the village

I took mama to get her infusions today, and it’s a full-day type of ordeal. They tell you to allot at least 3-4 hours of your day for it, so I wrapped up my 11am session by saying something along the lines of, “what if you weren’t the perfect or best version of yourself and someone loves you anyway?” and headed home to pick mama up. When I entered the house, she sat lounged on the sofa in her pajamas that have recently begun to only loosely fit her. She ushered me to eat something in her listless, meek voice that fills me with a simmering bitterness kept at bay by dread and guilt. In the kitchen, I found a bag and a Diet Coke waiting for me with mama’s name printed on the ticket. I stashed the bag in my bedroom for when I returned, grabbed my drink, and asked her why she wasn’t ready. She cast me an apologetic look and moved to stand, looking and sounding pained as she did so. When we were in the car, she picked up the default conversation we have been having for the past year or so— rattling off a list of her symptoms: new, old, painful, annoying, mysterious, rarely better; so I turned up the music and said nothing, washing down the lump of shame in my throat with a sip of Coke and a mental prayer for her wellbeing to replace the silence she so desperately wanted to be reassurance.

Downtown parking added to the assemblage of festering emotions threatening to breach my control, and the oversaturated hospital brimming with misery and anguish certainly did not help either. Once inside, the world became even bleaker than it seemed prior, and I felt a twinge of resentment on behalf of the populations who are subject to these types of environments on a regular basis. I rolled my eyes at the half-hearted Christmas decorations placed in front of the ceiling-high glass windows and its contrast to the barren entrails of the building, as if happiness and hope were only things of display. We were called back to the infusion section of the oncology floor, after a 10-story elevator ride that left me momentarily lightheaded, and I breathed a sigh of relief knowing the next two to three hours would be uninterrupted time with my book.

Except it was not. The genuinely-friendly white nurse lady couldn’t find a vein, validating the fear my mom spoke to in the car ride over, and I winced when I glanced over to see a needle half-stuck in mama’s arm, the one that was so camouflaged in bruises and discolorations that I had to look away just as quickly. My relationship with blood, gore, and everything in-between was not a delicate one; I had never been one to be faint-of-heart with these things. But for some reason, my face flushed, and my belly did somersaults, and all I could think was that they needed to hurry this up. So she called over another eager-eyed, genuinely-friendly white nurse lady. It seemed that this wing of the world was made up of lots of those. This one’s name was Holly. While Holly dug in mama’s arm for a vein, I found myself searching her face for any sign of discomfort or pain. And sure enough, there they were: both discomfort and pain etched into her features as if it were part of her genetic makeup. Mama’s face could only be described, of late, as gaunt. Her face has slimmed, lost all its color, and aged drastically, as if each hospital visit had breathed the soul of a lifetime’s suffering inside her. For a brief moment, I felt a pressure come on so suddenly I was sure I was going to vomit. But instead, I started to laugh.

All three of them whipped their heads around to me— Genuinely-Friendly Nurse #1, Nurse Holly, and mama, each with a mixture of bewilderment, confusion, and curiosity.

Then mama started laughing back, and for a second, she looked and sounded a lot like the woman who raised me. “You’re so mean! Why are you laughing at me?” she asked while the other two women smiled. “I shouldn’t have brought you with me.” But I could tell she was thoroughly amused by me. And I was technically the one that brought her, but I kept that part to myself. “Do you remember when you used to do this?”

Before I could respond, she turned around to the two young women. “My daughter used to be a nurse, too.” Also technically not true. I was one semester away from becoming a registered nurse.

Nurse Holly piped up next. “Oh yeah? Why’d you stop?”

“I hated it,” I responded without second thought.

