While on a trip home to the Northeast, commentator Peggy Shonosky visits an old friend's mother, who is dying of cancer.
By Peggy Shonosky
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Wilmington, NC – I just returned from a trip to Massachusetts to visit my father. While there, I had coffee with a friend whose mother is dying of lung cancer. Carol and I go back to the ninth grade, and her support during my own mother's final months and weeks of life two years ago meant a great deal to me. Her mom is a tough lady; she actually taught math at the Catholic high school in town until she was almost 80, and I wasn't too surprised to hear that she's poised to be among the very small number of people diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer?less than one percent?who are still alive a year later. I stopped by to visit her after coffee, and was happy to see that she seemed remarkably little changed from the last time I visited in October, although in fact the cancer has recently invaded her brain, and she now requires oxygen, and the continuous presence of a caregiver. Her lifelong passion for baseball and football is undimmed, and Carol and her siblings are grateful that the Red Sox and the Patriots supplied her with such spectacular, and extended, seasons. If she thinks about them being the last she'll see, she says nothing to her kids; apparently, she is resolute in her determination not to talk about dying. Carol, whose father is already gone, struggles to comprehend what it will mean to be parentless. "I know it's silly," says this accomplished and successful woman, "but I find myself wondering, who will be proud of me, now?" She's tough, my friend, like her mother, so this small expression of vulnerability is immediately followed by a funny little riff about how she'll have to hire someone to do it, but I know exactly what she means. Caring for a dying loved one gives you time to think, and one of the things I thought about often, is the irony that death is so common?so ordinary?and yet so unutterably profound and mysterious in each of its individual instances. We live in an age and in a country where rationalism has allowed us to map much of the previously unknown world. The seas, the heavens, the human genome, all have been charted. All manner of formerly inaccessible knowledge is ours, or very nearly so. It is a world that's light years, rather than just centuries, removed from the Middle Ages, when people turned to religion for assurances, rather than to inquiry for answers, when confronted with the great forces of the universe. Since the result was often superstition and ignorance and fear, few if any of us would choose to go back. But one thing those people had that we've largely lost, is the conception of mystery as something holy, as something ultimately beyond our understanding, rather than as a nut to be cracked. We believe, with good reason, that every code can be broken, every riddle answered, if we just apply enough science and technology. What death does is give us an intensely personal reminder that at least one great mystery will always remain.
Peggy Shonosky is a former high school history teacher and current freelance writer. E-mail her at PeggyS2007@gmail.com