Blog

I am no stranger to pain.  I had two kids without drugs; I’ve ridden my bike so far that I’ve gotten blisters in places no one should have blisters; I had a kidney stone as large as a Maine blueberry; I had a couple of tattoos removed, and I even dated a Republican once.  So getting three tumors and a nipple removed because of breast cancer wasn’t that big of a deal as far as physical pain goes, but no one told me that my armpit was going to be on fire for the rest of my life.  The pain radiates down my side and makes things like using my machete size paper cutter excruciating.  Add in wedging clay, painting, drawing, basically everything I do all day long, and it’s no wonder my arm pit is screaming.

I went to see my radiology oncologist, thinking he might be able to help.  He tried to examine me and I shrank from his touch.  He decided to send me for a mammogram.  Like this makes sense.  It’s painful for someone to touch me, yet send me to a machine to get smashed?  But this is what happens once you get breast cancer–mammograms become compulsory for any symptom.  I wonder if I broke my foot, would a mammogram be ordered?

While I was waiting for the mammogram doctor to come out from behind his magic curtain and give me courage or a new brain, I read magazines.  Allure had an interesting article about Math magazine.  It’s not about Math.  Google it.  I did.  Then I read about Henry Winkler.  He sort of regrets not taking the lead in Grease; he didn’t want to be typecast.  I totally get that.  I was just reading about Lisa Bonet’s milestone 50th birthday, when I got a phone call letting me know that my gynecologist is in the hospital with a back injury.  She is having surgery and won’t be available to remove my broken parts.  This is the smart, cool doctor who told me no toys or boys after the procedure.  I like this woman.  And I feel really awful for her.  Back injuries are bad.  She’s got a long road ahead of her.

I remember when Dad injured his back at work.  It seemed like he didn’t move off the floor of the den for weeks until he had his back surgery.  I remember he was walking with a cane when we went on a road trip to Vegas the following summer.  Our diesel Oldsmobile broke down in the desert and a semi truck pulled over to help us.  Dad and I left mom and Aunt Toni with the car and hitched a trip with the trucker into town to get a tow and a rental car.  That’s the way to come into Vegas–riding high in semi, just when the neon is starting to glow.  I remember dad getting out of the truck using the cane and the side of the door panel to ease himself down onto the sidewalk.  He sucked in his breath and I knew he was hurting, but he put one hand on my shoulder and took a step toward the dealership where the trucker had dropped us.  Dad of course never said a word about pain.

I don’t know why things happen the way they do, but sometimes I think my parents were taken so that they could help in ways they couldn’t while they were here on Earth.  I am grateful everyday that my mom hasn’t had to watch her grandson’s schizophrenia unfold.  It would have killed her.  And I am so glad my dad doesn’t have to see me travel this cancer journey.  My pain would have been unbearable for him.    And thinking about them, makes me feel like a great big whiny baby for crying about my armpit.  But it’s a hundred times easier to concentrate on that pain, then the pain in the middle of my soul from losing them.

The mammogram was fine.  I knew it would be. Apparently,  there is a nerve that runs down the side of our bodies and it was cut to remove my lymph nodes.  Sometimes this thing called cording develops and causes tightness and pain.  I probably am not helping the situation with all the prep I do for the little velociraptors.  So my doctor ordered me to rest my arm.  Easy for him to say.  He obviously has no idea what an art teacher does all day long.  I didn’t bother to tell him that I also drive a manual transmission.  He is sending me to physical therapy.  I guess if that doesn’t work out, I can always try my hand at writing for one of those magazines that people read at the doctor’s office.