Genuinely-Friendly Nurse #1 and Nurse Holly laughed like I had just told the best joke in the world, and I wondered how much they related to it. They prattled on about the diversity of the nursing profession and their own experiences in the nursing world, and right as Nurse Holly finally stuck a vein, she smiled at mama and asked me if I’m happy with what I’m doing now. I told her that I am. When she asked what I do, I told her I’m a therapist, which seemed to win the interest and approval of the two nurses. Mama breathed deeply next to me and thanked Nurse Holly as she walked away. Genuinely-Friendly Nurse #1 began attaching the bag to the drip and looked to me once more.

“My son,” she started, which took me slightly aback with how incredibly young she appeared, “has a therapist, and we are absolutely in love with her.” She smiled. “She has worked miracles for his anxiety. He just goes around saying, ‘well, my therapist said this,’ and is just so unashamed about it—”

“What is there to be ashamed of?” Mama interjected.

“Exactly.”

And so on and so forth. Genuinely-Friendly Nurse #1 lived up to her name in that she supplied mama with a pillow, a blanket, snacks, water, even giving me another Diet Coke. It wasn’t until then when I finally settled in and began to focus on reading, ignoring the incessant urge to continue searching mama’s body language as if it would give us the answers we so desperately wanted. She so desperately wanted. But that wasn’t my role. My role remained steadfast and unperturbed, like a statue, solid enough that she never has to worry about me breaking. Only a couple pages in—another white lady interrupted. This time, a patient. She wobbled over to mama and I, her drip machine following closely behind her as she handed mama a white envelope.

“I paint,” the patient said as she walked back to her little station. “That’s what I do to make myself happy throughout it all, so I hope I can spread some of my joy to you.”

Inside the envelope was a card with a beautiful blue jay painted over speckled smears of various colored paints, much like the bruises painting mama’s arms, and signed Kayla underneath a print that read: “Every Moment Matters”. When mama opened it, she read the note inside then handed it to me:

“Tis the season,

Some of you may know me as the Paint Lady, but my name is Kayla Taylor. I hope your card today will bring you a little Christmas Joy, as that is what gets me through hard times is thinking about all the people and things that bring me pleasure.

I, like you, have been battling with cancer for 25 years, 15 with ovarian. I’m joining you today for my second round of chemo. I tell you this to ask you to never give up fighting. So many new treatments have been developed over the years and all we have to do is outlive the cure… My way of doing that is to continue to live life everyday doing the things that bring me joy and fill my Spirit. I’m an avid gardener and love my plants, I travel as much as I can, and of course, I paint.

My wish for you this holiday season is to feel the Spirit of Christmas and believe in the magic, as everyday is a new beginning. Merry Christmas and may the New Year bring you renewed strength and joy.”

As I read the note, another card slipped from behind the paper that read: “But those who wait upon the Lord will find new strength. They will fly high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31.” I wanted to throw the card at her, scream that mama didn’t have cancer, and that she could keep her card and her cancer to herself. But instead, I smiled and said the painting was beautiful. And it was.

Two hours later, the last of the drip reached mama’s veins, and I had begun thoroughly enjoying The House in the Cerulean Sea, so it was a tad disheartening when Genuinely-Friendly Nurse #1 began the process of wrapping up. As she was, a young woman with a visible baby bump sauntered into the small infusion section and plopped down onto one of the recliners like she had done this more times than she can count. As nurses tended to the pregnant woman, mama and I packed up our things, waiting for the nurse to give us the green light to finally go home. Just as she seemed to be finished, a horrid mixture between coughing and gagging erupted in the seat closest to us. The pregnant woman. The nurses pulled the privacy curtains around her without so much as a word and fell into what seemed to be an unspoken, organized chaos.

Eventually, the gagging and coughing turned into the sound of full-throttle puking. Five minutes passed. Another nurse approached mama’s machine, removed the needle, wrapped her arm, and informed us that we’re all set to go. We took our leave as the child-bearing woman apologized profusely, which prompted a chorus of nurses to reprimand her simultaneously for apologizing. We took the dreary elevator back down ten stories as mama insisted I let her buy me more food; as she spoke, I was unsure of whether color had been replenished in her features or if it was only the object of my desire to self-soothe that made it appear that way.