Notes I've Collected from My Dead Mother
“Notes I’ve Collected for My Dead Mother”
By Kierstyn Lamour
my mother wanted
children
when she was 34
the same year she was born
in Detroit
and my grandmother told me
she had 41 skirts
to wear to school
she was never decorated the same
twice
in one month
so she had these children
three two one
and they were not so pressed
or pleated
they grew out of new wrinkles
slower than
the malignant ones she grew into
and when she turned 52
her children were not older than
her wedding ring
so she divided her jewelry among them
giving them something
unreligious
arranging her funeral
around a church they did not know
and people came to her with
baggy faces
and moist hairlines
wiping and nodding
wearing something mournful
and someone thought I looked
appropriate
in my black skirt french braid
peering into the coffin
to look at the paper bag colored skin
in a wig
and a fuchsia dress.
A good job, they told me
yes a fine job
someone over said
and they saw her ring
attached uneasily
touching my dried hands
telling me they wouldn’t burn her
jewelry and I
haven’t worn any since.”
The Short Story of My Mother’s Cancer
Contribution by writer and friend Kierstyn Lamour
My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1979. My sister was ten, I was seven, and my brother was four. She was considered “old” as a mom back then, especially having had my brother at age 41. She hated being older than all my friends’ parents and refused to tell me how old she was when she was alive. I learned on the day of her funeral in 1987 that she had been born in 1934. She died at age 52.
My father was an engineer for General Motors and we had excellent health insurance. My mother’s treatment, which lasted for seven years, consisted of several rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and a number of surgeries. I’m not surprised GM needed a government bailout. I remember my mother telling me that at some point they had removed “everything” that could be removed from her. I don’t know if it was hyperbole, but I know she didn’t have her appendix, tonsils, adenoids, or her right breast anymore. Much later I found out that she had endured several miscarriages, including a stillborn baby before I was born. She went into remission a few times, but during treatment I remember her chewing on black licorice a lot. She said it blotted out the metallic taste in her mouth she couldn’t get rid of any other way. My older sister, Anyssa, would often help her with her make-up and wigs, but during remission her hair (which she had always dyed platinum blonde) grew in grey and curly. I remember a cashier at McDonald’s greeted us by telling my mom what a lovely granddaughter she had (me). We left without a word and she cried all the way home.
One of her friends told me that my mother had been on “the pill” since it had been introduced, and she was suspicious of its link to her cancer. I learned that her favorite cousin, Donna, also died of breast cancer at some point. So is it genetics? The environment? Red M & M’s? Stress? The spiral of “why” is a painful spin for offspring. I’m just about to turn forty-five, and I have been spotty with my mammograms thus far. A friend of mine has been trying to get me to go genetic counseling. And then what? If I have the deadly code, do I cut off my breasts? Pull an Angelina Jolie?
I told my husband I wanted to have more time with our kids than my mother had, so we had them “early.” I gave birth to my first child at age twenty-eight--a full ten years before my mother had given birth to me. My OB told me that some studies supported the hypothesis that women who had babies before the age of thirty reduced their chances of getting breast cancer because the pregnancy “interrupted” the menstrual cycle (in a good way) at the right moment in one’s reproductive life. I haven’t researched this, but it gave my anxieties a place to perch for a number of years. Today my children are sixteen, fourteen, and eleven—the exact same ages we were when my mom died. I am the exact age my mom was when she discovered the cancer. And, in the strange way coincidence works, this Friday will mark the thirty-year anniversary of her death.