How is your mom?

I never know what to say when someone asks me, "How's your mom?" So many questions are hidden in that simple one. Which one are they asking? Is the question, "How is she feeling today?", "How are her spirits?", "Are there any signs the cancer has progressed?", "Is the anti-nausea medicine working?" or, perhaps hardest of all, "How are you?" One thing I know, they are looking for more than a cursory, "Fine."

Day to day, I can answer, "She's hanging in there," or "She's had a good/okay/difficult day."

Week to week and month to month, it's harder to answer. First of all, she's not a complainer, so I look for clues of how she's feeling based on how long she sleeps, how much she eats, how engaged she is in the conversation and activity around her. Up to now, her demeanor has seemed to have more to do with how well the meds are working than how hard the cancer is working on her, but I see that changing.

It's hard to write about here, knowing Mom will be the first to open this blog and will be either embarrassed or mortified or amused by whatever I choose to say. Physically, you can tell the cancer is doing its work. She's eating less, sleeping more, puking more. She still moves about under her own power, with the help of her walker and her treadmill, which serves now as a grab bar instead of an exercise machine. She still enjoys our visits, but when the whole family descends on her, it feels more like she is the stationary sun around which all the activity revolves. (This feeling is magnified by the fact that her dream chair, where she spends most of her time, is planted at the end of the kitchen island, so anyone entering or leaving the kitchen brushes past her.)

Emotionally and spiritually, Mom is predictably holding up better than the rest of us. I know she has her fears, but she keeps them to herself, choosing the face of serenity for those of us she feels sorry for.

Dad has taken naturally to the regimen of daily chores, though I know he aches to be out in the bustling public. I like to give him the chance to get out as often as I can, but he seems more and more content to be at Mom's side and less drawn by whatever he's missing outside the walls of their house. He vacillates between being the ever-capable caregiver and a weeping mess, but says he is okay with both.

As for me, I'd say I'm "fine"...except when I'm not. I handle the heavy things with the closest thing to grace I can muster, but when something simple goes wrong (like the girls missing their school registration or me being forced to sit through a chaotic Girl Scout meeting), I lose it. I cry over the stupid things like people looking at me funny or a good piece of chocolate. If anyone has a suggestion for a real tear jerker movie, maybe I could clean some latent emotion out of my system. I have a nagging malaise that is seemingly unrelated to what I eat or how much I sleep, that has, unfortunately, done nothing to curb my appetite.

I feel like I should sit with Mom and pray with her, read the Bible and talk with her about it, ask her probing questions about what she's experiencing and what she wants to tell me before it's too late. We can go there once in a while, but it's too heavy and serious for all the time. Times alone with Mom are often spent watching I Love Lucy or sorting edge pieces out for the latest jigsaw puzzle. We've been "doing" cancer for half a year now, and hospice for more than 3 months. Much as I love to dwell on the eternal, I'm too exhausted to do it all the time. The time is coming, sooner than I want it to, that we'll be faced with the serious side of things all the time. I'm praying that, even then, we will find a little humor every day.