The other night my husband and I were in the kitchen cleaning up and started joking about our son organising our funerals. Joking about who he might bring and so on. And then my husband says that he has already decided on the specifics of what he wants. So I ask him to tell me what they are since it's likely he could go before me. He's telling me about some particulars, as I'm doing the dishes. And then I get a flash back to the conversation my Dad and I had to have with Mom last summer about her wishes for her funeral. How she wasn't very clear about what she wanted apart from something environmentally friendly. How she was in denial about her own dying. I'll always remember how surprised and slightly ambushed she looked when we asked.
I don't think she ever really got her head around how fast the cancer was taking over her body and how little time she had. I mean, none of us did really. We all struggled with how rapidly she died. But we could all see it happening. Every single day she declined a little more, could walk a little less far. Got tired from less and less. She was barely eating anything - her stomach had gotten so small from the acites that filled her abdomen, and she looked terribly thin and emaciated. She got dizzy and light headed when standing up. Two weeks before she died she had a fall while sitting on the toilet and bumped her head. I think that really shocked her. But still she insisted on going to all her treatment appointments even though the stress of the journeys were starting to take their toll. The week before things got really bad, she had an appointment every day of the week. She was taking an alternative therapy of vitamin C treatments plus her immunotherapy appointments and blood transfusions. We all thought that week might be a make or break week for her.
I remember saying to her:
"You know, you don't have to do any of this if you don't want to."
"Any of what?" She said.
"Any of these appointments." I replied. "If they're meant to increase your comfort and they're making you more uncomfortable and stressed, you don't have to go to them. You could just be comfortable and chill out here and rest."
She turned to me, and looked me in the face and said:
"But then how am I supposed to get better?"
How could I say to her: "you aren't going to get better Mom"?
Mom thought she could get better. She thought the cancer was something she could "fight". Something she could "beat". People told her she could "win". At some point I realised how much I hated this language we've come to use for people with cancer. How we fail a person's humanity by laying the responsibility of cancer onto the person who's ill; making people think it's within their personal power to change. Something they can beat, win, defeat, triumph over if they just ate better, took this treatment, thought positively. For some people, cancer can go into remission or disappear altogether. For others it's way too advanced for their body and they die. There are so many combinations of different conditions within the body that allows one person to heal and the next person to succumb. Describing it as a fight does a disservice to both. I wish Mom was never told that this was something she could beat. I wish she had fully understood what her diagnosis meant both for her and her loved ones. But I guess the confrontation of death does strange things to the mind and maybe the idea of fighting was a last act of self-preservation.
Another act of self-preservation for Mom was going for a swim in the lake. Mom loved the water so much. The cool waters of the lake providing a welcome escape from this body she didn't recognise anymore. The day she couldn't physically get in the lake, we knew it couldn't be long.
The day of her dying, we all took a break in the late afternoon and went for a swim. Me and my sisters swam in the small bay outside our cottage enclosed by two rocky piers. It was bittersweet. When we got out, and stood drip drying on the deck outside, my middle sister remarked how Mom should've been there with us, how she could hear her voice saying: "How's the water girls?" My uncle came back down to our cottage and reported that Nan had got in the water and immediately burst into tears, sobbing "Heather should be here!"
In the end we tried to give Mom as environmentally friendly a funeral as possible. She was cremated in a simple cardboard box and her ashes were placed in two different biodegradable urns. One with wildflower seeds to be buried in the earth at the cottage, and the other to dissolve in water for a water burial in her beloved Georgian Bay.
We took my dad's boat from the harbour in Midland and drove it around to the bay just out front of Nan and Granddad's cottage. The cottage of her childhood. My aunt Mary came out to meet us in a kayak and my sister and her family and my Uncle Andrew came out in a small tin boat with an outboard motor. It was a beautiful hot sunny day with a breeze and the water was perfect. My Dad said a few words and so did Hilary, my youngest sister. Then Dad let the urn go into the water. We sprinkled beautiful wildflowers Hilary had picked on top of the urn in the water. The urn was meant to float for a few minutes and then start to slowly sink to the bottom. But for some reason, ours didn't. We splashed water on it to try and water log it so it grew heavier but that didn't work, it just kept floating. One of the corners of the bag containing Mom's ashes must have come loose because all of a sudden her ashes started pouring out into the lake, swirling with the movement of the water and the flowers. Swimming in the sunlight. Long curlycues of ash mingled with the water, floating just below the surface before making it's way down in a kind of slow, lilting dance. It was beautiful. Mom and the water. Her sister paddling alongside her watching her swirling arms of ash disperse and disappear.
Then we looked up and saw the coast guard. Strictly speaking water burials are illegal in provincial lakes. We collectively held our breath for a few minutes but they turned and headed out into the middle of the lake around the point.
I decided to stay in the bay and swim for shore while my husband and Hilary’s husband accompanied Dad back to the harbour with the boat. Family friends were watching my son on the beach, so my sisters and I took our time and had a little swim. When we emerged onto the beach, our aunt were there. We all smiled at each other and felt a sense of peace. It felt like we had been swimming with Mom.
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