Whatsername

Thought I ran into you down on the street

Then it turned out to only be a dream

I made a point to burn all of the photographs

She went away and then I took a different path

I remember the face, but I can't recall the name

Now I wonder how whatsername has been.

And in the darkest night

If my memory serves me right

I'll never turn back time

Forgetting you, but not the time.

*Whatsername- Green Day

__________________________________________________________________

Whatsername has a name. And I can recall it quite well.

In my life, whatsername is cancer. And even though I made a point to burn all those photographs in my mind, I met her again most unexpectedly last week whilst camping.

I met her head on in a dream. My subconscious was locked. I couldn't get away.

In my dream my mother was rediagnosed with breast cancer, only in my dream it was anything but contained. 47 tumors. 24 of them benign, 23 of them rapidly devouring her insides.
I remember a point in my dream when I found out, and I fell, broken, to the ground. I collapsed. No longer strong, no longer unwavering.

There was a shadow of hope in my dream, maybe she could get better. Maybe she could win.
Mostly there was a tidal wave of pain. A riot of futility.

I forced myself awake after not being able to handle it any longer. Flailing wildly in a state of almost passed-out stupor, I noticed there were tears everywhere. I had drenched my pillow, my blanket.

Somehow, I managed to rock myself back to sleep, but ever since that awful night, I've had the worst sort of monkey on my back. For days afterwards, I dreaded being alone because everytime I was, the haunting image of my mother's pale, emaciated face swam before me. My worst fears were reawakened, and what was worse, there was no way to calm them. I was completely out of cell service for a week and I couldn't call and hear my mother's voice. I couldn't be reassured that everything at home was fine, that there was no more cancer. I felt so lost.

Memories of awful days kept trying their damnedest to resurface, but I kept pushing them back hard into the unseen corners of my mind. I don't talk about that time in my life. I don't remember it. It never happened.

____________________________________________________________

2004 was the worst year of my life.

We moved from my childhood home in the beautiful, unruly Oregon countryside to the strict, paper-ruled, fenced backyards of the suburbs. I hated leaving my home.

I became an only child, as both sisters got married in one year, and one moved far away to Seattle.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer less than a week after my sister's late April wedding.

Every human being experiences a moment in their lives when the switch from childhood to adulthood takes place. Some don't notice it, others remember it after years of forgetting, and some choose to pretend it never happened.

I remember my switch very clearly.

A few days after my sister's wedding, they were still on their honeymoon, I went with my mom to her regularly scheduled mammogram.

I waited, and I waited. Many other patients arrived and departed from their appointments within the time span that I sat in that awful waiting room chair. I waited. I didn't touch the stack of magazines on the table. I worried.

I wasn't unaware. I've always been a worrier, even when I was a kid. I was alone, my mother was not coming out, and I was so alone.

My mom finally came out in the waiting room and took me by the hand. My fear tells me it was two hours later, but my memory can't actually recall how long it was. Maybe it was two hours. It definitely felt long enough.

"We're almost done, honey."

My mom promised me we'd be done soon, we could go home soon, everything was fine, don't look so worried.....

And so, another spout of waiting in a plastic chair in another wing of the hospital as my mom underwent an ultra-sound. I knew something must have been wrong, because I wasn't even in a formal waiting room. There was a chair set up in a hallway next to a pile of unused gurneys, and that's where they told my mom I could sit. Doctors in their scrubs with their clipboards whizzed by, nurses strolled up and down and up and down, nobody noticed me. Nobody looked happy.

Hours after we first got to the hospital, they finally let us leave. My mother was so quiet.

I remember looking down a long hallway as we were making our way out to the car.
A man in a paramedics uniform was strapping something to a gurney. It was a lady, her eyes were closed. He raised the blanket over her head.

My mother called at me to hurry up. My childhood withered.

I sat alone in the car, watching my mom pace up and down the sidewalk in front of me. She was talking to my dad, her eyes were cloudy. I fought hard to keep from crying. She never hid things from me, she never took phonecalls elsewhere to where I couldn't hear them, she trusted me.
Something was wrong.

Her voice penetrated the car windows, even though they were rolled all the way up.
"They said they found something." My inner child died.

I was just eleven years old when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The next day, I sent an email to my sister Hallie who had just moved to Seattle a few months before. My mom had gone in for more tests, and I stayed behind this time.

My parents shared secret glances and hushed conversations, but I knew.
I wrote to my sister, "Hallie, I'm really scared. I think mom has cancer, but no-one will talk to me."

She called my parents in tears that night. "You have to tell Hannah."

So they brought me downstairs, they sat me on the couch, and after a few moments of silence, during which I was already crying, they told me.

