The word cancer swirled around in my head. Cancer. My mom does not have cancer. But I mean, if she did have it, that would explain a lot... All of the symptoms. How could I have missed that? Okay I am definitely not going to beat myself up about this. I am not a doctor and I couldn’t have seen it coming. End of story.
She told me she didn’t know for sure yet but the doctors told her she was most likely going to have radiation soon. Oh God. Radiation. Is it terrible that when I heard the word radiation I was already thinking and I’m going to be the one that has to take care of her. Yes. It is a terrible. But I’d get through this. We would get through this. Together. Like we always do. I’ll just... I’ll start skipping math tutoring, I can always pull my grades back up later. I’ll miss more school and stay home with her. That’s what I’ll do.
It turns out I had to do this sooner than I thought because she was getting worse and worse everyday. And the worse she got, the angrier I got. I got so angry that I started ignoring her all together. I wanted to be normal, I deserved to be normal... Yeah. That’s what I kept saying to myself. That was my brilliant plan, to ignore my sick mother. I came home and she was passed out, oh well. Kept on walking. She tried to reach out to me, and just take a guess what I did in response to that. I ignored her.
It was our secondish, maybe third week in our new apartment. We still didn’t know for sure if it was cancer because, oh yeah, my mom skipped her doctor’s appointment and guess who didn’t call her doctor back like she usually does to make sure her mom went? Me. I hadn’t even told anyone. I didn’t want to until I was sure. Even then, I didn’t really know if I wanted to. I had kept the whole thing a huge secret for so long that I just got used to it. I got used to covering it all up.
Isabel was over at my house all weekend. I had really missed her since we hadn’t hung out in like, forever. I loved having her back as my best friend. So then on Sunday night, her mom which was practically my second mother, said that she’d just take me home and then take me to school the next day. I checked to see if my mom was okay before I left, she was passed out. Go figure. So I just left her there. Later on that night I called her and she picked up, her speech was slurred but I told her I loved her and that I was at Isabel’s and that I’d see her tomorrow. Later on that day, I was waiting outside of school for my mom to come pick me up. I was waiting for a long time. Until Laura, Isabel’s mom said that she’d take me home and we all decided to go walk on the beach for a little bit because it was right there. I just had the weirdest feeling the entire time, but I shook it off. It was probably just nothing. Since her house was on the island, Laura just dropped Isabel off at the house and took me home so that Isabel could take a shower and get ready for school the next day. When we got home though, my Aunt Jojo and my Nana took Laura outside and told me to wait on the couch. Okay... This is weird. I just sat there on the couch. That weird feeling was creeping back up on me. But the only way I can really explain that feeling, is weird. It wasn’t a sad feeling, or a scared feeling it was just weird. They came back inside and I assumed that Laura had left. I wasn’t really that close to Aunt Jojo, she came over more now to check up on Nana and Papa and visit with my mom and me.
Nana had this big, green, super-soft chair. I always sat with her in that chair, because it was huge and we could both fit. Sometimes my mom, Nana, and I all three crammed in to the chair. Sundays, she would read the paper and I would read the Sunday Comics. I laughed with her in that chair, I cried with her in that chair. That chair saw a lot of my life.
Jojo was sitting on the stool now, facing Nana and she told me to come over there. She patted the empty space next to Nana and said she needed to tell me something. Oh great, I thought, what did my mother do this time?
But the next sentence tore me right away from those thoughts. The next sentence changed my life forever. “We found your mother in the apartment... She didn’t wake up.”
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