Lately, I have taken to tearing sinew from bone in a regular stream of skiing, biking, and climbing accidents.  Always my left hand receiving the shortest straw, and every accident leaving it further bad at opening.  After the most recent of these, my hand looked like a curled hook, unable to straighten itself.  My gnarled left hand, typing these words, looks like my mother’s hands did as she neared the end of her life.  Cancer starts out as a boogie man that only shows its face furtively.  But as my mom approached the end of her third decade with cancer, the boogie man wrote upon her body, atrophying muscle and hardening tissue causing her hands to cramp into a partial but permanent closure.  It has been very hard for me to look back at photos from that time, like this one, which was one of the last ones taken of us before she died.  It makes me confront a different version of the mythically cheerful, charismatic, and ever loving person that bonded everyone around to her spirit.  It reminds me of a moment, near the end, that she struggled to get up from the couch.  I sat down to try to help her with some physical therapy that may help her regain the strength that cancer had sapped from her bones.  It was all too much for her at that moment, and the frustration overwhelmed her, sending me away, silently crying as I ascended the stairs to my room.  But I find myself returning to the harder stories, as they seem to be wildly plentiful and stand in stark contrast to the mythically wonderful mother I knew.

Some get to know their mother as they become adults.  My mother died the day I became an adult, so I am returning to sift through the stories to separate the myth and power of motherhood, from the reality on which that edifice was built.  Some of these stories are too horrific for any child to hear, despite happening to my mother when she was a child.  And some of the stories sound different when you are older, when you recognize as Bryan Doyle did “that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore.”  And I don’t know what I hope to accomplish by telling the full story here, but as I get older it feels more important than ever to ditch the idea of a fairytale ending and tell something as it is.

My mother, Marie Lemire, was born December 22, 1953, in a sleepy New Hampshire town.  It was during this time that my mom first brushed with cancer.  As a teenager, she had part of her lung and side of her body removed after a biopsy showed it was cancerous.  Marie’s mom, Dot, was tyrannical as I remember, and took to making young Marie kneel on wooden rulers as corporal punishment.  I am not sure we know all the stories of abuse, because my mom tried to maintain this strained relationship until she was too sick to do so.  Dot never came to visit us as my mom’s illness progressed and would later accuse my dad of hiding her death from her.  The one thing I do know is that my mom decided to run away from home to live with friends or maybe a boyfriend, around the age of 16.

One of the places she found herself, after running away from home, was with her boyfriend, a Viet Nam war veteran named Bob.  I know hardly anything about their relationship, but I do know it was tumultuous, and that Bob was an alcoholic. Many times, he threatened to kill himself if my mom left him.  After one of these arguments, Marie ran out of the trailer and into the dark New Hampshire night.  Bob placed a revolver to the roof of his mouth, pulled the trigger, shot, and killed himself.  I know my mom would have run back in there, and at the age of 17, found herself holding death.

Another place she found herself was on the road with a man named Greg, who she met at a camp they were working at together for the summer.  They hitch-hiked across the country to Oregon and back to his home in Southeastern Ohio.  When they arrived, Greg’s father told them that they would have to marry each other if they wanted to live together.  So they got married, and my understanding of this time is that it was very tumultuous and I imagine that my mom felt very alone in this relationship, isolated in a new town.  One of the people she befriended during this time, a much older woman named Lee, became her lifelong friend and we visited her just as often as family, until she passed away.  When I was young, I found it curious that she had such an old woman as a friend.  Now that I am approaching the age that she died, I can see in Lee, the mother she wanted, the steady and guiding force with an isolating relationship unraveled, unsure who to trust, maybe unsure if she could herself.

My dad met my mom before her relationship with Greg had fully come apart.  When we were young, the story of my dad meeting my mom was told while narrative’s like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin had us convinced that there is a clear path for our main characters and true love always wins in the end.  Now that I have had my share of relationships beginning and ending, being unsure, and not trusting myself to know what the right thing to do next is, I know that no one involved had the love story script that they could play along to.  My dad has said of this time that it was complicated, and I suspect that might be an understatement.  But I am lucky that my dad has never sugar coated the truth, even when it came to my mom and his relationship, which I always saw as loving and supportive.  He has told us the hard stories as well, like the following that he shared publicly:

“Years ago I had a terrible disagreement (fight) with my wife in Penn Station in NYC. It was in the days before cell phones and she had taken the kids somewhere in the sprawling massive station while we waited for our connecting train to New Hampshire. I became worried after they were gone for over an hour which then progressed to anger after two hours of absence.

When she finally appeared, we got into an explosive argument which included all sorts of expletives and regrettable statements.  Eventually I proclaimed that we shouldn’t even be married and I ran out into the streets of New York near Madison Square Garden and it hit me.  Just what the heck am I doing and where was I going to go? I felt completely petty and stupid.  So after this veritable trip around the world in my mind, I realized the damage I had caused and was wordless for ways to express my regret.”

You may find yourself recoiling at this story, and I know I did when I was younger.  This story didn’t fully synchronize with the fairytale Disney script.  But now I know the lesson my father has hidden in there.  It is a lesson that he has come back to a number of times over the years: that we are only strong when we recognize how truly weak we are alone.  That we all are weak, and at times it causes us to be petty and stupid.  And that we must recognize that there is no fairytale or perfect morality, that it is only love that will get us through.  James Baldwin said, “The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and passion of a very few people.  Otherwise, of course you can despair.  Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you.  What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you… You could be that person.  You could be that monster, you could be that cop.  And you have to decide in yourself not to be.”

The lessons that my father has repeated over the years, I see now how informed it was by my mother’s experience.  There was no fairytale for her, but she became the glue of our family, our community, and anyone that came into her presence.  The source of her power though was not a fairytale script that she knew the ending to.  It was from, at times, confronting horror in life and having humility in the face of it, to extend kindness to others… the kindness she was often denied.  From facing a teenage cancer surgery in an abusive household.  To having a boyfriend commit suicide, moments after she ran out the door.  To feeling trapped and alone in a relationship, isolated in a new town.  And to know that even in the presence of a loving and supportive relationship with my father, the hardships are never over.  You will still have “terrible disagreements (fights)”.  But we didn’t hear about the horror’s growing up, we just saw the result of them.  Which was someone who you could tell your story to and know it would be received with an open heart and without judgment.

As I am finally wrapping up the end of this writing, my hand has made some work of straightening itself, but not quite all the way.  The one crooked finger tip is still a little reminder of my mom’s cancer ravaged hands, twisted into claws at the very end of her life.  The week before she died, I made what was to be one last trip from college to see her in hospice.  I am sure she knew the end was coming, but she was having trouble making sense through the haze of the pain medications.  But she still found something inside her, to soften her hands. To reach for and touch my cheek so gently for what was to be the last time.