Detour

I was eighteen, a senior in high school, looking forward to graduating and going to college when I was forced to make a decision. My life, at that point, was an open road with endless possibilities. All I had to do was set the destination, put my foot on the pedal, and go. What I didn’t expect was the detour that lie ahead.

At eighteen it’s hard to comprehend how fragile the human body is. And it’s especially hard when you see someone who is both authority figure and nurturer, suddenly fall ill for no apparent reason. That’s what happened to my mother, Sue, the day after Black Friday. One day she was fine and the next she was complaining about having stomach pains. It’s just a bad case of indigestion, she had told me. Don’t worry, William.

Of course, I believed her. My mother was a strong, young (thirty-nine) independent woman. She had raised me on her own, after my father left us for another woman, when I was around six. Surely, whatever was bothering her was just a case of…indigestion? Still, something inside me knew that wasn’t true. If you asked me to explain this feeling, I don’t think I could. It was more instinctual, like how your body knows to keep breathing.

By Monday the persistent discomfort in her stomach worsened into a stabbing pain that doubled her over. She called off work before phoning Doctor Hoffman’s office for an appointment. I could see the worry lines creasing her smooth skin and heavy purple bags from stress and sleeplessness under her eyes. I felt a swirl of emotions that I didn’t understand flood my body as I watched her make the call. What was going on?

The next day, Trudy King, my mom’s best friend, came to take my mother to her doctor’s appointment. Mom looked awful that morning, completely rundown. Her dark hair a stringy, tangled mess, her complexion pale. I knew she had been up the previous night, making trips to the bathroom. She couldn’t keep anything down. I offered to help, but she said, it must be a stomach bug. I hoped she was right. 

The following Sunday the doctor called. A little piece of advice: doctors never call on Sundays unless there is bad news - trust me on this. I watched my mom pick up the phone, listen as Dr. Hoffman went over the test results that he had sent her for. I saw the horror – yes horror, there’s no better word for it – on her face as she absorbed the terrible news. She slowly sank down onto the stool next to the counter by the phone. I heard her sniff, trying to hold back the tears, but one broke free and ran down her nose and dripped onto her pantleg, making a perfect round dot, darkening her jeans.

I felt something inside me sink, while at the same time, a deep concern flushed over my body, warming me uncomfortably. It wasn’t good news. When she hung up, she turned and just stared at me. Taking me in. Every whisp of hair, pore, and freckle, like she was taking a snapshot of me in her mind.

“W-what’s wrong?” I asked, hearing the break in my own voice.

“They believe it’s cancer.”

“Believe?”

Her eyes bore into mine, deciding how much to tell me and how much to withhold.

“They know it’s cancer,” she said solemnly. Her eyes drifted to the floor, ashamed, as if the cancer growing in her body was somehow her fault. It wasn’t.

My throat constricted that I couldn’t even swallow, let alone say anything. I felt numb all over. But my mind was saying: this can’t be true.

My mother wrapped me in her arms, pulled me into her, told me everything would be alright. She felt so frail and cold to the touch it wasn’t even like I was hugging my mom anymore, but a skeleton. I hadn’t even realized how much weight she had lost until that very moment. She told me not to worry. That this was just another part of life, and we would get through this, together. But that wasn’t fair. She had taken every punch life had thrown her way – a cheating husband, raising me on her own, working herself till exhaustion so we had a roof over our heads and food in our bellies - and had gotten back up.

Following that Sunday’s phone call from Dr. Hoffman, I tried to focus on school. On spending time with friends. On doing anything other than facing the fact that there was an insidious killer lurking in my mother’s body. But you can’t focus. Not on friends. Not on school. But I tried. God help me I tried, even after mom insisted that I not let her health issues stop me from living my life.

But the world around me seemed surreal, like I was living in a waking nightmare. I was on autopilot, floating like a balloon caught in a drift. I tried to mask my hurt, my sadness, my pain, for her, not for myself. I needed to be strong for her.

By early December mom was in Chemotherapy treatments. She had Trudy drive her to all her appointments. She didn’t want me to be there, didn’t want me to see how sick she became from the chemo poisoning her body. I wanted to go. She didn’t have to bear this burden all on her own; I would take some of it off her shoulders. I could at least do that for her. But keeping me away was my mother’s way of guarding me from knowing how bad the cancer had progressed, even with treatments.

