… my mother’s desire to live was so powerful, so much stronger in her than any countervailing reality, that without denying the lethality of [myelodysplastic syndrome, a precursor to rapidly progressive leukaemia], she willed herself into believing that she could again be the exception as she had been when stricken with breast cancer three decades before.
Was this denial, à la Kübler-Ross? I can see how it could be described this way, but I don’t believe so. My mother’s refusal to accept death was not one ‘stage’ in the process leading first to acceptance and then (perhaps conveniently for the care givers who could parse their patients’ deaths in this way?) to extinction itself. It was at the core of her consciousness. She was determined to live because she simply could not imagine giving in, as she put it to me once, long before her final cancer, to the imperative of dying. I suppose, as was once said of Samuel Beckett, that her quarrel too was with the Book of Genesis.
But she could not keep up this determination to fight for her life against all odds on her own. That was where the people closest to her came in, where, without immodesty, for it was a position I found it almost unbearable to be in, I came in. In order for her to believe that she would be cured, my mother needed to believe that her loved ones were convinced of this as well. Virtually from the onset of her illness, what I felt she wanted from me – she never said this explicitly but the message was clear enough – was to find hopeful things to say about her prospects. She wanted optimistic or, at least, less pessimistic ways of construing even bad news, and – a kind of moral cheerleading, I suppose, and support for her hope, belief, call it what you will – that despite her advanced age and the spectacularly difficult cytogenetics of her specific case that she would be special, as she often put it, one more time and beat the odds.
If I am being honest, I cannot say that I ever really thought my mother had much chance of making it. But equally, it never really occurred to me but to do whatever I could to buttress and abet her in her belief that she could survive. In those first few weeks after she was diagnosed, but before she made the decision to go to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre in Seattle, Washington, to receive the transplant, I did keep wondering whether, given the fact that her chances were so poor and she was going to suffer so much, perhaps I should be candid with her. But she so plainly did not want to hear this that I never really came close to doing so.