I made manicotti recently.  It was a big step for me, because it’s something Mom used to make. I didn’t use her recipe though.  I still haven’t been able to bring myself to open her recipe box. I sort of know what’s in there—note cards that she painstakingly filled out with all her old standbys—spaghetti sauce, enchilada casserole, lemonade cookies, but also photocopies of jokes she loved, and scraps of paper that she had taped up into the cupboard at the house on Diamond—the Mayo Clinic diet, the Lord’s Prayer, a recipe for homemade pizza.   I’m not ready to open the box though and see her handwriting and be flooded with memories that I have forgotten that I have.  So I made manicotti from the recipe on the back of the pasta box.  It wasn’t bad, but the mere act of making a shadow of a food that my mother made has brought a flood of memories anyway.

Mom grew up on the shores of Northern Ireland.  Her father was a fisherman and she talked about the stuff she grew up eating—whelks, limpets, mussels, beef only on Sundays.  She wouldn’t touch seafood.  To her lobster and crab were cockroaches of the sea.  She came to America and my aunts taught her how to make the foods my dad loved—green chili, homemade tortillas, posole.  She became kind of an expert in international cooking.  She specialized in making foods we liked in restaurants. She bought a Chinese cookbook after a Sunday dinner at the Golden Dragon in Pueblo and practiced sweet and sour sauce, egg foo young, fried rice, and egg rolls.  She used the vegetables from Dad’s garden.  Honestly, Mom’s fried rice was better than any I’ve had in any restaurant and I’ve been in Chinatown in San Fransisco, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.  All I have do is close my eyes and I can see her cracking an egg into the pan with fresh spring onions.  She would add broccoli for Darian.  Baby shrimp for me.

Kevin and I were always Italian food fanatics.  She’d make giant pans of lasagna, spaghetti with Italian sausage in the sauce, manicotti with cheese bubbling out of the edges of the shell, and homemade pizza with dozes of varieties of toppings.  She always made her own sauces with tomatoes  and peppers she canned herself from dad’s garden.  She’d make her own pasta, mixing the ingredients in a giant yellow bowl.  It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I remember our house  on Diamond with a tiny kitchen and the washing machine jammed into the corner across from the built in oven.  I’d perch on the washer and watch the clock tick around, waiting for the pizza to be done.  Olives and sausage and green peppers and onions.  That’s back before delivery and the frozen stuff.  Pizza was a treat, not a commodity.  And my mother’s is still the very best I’ve had.  And her ravioli.  She’d make a big production out of rolling out the pasta and hand stuffing every single ravioli and she’d roll her eyes and sigh when I asked for it.  But she made it for me on my birthday, or sometimes for something special—like when Darian was born, or when my novel came out, or if I’d had a particularly hard week at work.  She also made it when I finally broke up with Rick.  God, she hated him.  And she didn’t hate anyone.  Probably should have been a clue for me.

Comfort food was another of her specialities.  I remember when I came home to my apartment in Northglenn after Shayne was born and I was alone with a newborn baby for the very first time.  From nowhere, tears poured down my cheeks. It was probably a combination of hormones and having the responsibility of having a kid all by myself hitting me, but I was a wreck.  Mom drove up, took one look at me and made me a grilled cheese sandwich with cheese oozing on to the plate and fresh raspberries that she’d picked out in the backyard, and sliced avocados and glass of chilled cranberry juice. For whatever reason, that became my “rescue” meal.  She’d make it if I was getting over a cold, or when Shayne left to college and hadn’t called in weeks, or sometimes she’d stop by my classroom with a hot grilled cheese wrapped in tinfoil.  It’s a sandwich I never make for myself. And  I hadn’t had one since she died until I was going through radiation. Darian made me one and brought it to me in bed.  It had the same oozy cheese and perfect golden color.    It was like Mom was there, saying, “You’ve got this.  It’ll be okay.”

The kids and I never really talk about the night my parents were killed.  Or the aftermath of what has happened since.  But we do talk about mom’s food.  Shayne remembers her lasagna and the way she’d make just him biscuits and gravy while everybody else was eating toast.  Darian talks about the mashed potatoes that were always the perfect texture. The kids grew up in my mother’s kitchen as I did and have their own memories and favorites, but for all of us—the meals were my mother’s love.