It was Tuesday, December 14^th when Trudy brought my mom home from a particularly grueling Chemotherapy session. I could tell. Mom held the hurt in her eyes, her face drawn and tight, and she moved like a woman double her age back to her bedroom. Her long dark hair had begun to thin by this point. But what was more bothersome was her complexion. Her olive skin tone had faded, like God had opened up a plug and drained her of color, turning her skin to a sickly gray hue.

Trudy helped my mother into bed as I waited out in the kitchen. When she returned, I could tell there was something worrisome on her mind.

“How much has your mother told you?” Trudy asked.

“Just that she has cancer.”

Trudy took this in, mulled it over before she spoke.

“Your mom doesn’t just have cancer, William,” she said. “She has stage four Ovarian Cancer that has spread to her stomach.”

I didn’t know enough about cancer to know how it progressed. I was eighteen, after all, but what I did understand was that there were stages, and four was the worst. A shiver cocooned me, like someone had just wrapped me in a cold, wet blanket, its soggy mass weighing me down.

“So what now?” I asked innocently. Do I pray? Ask God for his help? What the hell do I do, Trudy? I wanted to scream at her.

But Trudy had no words of wisdom, nor of encouragement. She just shook her head, turned, and left. I felt sick like I had eaten something that had spoiled, an uneasy churning in my stomach that told me this wasn’t going to end well. I broke down then, alone, with no one there to comfort me.

That night I had fallen asleep watching one of my mom’s favorite movies, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and had awoken to the sounds of her being sick. Springing out of bed, I rushed to her room to find her bent over the wastepaper can. Her bedroom smelled foul, and when I helped her back onto the pillow, a black, viscous liquid coated her lips, stained her teeth - bile.

“I think I need to go to the hospital, William,” she said, weakly. Her breath smelled awful.

I called 911 right away.

When we got to the hospital emergency room it was a waiting game. More doctors and nurses came in to see her, - poking, probing, prodding – and a new round of tests was ordered, and IV with fluid was hooked up. They all carried the same grim look, as if they knew, just from the sight of my mom’s condition where this was all headed.

But I still had hope. Though with each new face that entered, be it doctor or nurse, that hopefulness was quickly diminishing. I could feel my world crashing around me as the person I loved and cherished was slowly slipping away, being consumed by cancer from the inside out.

What am I going to do if I lose you, mom? Where will I go? How will I survive?

Thoughts like these swirled around in my head like a cesspool.

You won’t see me graduate high school. You won’t see me go off to college.

This wasn’t fair, damnit!

My mom was thirty-nine years old. How could she get stage four Ovarian Cancer that young? My mom didn’t smoke, drink, or even swear – the worst I had ever heard slip from her mouth was son of a witch. And yet, here she was, in the hospital with cancer. If there was a God, then he was cruel, I felt.

Finally, after two hours, she was transferred to a room. By that point she was so weak she could barely keep her eyes open. I stayed with her for the rest of the night.

When dawn broke, I went home to take a shower and to get ready for school. I wondered what I was doing, why I didn’t just stay home that day. But I knew I needed the distraction school brought. But focusing on my studies was a joke. My mind was all over the place, filled with worry, self-pity (why me?) and anger that God had done this to my mom, to me. A few of my friends offered their condolences and to help in any way they could. But what could they do? They were as helpless as I was to change the inevitable outcome that was just over the horizon.

I broke down several times that day. The wash of grief overtaking me when I least expected it. I spent fifteen minutes in the lavatory trying to compose myself. When I finally made it to class, my English teacher asked if I was okay. I nodded that I was, even though my eyes were red rimmed and swollen from crying. I didn’t want his sympathy. I wanted my mom to be okay. I wanted her back to the way she was, not lying in a hospital room battling cancer.

So unfair.

I returned to the hospital that afternoon to find her awake. She looked better than she had when she was brought in, but that wasn’t saying much. She asked about school. I lied and told her everything was going well. She nodded, as if she knew I was just telling her what I believe she wanted to hear; she didn’t have the energy to push the issue, and I didn’t have the energy to talk. I just wanted to be there with her.

The nurses came and went. I tried to talk to them, get them to give me an update on how my mom was doing. All I really wanted to know was if she was going to get better. Please, God, let her get better. Let her beat this. But the nurses were vague, at best, leaving me in the dark to wonder. What I later realized was that there are laws in place, and nurses are not permitted to share medical information, even with family. That’s left for the doctors.

My mom slept off and on throughout the evening. She came to every so often, looked around the room as if she didn’t know where she was. Then she’d find me, smile, and say, William, I love you. And I would reply, I love you, too. Then she would drift back off.