The months following are a whirlwind of surgeries, chemotherapy sessions, sleepless nights, and hours spent crying so hard by myself and praying to God to let my mother live. If she dies, I die, I must have told God a thousand times.

Cancer is an unforeseen force.
A silent army that creeps up on you and blindsides you, so that everything you touch, and everything you see, is tinged in death.

The moment that my childhood was forever lost, I swore to myself to be the best adult I could be. I didn't cry about it publicly. I didn't draw attention to it, or ask for pity, I hardly mentioned it at all.

I focused on schoolwork, and helped around the house. I cleaned and cooked for my sick mother, and I never let myself show any weakness about it. I tried so hard not to let the pain surface. I had to keep a game face. Life was going to go on, and my mother was going to keep living it!

All thanks to God's redeeming grace, she did keep living life. 7 years cancer-free, since.

After that year in complete suspension, life went on at top speed. There wasn't really time to look back on what had happened, there was no desire to.

That dream I had last week was the first time I really experienced the depth of that fear in over seven years. But I still pushed the memories back. I couldn't relive them, I couldn't abide their ugliness. I've made myself strong. I've made myself complete, or so I thought.

I thought that I was over it, I thought that it had completely healed.

I realized this past week that I never gave it time to heal. I never gave it time, or air, I never let it breathe. I never let it free, open, I never acknowledged that phase of my life. I had completely bottled it up and locked it deep, deep inside.

I even started to think the other day about how many people I know now actually knew about my mom having cancer. Just last month, one of my close friends saw a picture in my living room and said, "Hannah.... Did your mom have cancer?"

I still don't acknowledge it.

I realize now that it's time.

I have to let go of it.

My seven year old self slapped me in the face while camping this week. She said, "I died when I was eleven. You didn't have to let me die. Love those moments. Accept your scars, and I just might come back to life."

So I did.

On the roadtrip home from the campsite, I plugged in my headphones, stared at the window, and took a very deep breath. I opened the box of memories in my mind labeled "Whatsername", and I let them rise.

"I love you for who you are and what you've done for me in my life. I recognize the greater purpose of the scars you left, and I accept you as a valid part of my past with no reason to be ashamed or afraid of you anymore."

I love and accept you to the moment sitting in the car. The moment my childhood was replaced.

I love and accept you to the moment sitting, crying, on the couch as my parents tearfully told me what was happening.

I accept you to the memory of sleeping all night long in an armchair next to my mother's hospital bed after one of her surgeries. I had refused to go home. I held her hand. The beep beep of monitors lulled me into an uneasy sleep.

I accept you to the memory of my sister Katie shaving my mother's head, and her beautiful pepper-and-salt hair falling silently to the bathroom floor as my family gathered around the mirror. I sat on the floor holding my cousin's hand. My dad couldn't watch, the tears never fell, but I saw them there behind his eyes.

I accept you to the memory of shopping for wigs with my mother and her best friend. The two of them tried to joke around about the ridiculousness of the store, but it was still a somber day.

I love and accept you to the memory of her first chemo treatment. She sent me to a friend's house overnight so I wouldn't see her for 24 hours after. I wouldn't see the disillusionment, the discomfort. The vomiting. The crying. She picked me up the next day and took me to Burgerville for lunch. I was terrified to look her in the face, for fear of seeing the pain in her eyes.

I love and accept you to the memory of her crying in frustration because she had been craving Tiramisu for weeks, and after finally ordering some at dinner one night, the same chemo which caused her voracious craving caused her to be violently sick at the very first bite. She's never eaten it since.

I cried and cried thousands of tears as I did this, it was a miracle nobody looked in the rear-view mirror at me. They would have been quite alarmed. Memories I had not allowed myself to remember came flocking back for the first time in years. I loved and accepted them all.

Cancer is a highly traumatic event in any person's life. I used to tell myself that since she survived, there was no reason to come to grips with those memories because I never lost anything. I still was blessed enough to have my mother. How can I be selfish and complain when I never really lost?

But I did loose something. I lost a part of my beautiful and astounding mother that I will never get back. Her youth. I lost my innocence.

And up until now, that was something I was not willing to admit, or accept. But I can now.

I understand the significance of that entire ordeal in my life so much more now. As soon as I accepted the memories and feelings, I felt a huge weight lift as that seven-year-old monkey finally fell off of my back.

I'm ready to talk about it. I'm ready to open the wounds and let them heal. The process isn't over, I don't know when it will be over, but it's happening.

It's happening, and every moment my beloved mother breathes air throughout her pure, healthy body.

Thanks be to God for the miracles He performs every single day.