The days after my parents death are a fog for me.  I have a couple of memories of their things as the house was being dismantled.  My mother’s jewelry spread across the bed.  My dad’s fishing poles lined up against the house.  I remember taking the yellow mixing bowl off the counter, tipping in the recipe box and grabbing my dad’s tackle box and going out to my car.  Tears made it impossible to drive and I had to stop two houses away and get it together so I could get home and do whatever came next.

The yellow bowl is in my cupboard. It’s the bowl Kevin and I ate popcorn out of on Sunday nights when we watched the Wild Kingdom and the Disney movie.  It’s the bowl my mom mixed pancakes and pie crust in.  At Thanksgiving it would be filled with potato salad.  At the Fourth of July, macaroni salad.  On any given day, the yellow bowl would hold, hot from the pan, buñuelos.   I can’t bring myself to use the yellow bowl.  But when I open that cupboard door and see it, it comforts me.  One day, when I am strong enough, I will take it out.  I will open up the recipe box and find the manicotti card or the lemonade cookie card and and mix up a batch for the kids and James.  After all, that is what Mom would want me to do.

In a few weeks my ovaries are coming out. My doctor is younger than I am. She doesn’t wear a wedding ring and she has amazing long, red curly hair. Her doctor’s profile says that she can speak Russian fluently. I also looked her up on social media, because this is what you do now. Nothing alarming showed up, so I guess she is competent to remove my broken parts. She told me that I could have nothing inside me for eight weeks. No toys or boys or tampons. Uh, I’m the one that says the funny stuff, babe. But I let it slide. Anyway, she was giving me an exam and she felt a lump in my breast—the left one, not the cancer side. I knew it was there. I’ve been told scar tissue leaves lumps sometimes. I told her as much. She told me that it didn’t feel like scar tissue to her and asked me if it had been imaged. Well, no it hasn’t been. Then she proceeded to tell me that she wouldn’t feel comfortable without me getting a mammogram and an ultrasound. Sigh. I told her that scheduling that would take eons and I have a six month check up in March. She assured me she could get me into a lab right away, which she did.

Mammograms totally remind me of my mom. One of my last normal mornings with Mom was sitting across from her in the kitchen as she flipped pancakes on the griddle and described in great detail about being squeezed and pinched and prodded into the photo box. She waved the spatula around and made faces the whole time. I wondered why she was still having mammograms at 84, but I also kind of laughed at her description, but not too much, because I didn’t want her to realize that I’d never had a mammogram. I would have never heard the end of that. But in the last months I have definitely made up for waiting till I was 48 to undergo the indignities of the squeezing and jabbing. I close my eyes and concentrate on the memory of my mother every single time. It makes the pain a little less.

Ultrasound techs can’t tell you anything other than it’s a boy or a girl. And in my case, it’s definitely not that. I saw the black hole on the screen, but it seemed sort of symmetrical to me and I still think it’s a good possibility that it is scar tissue from the plastic surgery, so I’m not all that stressed. Although, I’d bet money I get called in for a biopsy next week.
I asked the doctor how long of recovery time I’d need when the ovaries do come out. She told me that she thought I could be back to work in two weeks. Two weeks! I was hoping for a year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to be working and I love the people I work with and love the kids. I know I do my fair share of bitching and refer to my students as monsters and pterodactyls. But I get hugs everyday and the kids draw me pictures and write me notes and tell me about their stomachaches and their new toys. And I actually love having clay under my fingernails, and blue paint smeared across my forehead every damn day. But I’m tired. Every single morning I wake up and feel like I’m tied to my bed. And not in a fun way. More like chains are holding me in place. I have to fight loose and get up, put on a happy face and get the party started.

I swear I try to do positive things. I pay my bills, and read books, and walk my dog and pet my cat and go to movies with my kids and share meals with them. I gab with my girlfriends and snuggle with my man. I try to remember the good things about my parents and be grateful for all that they gave me. I try to celebrate that Shayne is off the streets and lucid and ice fishing with friends instead of huddled on the porch in his pajamas afraid of the soul snatcher in the heating vent. I know a lot of people have it way worse than I do. Yet, I’m having such a hard time shaking the darkness that takes me in all kinds of places.

