I felt numb, frozen in my chair. She was so calm, so steady. I wanted to cry, but instead, I sprang into action. “We have to get you to a specialist. Are they going to operate, do chemo, radiation?”
She put her hand up to stop me, and I knew we were about to have the biggest fight of our lives. “We are not going to do any of that. I’m going to live out my days as I please. I will eat my dessert first and watch Mickey Mouse with my great-grandchildren. And when my time is through, it will be through.”
She was so stoic when she said it. I usually thought of this decision, of this state of mind in the face of death, as resigned. But Mom wasn’t resigned. She was almost joyous. And it hit me. My mother was dying. My mother was going to die. Soon. I felt tears well up and dabbed them away with my napkin.
“Sweetheart, let’s not make a scene, OK? I’m fine. I’m better than fine. I’m not losing my hair and vomiting. I’m not spending a year in the hospital to potentially buy me two more when I’ll never really be right. I’ve thought about this. I assure you this is the right decision.”
“For whom, Mother? Because it doesn’t feel like the right decision for me.”
She smiled at me sadly. “I will not have you spending your life caring for me and shuffling me back and forth to doctors’ appointments. I’m ready to be with your father, anyhow.” It wasn’t until she said, “You are all terribly boring,” that I finally saw emotion breaking through her placid expression.
“You will not go back to Florida. That’s it, and that’s final.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but I think she knew I needed this, in the way that mothers always do. She took a sip of tea and said, “I do so love that beautiful Emerson with that darling Mark. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she married him, moved back to Peachtree, and gave up all that acting nonsense?”
Just like that, we were finished talking about dying. We were, instead, talking about life. While I wasn’t sure I agreed with her decision to forgo treatment, I did know one thing for sure: in the entire time I had known her, all my life, except for once, I had never known her to make the wrong decision. And that thought would carry me through until the very end.
SEVENTEEN
war zone
sloane
January 20, 2016
Dear Sloane,
I lost one of my men today. His world is over. I’m still here. How can that be? All there’s left to do is keep fighting. All I can do is make sure he didn’t die in vain.
I love you,
Adam
SIX MONTHS INTO OUR marriage, Adam and I had slowed the fast, crazy pace of our relationship and begun getting into a routine. He was home, so I wasn’t worried. I was painting and working at a gift shop near our post. We would cook dinner together at night. It was a simple life, the kind of life I’d never known I wanted but, now that I had it, felt absolutely perfect.
Perfect, that is, until the night we were lying in bed and I was drifting off, when Adam said, “When do you want to start trying to have a baby?”
I had jolted up. “A baby?” I asked, panic surging through me. “No one ever said anything about a baby.”
It was true. No one had. In all those months of talking and writing letters, Adam and I had never talked about having children. Obviously, this was not a good idea. Having kids is one of the most life-altering things that can happen in a family, and I knew we should have talked about it a million times. It was always on the tip of my tongue, especially because I knew I seemed like someone who wanted that traditional life, that role as mother and caregiver.
Only, I didn’t. Being with Adam had, ironically, soothed that fear that had embedded itself into me like a tick in flesh after my father died. Whereas before, I felt terrified of getting too close to anyone, scared of loving or letting anyone in, paralyzed by the mere thought that I might receive another phone call that someone I had loved more than life was gone in an instant, now, with Adam, I felt safer.
It was strange since he had a job where he could be taken from me at any moment. But I knew that. In his line of work, people died. People were killed. It’s not that I expected he would be killed in the line of duty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was always a possibility. It was always something that was in the back of my mind.
While I realize this doesn’t sound totally rational—tragedy will do that to a mind, I think—I liked that the element of surprise was gone. If Adam were to be killed, it would rip my heart out of my body. It would break me in ways I couldn’t even imagine. But it wouldn’t be a total shock. And so, in that way, I felt prepared. But I wasn’t prepared for this.
“We’ve only been married six months,” I said. The reality was not that I didn’t want to have kids because Adam and I hadn’t been married long enough. I knew without hesitation that Adam and I would be together, happily, in love, until our dying breaths. The reality was that I didn’t want to have kids at all. And if I was honest with myself, I had never brought it up before because I was selfish. I had never brought it up because I knew it might be a deal breaker for Adam—and I wanted him more than I wanted anything else on the planet.
