapy was difficult and tiring on my sister. Then, she stopped going to chemo and I presumed that she had completed her program.

Visiting with her on a daily basis brought us back together again and she looked healthy, smiling, and joking. But, the tension in her life outside of the breast removal had not been removed. A belligerent daughter-in-law was aggressively threatening her for a larger share of the family's assets. My mother was too intimidated to talk to me about it, but I did have her word that a politically oriented attorney was using our family to advance his ends.

Those ends caused the eventual breakdown of whatever defense mechanisms my mother's bodily system had. I am a firm believer that our bodies are provided with automatic mechanisms that alter chemical formation and therefore influence muscular and organ operation. I am also a life long student of universities and have an exhausting resume of classes, programs, and diplomas. But, like the Wizard of Oz, I have managed to maintain a belief that our psychological stressors can kill us.

Consider being seriously ill and facing on a daily basis someone who you know has betrayed you and is actively working against your interests while at the same time being unable for fear of causing more family tension, to insist that that person leave you alone. What my mother needed at that time was for the justice system that she had relied on to work. For the secret attacks against her children by a gold-digger daughter-in-law and a corrupt attorney to be dealt with in court. What she got was a startling end to her long voyage on earth.

We were all sitting in the family room, I next to my mother and the daughter-in-law blocking the entrance to the kitchen with a huge chair. She looked at my mother beaming with health and happiness that her family was once again all together and the daughter-in-law yelled, "Eat".

My mother shot up off her love seat and looked stricken. She was mortally offended by the grossness and the sound of the voice that had made such a demand. I might add that we were not at table at the time. The following weeks saw a demise in her health and I was told that her cancer had metastasized in her brain. At the hospital, I was told by her surgeon that because of her age (she was eighty five) he didn't plan to operate. Imagine that.

She lived in the hospital for several months, was transferred in a coma to a nursing home and was found dead by her son, sans the wife, several months later.

At the funeral, the gold-digger took honors for how staunch she was and the priest blessed us all.

My family has not recovered from this event and probably never will. The myth of closure assumes that justice has been carried out or that psychological attacks have been addressed and opened to the air of day. There can be no closure for certain cases. What is often presumed to be closure is actually only a scab over a wound.

Nora K Anthony