My Mom

 This photo of my mother showed up on my sister's Facebook page. I had never seen it before.  When I thought of my mother the past 39 years since her death, I remembered her beauty, her grace, her sense of humor, her loving kindness to all people, and the intense sadness that crept into her life occasionally...depression.

When I was 12, my mother was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer.

Her disease was so far advanced they had to remove her entire pectoralis muscle when they took her breast. The procedure, which is rarely done in the 21st century was called a Halsted Radical Mastectomy.  They had promised our mother they would wake her up if it was decided they needed to take her breast. They failed to do that.

Halsted Radical Mastectomy

My father brought my sister and me to the hospital to see mom after her surgery, she was wearing a brave face and as always, it seemed she was worried more about us than herself.  She had a large bandage on her chest, she had not seen under it yet.  I honestly do not remember when the doctor came in, I was terrified for my mother, she had never been really sick before, and my father was not known for his sympathy, empathy, or loving nature. In essence, he was a man mired down in anger and was so dissatisfied with his life, he was unkind to all of us.  I and my sister had to face our fear for our mother with no adult telling us everything would be OK.

At some point in our visit, our mother pulled the bandages away from across her chest and saw that her entire breast was gone.  The look of shock on her face is one I will never forget, she said "You took it, you promised you would tell me first" The mining doctor; ( early HMO type of physician) with no emotion told her they decided to go ahead when they saw how far cancer had spread. She looked utterly betrayed and wept bitterly. The loss of her breast was also the loss of her husband, as my father would no longer allow her into the marriage bed because "she was no longer a real woman".

I left childhood behind that day, but my mother, bless her, wanted to make my life as 'cancer-free" as she could, leaving me out of most conversations about her treatments or how she was feeling. I knew almost nothing about what she was truly going through.  I did know that my father had left her to fend on her own while inhabiting the same home, he never held her in his arms again. I was beyond angry with him for his behavior, and he had never been a stellar father, to begin with; cruel, angry, abusive, a human being so dissatisfied with the way his life turned out, he took it out on us. He was a broken man in so many ways and one of the most unhappy people I have ever known. Only now can I look back at who he was with some sympathy, but he did so much damage to all of us.

I needed my mother desperately, but she was fighting for her life and her Cobalt treatments were brutal. She was exhausted and depressed and more unhappy than I had ever seen her.  I did all the things a child screaming for help does; ditched school (wild child that I was, I bought day-old doughnuts with my two friends and hung out in front of the movie theater), I wrote excuses for myself saying I had doctor appointments, I never got caught until  my mother wrote one for me and they thought hers was a forgery... at some point the following summer I went to drinking parties with friends, being LDS meant I had never really been exposed to drinking or drinkers, I discovered I hated alcohol and I also noticed that high school boys wanted to get the middle school girls drunk so they could take advantage of them. Since I could not swallow the Budweiser beer given to me, I did not get drunk, I pried my friends out of that party because I knew they would be raped if I did not. I never returned, and I never spoke to those young men again, I was disgusted by their behavior. That summer I learned that many men lived for sex and thought of very little but sex. I was beginning to hold men in disdain, there were none I could look up to any longer.