Member-only story
I Am My Mother’s Keeper
Helping her live through a painful illness has somehow has brought us closer together
July 23 is a date that makes my shoulders tense. I was 11, and my mom was about to die. I remember calling my dad, who was working evenings driving a taxi, to come home because Mom was really sick. Truth be told, she had been sick for quite some time, but that night felt different — urgent — and I was scared. I don’t remember what or if my dad said anything at all. I hung up. I turned around to look at the Safeway calendar hanging up in my room: July 23. This was the day my mom was going to die.
Except she didn’t die. Straight to the emergency room, into a hospital bed, countless machines hooked up to her, each thin wire a tentative hold keeping her with us. She was barely even a whisper of life, but she didn’t die. The coming months and years were filled with quite a few more trips to the emergency room, hospital visits, consults with specialists, myriad prescriptions, and moments that stretched out like oceans, drowning me in my own fear.
Nineteen years after her illness — the result of a terrible pancreas infection that nearly destroyed every organ in her body — my mom is still alive. However, the effects of that time remain. She is on medication she will have to take for the rest of her life. She’ll have…
