The Purple Bathing Suit

“April is the cruelest month”  T.S. Eliot

Although I have spent my professional career battling cancer, cancer is not the cruelest disease.  Tonight I was looking through old photographs that my father had taken to a print shop to be scanned on to a disk.  He sent me a copy, but I had not had much time to look at the pictures.  When I finally did, last night, I was disappointed in the sloppy job that the print shop or camera shop had done—photos were scanned in upside down, backside forward, reversed, random and unlabeled.  There was no chronology or logic—it was just willy-nilly, get the job done.  And I am sure that they charged him a lot of money for that service.

Looking again tonight, there is joy and sadness in those old and out of order family photographs.  My sister smiles as she receives her diploma from Stanford.  My little brother, now long dead of a drug overdose, blue eyed and perfect as a three year old sitting next to my 5 year old pony-tailed self.  Me, in my favorite “car-coat” as my mother called it, felted and toggle tied and warm.  I remember that time it snowed in Houston—I was in first grade and I had pretended to be sick to stay home from school and then it snowed, beautiful white fluffy snow, and my Nana would not let me go outside to play because, of course, I was “sick”.  By the next day, the snow was gone.

Of all of those old pictures, there is one that jumps right off the screen at me.  It is a photograph of my mother, just graduated from college, in a purple skirted Jantzen bathing suit.  I know it is a Jantzen because I remember the logo from my childhood—a little diver with a swim cap covering her head, doing a swan dive into a pool, ubiquitously sewn onto every Jantzen suit of the 1950’s.  My mother is at the beach, sitting demurely on a beach towel that appears to be engulfed by a foamy wave which creeps just past her delicately crossed legs.  She is brunette, petite, beautiful and smiling.  She is 21, and her whole life is before her.  I like to think that my father, deeply in love, took that picture just before they married.

Sixty years later, my mother is a two time cancer survivor.  She was treated for breast cancer in 2001, and then for a disease of the blood, Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, which involved her brain in 2005.  At that time she received chemotherapy directly into her central nervous system.  Five years later, in 2010, she began to lose her memory, and her will to walk, and to speak, and to eat.  Now, in 2012, she has advanced dementia.  She does not recognize me or my sister, and my father dutifully visits her at least every other day in her nursing home, where she receives excellent care, completely dependent on others for her survival.  Because her nurses are so attentive, she has not had a life threatening pneumonia or urinary infection or infected bed sore which would cause her demise.  And so, we wait.

I never got along very well with my mother, but despite that I wish fervently that she could be herself again, older and wiser, waiting out the tide in her purple Jantzen bathing suit. Cancer is not the cruelest disease—dementia is.   I am waiting to see which shoe will drop for me.