I have been thinking about this for a long time, and I have definitely decided: there is nothing funny about my mom's cancer.
My hesitation at this conclusion might stem from it's being my initial reaction. More than a month ago, my dad called me from my brother's house in Media and told me the results of all mom's tests from Riddle Memorial. "This is not funny," I told my father. I said it again to my husband, and I liked the sound of it so much that I sang it out again and again to the tune of low growling tears.
My husband got on the phone with my mom the next day and told her, "It is just not funny." He confuses "funny" with "fun", however, so he meant to be sympathetic to mom's pain and confusion.
Now, my cancer was funny. I mean in the sense of "causing laughter." Hear me out. I was a serious, more-veggie-than-thou vegetarian, one who had nine reasons to eat organic broccoli and who knew the secret code names for milk products in processed foods; I withstood the derision of my husband, who has himself whacked chickens and sold meat for the largest chicken processor in Costa Rica. Once I grabbed a pan in which he had fried up a steak and performed a cleansing ritual with salt, lemon and fire. And I was the one who got colon cancer at age 32.
Hindsight tells me that the cleansing ritual tempted the Gods to make this little joke.
Then I woke up after surgery with a colostomy. It was just yesterday that my husband told me he missed the bag on cold nights because it was so warm and cushiony. No, he didn't want me to fix him a hot water bottle because those go all cold. A colostomy bag has a built-in reheating mechanism. Infinitely superior, to his way of thinking.
My dad's two bouts with colon cancer are funny. He agrees with me; no, I agree with him since he started the joking. He makes jokes about his writing being so much better since he's mastered the use of the semi-colon (ba DUMP bump), and how this just proves that lawyers are full of it (ba DUMP bump). Then of course the timing of his diagnoses is just hysterical. The first time his diagnosis came ten, count 'em, ten days after Ronald Reagan had his surgery. The second time it came about three weeks after my surgery. That's my dad, trendy and loving it.
The really ironic bit is that I lost about as much colon as dad has left. Aside from being my response when dad tells me not to eat asparagus, it is surely fodder for some hearty guffawing in The Common Room of the Gods. "That pair need something to really bring them close," says, oh, I dunno, Kokopeli, "why not some ironic colon resectioning? C'mon, it'll be a real hoot." And Jesus and Ganesh shake their heads and say, "That's not funny," and Minerva just rolls her eyes and...
You get the idea.
Mom's going to lose one kidney on Thursday. She's afraid of surgery, and her trying to be brave makes me weep like a cellar wall when I'm alone. She's had this cancer creeping slowly through her kidney for seven years. That's seven years of slow slower slowest and sleeping twelve fourteen sixteen hours a day, dreading the visits of her precious granddaughters because it will take too much energy to clean before and after and play and sing during; barely summoning the enthusiasm to enjoy her own daughter's wedding, which she'd been wanting to plan since her own wedding was planned right out from under her; now she sits, hating her exhaustion and anemia and angry at the years she has lost to sleep, depression and more sleep.
And we're all just happy it's only one kidney.
There is nothing funny about my mom's cancer. It's not funny. It's not funny...