Forbidden words

At a wonderful lunch (salmon with white peaches and figs, broccoli rabe, vegan sushi, berry and mango tart) at my friend B's, I had an outburst I'm ashamed of. I was talking about the stress I feel watching my parents slide into poor health and the frustration I feel about their stubbornness in insisting on living independently, which paradoxically makes them more dependent on my brothers and me, and I finally said, "Why don't they just die!" The room fell silent. Everyone was shocked—myself included.

I don't really want them to die. I just want them to be sensible—and to behave in a way that doesn't scrape the sheathing from my nerves and twist them into a short circuit. That sentiment—Why don't they just die—is one of the things I fear most about a cancer recurrence. Having watched me struggle through surgery, chemo and radiation once, my friends and family will secretly wish I would just die quickly and spare them the ordeal of watching me die slowly. My continuing existence will be a hardship, a source of pain rather than pleasure. And I know just how they would feel.

There is another side of the story, though, and that is that I take a huge interest in watching my parents at this particular time in their lives. I've never seen anything as valiant as my dad's barreling madly through the halls of the rehab center in his walker, looking demented in his furious determination. "I want to get home to your mother," he said. Or anything as poignant as the arduous bill-paying of my mom, who can't reliably put the right entry on the right line even though her handwriting retains the ornate flourishes and the sharp clarity of etched crystal. Their fierce and frustrating death grip on their old way of life touches me. They don't want to identify themselves as old and needy, just as I didn't want to identify myself as sick and scared when I had cancer, so just as I ran, horrified, from the first cancer-support group I attended, so they recoil from the notion of assisted living. I didn't want to be one of the sick people I saw in the group, and they don't want to be old and feeble like the people they see in senior residences. But eventually, I think, just as I finally found relief in the company of people who shared my ordeal, they will welcome the relief of no longer having to pretend to be what they no longer are.