And all this health stuff makes me feel like a used car. You know one thing breaks and you get it repaired then the next week it’s something else. And you either keep throwing band-aids on it till it can no longer move, or you break down and get a newer car. I am sort of wondering about not going to the doctor anymore at all. Ignorance might be slightly underrated. And my real problem isn’t something that can be fixed by a knife or a needle or even a pill.

I think the only thing I can really do is keep getting up every day and doing the very best I can to look for the light.

I fell in love with mystery novels when I was six years old and read through my first Bobbsey Twins book all by myself. I loved the dependable characters, the rise and fall of the plot and that the truth always prevailed in the end. Even though I did read a spattering of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, my next love of mysteries came with Trixie Belden. I loved the scrapes she got herself into and the dialogue was funny and smart. As I grew up, I left behind mysteries as “childish” and read myself through “serious” literature in pursuit of an academic degree. While there were some authors through my studies that grabbed me—Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Joyce Carol Oates, lots of times I had to pry my eyelids open with miniscule toothpicks and muscle my way through boring, boring descriptions and pages of musings that I really didn’t care about. I got my English degree, but almost lost my love of reading in the process.

Ironically, it was teaching literature that reminded me of how much I used to love mysteries. One of my students gave me a Christopher Pike novel for Christmas. And even though it was formulaic and predictable, I read it with zeal. I went to my local independent bookstore—back when that was still a thing—and said to the owner—“I want a grown up mystery. What is good?” She marched me right over to the Grafton books. A is for Alibi wasn’t on the shelf, but B is for Burglar was. I took it home and immediately formed a kinship with private investigator, Kinsey Milhone. We are both sarcastic. We have entire wardrobe changes in our cars. We both have had our share of horrible luck with men, mostly because neither one of us truly wants to give up the freedom of independence. The list goes on. I read myself throughr K is for Killer in a matter of days, then after that I looked forward to each installment like some people look forward to Christmas or a beach vacation. In between times, I dabbled with other crime novels, other PI stories, but no one could come close to Grafton. She had my loyalty completely.

As the years have gone on, I have enjoyed experiencing the growth Grafton has had as a writer. The novels turned from formulaic to new, inventive ways of unrevealing a story. The character of Kinsey became more complex and deeper and matured as Grafton’s writing matured. Many times in my life, I have picked up a book, or reread the whole series, because they are always fun and thrilling and like being with old friends. I never cease to become totally engrossed.

In 2015, when X came out, I was probably at one of the most difficult crossroads of my life.  My parents had just died and my son was suffering from his first psychotic break.  He didn’t have a diagnosis at that point and I was reeling in uncertainty as he accused me of mind reading powers and carried on dialogues with people no one else could see.  He was mostly living on the streets afraid that his soul was being stolen or his thoughts were going to be highjacked.  I spent my days dealing with funeral arrangements, insurance issues, lawyers, doctor bills, condolences, plus traveling to nearby cities to look for my son as he hid in sheds and slept in motel stairwells, talking to himself and slowly starving.  In the midst of all that, I managed to get myself to the supermarket and pick up X—a little bit of light to hold on to.

The first thing that struck me?  Kinsey’s parents had been killed in a car crash driving on a mountain road.  They’d been struck by a falling boulder, whereas mine were killed by a silly girl racing to recover a forgotten cell phone.  We were both robbed of our parents in these senseless accidents.  Both orphans.  Another thing we had in common.  Although, I have never been much of a fan follower, I sent Grafton a message on Facebook, after I’d read X.  I told her about how I’d followed Kinsey for all those years, and about losing mom and dad and my son in a matter of weeks and I thanked her for writing and bringing me joy, especially at a time, I needed it the most.