By nightfall, I needed to leave. I was so tired and worn out from stress and sleeplessness, that I was afraid that if I didn’t get home, I’d fall asleep driving.

I touched my mom’s arm, and she opened her eyes.

“I’m going home, mom. I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?”

“I love you, William.”

“I love you, too.”

I had just drifted off to sleep when the phone rang at nine-thirty that night. As soon as I heard it, I knew, just knew as much as I knew the sky was blue, that it was the hospital calling. Something was wrong.

“Is this William?” a female voice asked.

“Yes?” I replied, sleepily.

The nurse started machinegun firing what had happened. I tried to take it all in, tried to understand what she was explaining, but I was still in a heavy sleep fog.

“We got her stable…”

“Stable?” That word made little sense – stable? “What happened?”

“She had a stroke, William. We performed CPR, since there was no DNR in her file. But like I said, she’s been placed on a ventilator.”

“How…no. She has cancer.” I couldn’t understand what she was telling me. It was all very confusing. Stroke? Ventilator?

“You really need to come in, William. The doctor will explain everything to you.”

When I got to the hospital, my mother had been moved to the ICU. As I walked into her room, I found her lying in the bed, eyes closed, hooked up to all kinds of machines and IVs. A long tube was down her throat, the plastic end taped to her mouth. The room was quiet except for the ventilator pumping and sucking air from her lungs, which synchronized with the rise and fall of her chest.

“I’m here, mom,” I crooned.

Behind me I heard someone enter. It was the ICU doctor. He asked if we could speak in the waiting room. Once there, he told me that my mother had suffered a stroke. He said that it wasn’t uncommon for someone in her condition; her body was failing because of the rapidly advancing cancer.

“We did a brain scan and there’s no signs of active brain waves.”

“What does that mean?” The room was spinning. Please, God, let this be a bad dream. I’m sleeping. Someone pinch me so I wake up.

“That there’s nothing else we can do for your mom, William.” He paused as if to align his thoughts. “I understand that your mother does not have a will. That means you’ll have to decide where we go from here.”

“What do you suggest?”

 “My suggestion is to take her off life support.”

A tremor shot through my body like someone had reached inside, took hold of my spinal cord, and violently shook me. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit – that would happen, but not until later when I was back home, shaking and crying uncontrollably in my bed, truly alone for the first time in my life.

“Understand, if that’s your decision, what you’re doing for your mom isn’t cruel. It’s an act of kindness,” he continued.

Easy for you to say. That isn’t your mom in there, is it, doc?

“But the decision is yours. We’ll do whatever you decide.”

No one should ever be put in this position. To decide whether someone lives or dies, let alone an eighteen-year-old for his mother.

But I did what needed to be done. It’s an act of kindness, right? That didn’t make the decision any easier.

As the nurses unhooked her from the ventilator, I cried. What had I done? I begged God for a miracle as I watched the heart monitor dip from seventy-seven beats per minute to seventy. Pleaded with him, that if he spared my mother, I would do whatever it is that he asked of me. I gritted my teeth so hard my jaw hurt as bouts of pain, tears, and anger – at my mom for falling ill, at God for allowing it to happen – overwhelmed me like a tidal wave. I wanted to scream. I wanted this awful pain, pain I would never wish on my worst enemy, to go away.

Glancing up through my murky vision, I saw her heart rate was at sixty beats per minute. A split second later, fifty. Forty. Thirty.

I was watching her go right before my young eyes. Watching her slip away from me.

Twenty.

Ten.

I love you; I kept repeating over and over.

Zero.

She was gone. And I was truly alone in the world.

My life took a drastic detour in those few weeks and especially that night, when I made the hardest decision I would ever make. The weeks, months, and years afterward I would question myself, question God, and why He forced me into making that decision. Twenty-three years later, I still don’t understand.

And I’ll bet you think this is a story that doesn’t have a happy ending. I would if I were you. But on the contrary, that wasn’t the point of me telling it to you. My life did detour that night, like I said, and the death of a loved one does change you. But not always for the worse. I wouldn’t be the loving, understanding, hardworking man I am today; maybe I would never have met my wife, Beth, or had two beautiful daughters with her, had fate not intervened. Life isn’t about planning. It’s about living. It’s about getting up and doing the best you can each and every day with the cards you’ve been dealt.

Don’t be mad at yourself or blame others because things didn’t work out the way you wanted them to. Because sometimes, even when we’re forced to take the unexpected detour, the best things lie ahead on a road that’s not yet written.