She wrote back to me.  Her words were just like her novels—full of truth and a little bit of hope that tomorrow will be better.  I will always keep her note.

Sue Grafton’s death has made me feel the horrific loss of my parents again.  Something unexpected and hard and unbelievable.  I can’t say how many times I have picked up the phone to call mom, or started driving to their house to have breakfast with my dad, or thought, “I can’t wait to show Mom and Dad.”  Sometimes I think of them and the pain and sadness is so intense that I have to stop thinking because it is too, too deep to put more than a toe in for a single second.  The fact that Grafton died of cancer is another blow.  How is appendix cancer even a thing?  It makes me realize that for the last six months, I’ve been cavalier and jokey about my own experiences with breast cancer.  A lot of people have told me how brave and strong I am.  Not really.  I joke around because I don’t want to think for one minute that cancer is something to worry about, something that could take me away from my kids, leaving them all alone to face life without me.  Like facing the pain of losing my parents, the reality of the havoc cancer can have is also too, too much to think of for more than a minute.

Losing Sue Grafton is also a loss of Kinsey Millhone.  They both died together.  Maybe it’s crazy to mourn a character that lives on a page, but I loved them both and I am sad that they are gone.  It reminds me once again that you can just never really be sure what life has in store for you.  You just never know when the last time is going to be truly the last time. I am sorry for Grafton’s family.  I am sorry that Z is for Zero  will never be written and the alphabet series won’t be finished.  I am sorry that a voice I loved will never again spin a tale.  I know that I can take comfort that I have shelves of Grafton’s writing.  I will always delight in picking up one of the novels and instantly find myself transported to somewhere else, no many how many times I’ve traveled through the pages.  I am truly grateful for all the joy and laughter the writing has brought me through the years.  And most of all I will treasure what Grafton has taught me through Kinsey.  Face life with courage and tenacity.  And never give up, no matter what the odds.

Respectfully, MT

Christmas to me was always my parents. We’d open gifts together and share a meal. Mostly Mom would cook, but sometimes we would break from tradition.  Once we ate in Cripple Creek, which I thought would be weird, but we were together, so it wasn’t. When I had my own kids, I thought I should have my own traditions. So I added getting ice cream on Christmas Eve before looking at lights, and going to the movies on Christmas Day after dinner. But most of the time mom and dad joined in on those traditions too. So the first Christmas I had without my parents, the kids and I fled to New York City. We took the train out to catch the Staten IsIand ferry to see Lady Liberty; we grabbed lunch in Chinatown and ate at a large table with strangers; we walked through Times Square; and then ended the evening with a show on Broadway. It was so unlike Christmas, that I could
forget what it was actually Christmas.

On the 26, six months after my parents died, the kids and I took the train to Coney Island. We took a tour of the neighborhood and walked on the empty boardwalk and threw red roses into the ocean to remember and honor my parents.

Last year, we headed to Chicago and Hamilton, and Navy Pier, and Second City.

This year with a malignant neoplasm hanging on to my ovary, And ongoing fatigue the that I can’t shake, I didn’t run away from Christmas. I put up the tree and hung the ornaments that my mother saved from my childhood. I bought gifts and gave to less fortunate. I looked at lights and stopped for ice cream.  And for the first time ever, I joined James and his family for the holiday.

His mother has worked endlessly to give  us a memorable Christmas. She does a theme every year.  It was Harry Potter this year. Treacle tarts. Pumpkin pasties. Other amazing food. Fun Harry Potter gifts.  Brooke and Lily, James’s nieces are still young enough to be excited about presents and unpretentious and unspoiled enough  to be grateful for what they received. Shayne is able to maintain in a social setting and Darian is joining activities and hugged Brooke goodbye. Mostly I am happy and honored to be welcomed warmly in a family that is not my own.

Tomorrow, I begin the process of figuring out what comes next with my ovary. It’s hard not to be scared. But if I have learned anything in the past years, it is that I will get through it and there will be lots of love on the way.

Merry Christmas to my family and friends.