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The Moon to Play With
A Daughter's Journey through Love, Loss, and the Power of Presence
By Wendy M. Karasin Balboa Press
Copyright © 2015 Wendy M. Karasin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-2387-3
CHAPTER 1
September 2008
The times they are a-changin'. —Bob Dylan
I step from my sheltered shadow as brisk autumn upends the lazy days of summer. Camp is over; kids go back to school. My mother, our family's matriarch, has age-related health issues that hit cliffs and rapids.
"Your blood test shows an elevated liver enzyme," says Dr. Anslow, our compassionate physician, who hugs us on our way out after ordering more tests. The first is the CT scan at Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology, a steel and smoked-glass building recessed in the ninety-degree angle formed by Merrick Avenue and Sunrise Highway. Inside, there is a large waiting room and a central staircase leading to the second floor. Chet, my mom's husband, my mother, and I have pressure-cooked guts.
"Mrs. Miller?" Our heads turn in unison to view the young tech in lavender scrubs, who identifies and whisks my mother behind closing elevator doors. When she is returned to us, we draw the tenuous inference that the CT scan proves inconclusive.
"Your doctor will call with the results," says our artful, if not evasive, technician. Through enormous windows, I notice the colors of the sky are blue, white, and yellow. My brain's internal chatter is maddening. It is with the power of some invisible energy that I am able to drive home.
"So what now?" we ask Dr. Anslow at our next visit.
"It's probably nothing, but we need to investigate further. I recommend an endoscopy." Agitation suffuses Chet, my mother, and me.
* * *
On a sunny, fateful afternoon, I get a call from the gastroenterologist who performed the endoscopy. I lie on my hip, draped like Cleopatra on my mother's peach-colored leather sofa, a pillow propped under one arm and a blue, woolen blanket covering my legs. A melody pulls me from my reverie. It takes a few moments for me to recognize the ringing phone as mine, and several more moments rummaging through my bag to locate it. The number is unfamiliar and I assume the individual on the other end has misdialed.
"Who is this, please?" the man asks.
"This is Wendy Karasin," I answer, but I'm thinking, What an idiot; didn't he call me?
"Are you Blossom Miller's daughter?"
"Yes."
"I am Doctor ..." I do not catch his name. It has a lot of consonants. His curt tone, the fact that he's a doctor, and my instincts lead me away from my mother overhearing the conversation or noticing changes in my facial expression. I throw the blue blanket from my legs, and my apprehension and I walk out the front door into the sharp fall air.
"I reviewed the results of the biopsy," he says. "Your mother has pancreatic cancer." Why is he calling me? I do not remember giving him my number, nor do I want to be in possession of information important people (my mother, her husband, and her primary care physician) are not. I sit on a driveway of gray-speckled brick with my equilibrium and legs knocked out from under me. Doctor Whatever-His-Name-Is does not seem to care whether I can stand, nor does he offer options to slow my disintegrating composure from being siphoned through the phone line. Leaves in carrot and ginger hue fall from bough to earth.
"Unfortunately, the tumor has wrapped itself around the portal vein. I don't know if surgery is possible, but I'll give you the name of a surgeon on Long Island, in case."
Am I to deliver this grenade? Not likely—emotion has taken my vocal cords hostage, rendering speech impossible.
The good news? We caught the cancer early. The bad news? The diagnosis is a death sentence.
CHAPTER 2
1951 Mom and Dad
To realize one's destiny is a person's only obligation. —Paulo Coelho
I was a fat baby who looked Asian. At eight pounds, one ounce, I weighed more than most of the babies in the nursery. The nurse handed my substantial self to my mom, who smiled and said, "Are you sure she's mine? She's cute but she looks Chinese."
My mother was five feet, two inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. It would be easy to mistake her petite form for a weak one. But she had the gravitational pull of a medium-sized planet in the Milky Way galaxy and a bear-hug strangle that could incapacitate. Her arms encircled her targets like a boa constrictor forcing them into submission. When they fell to the ground, laughing and suffering from minor discomfort, she would release her clutch. As a young child, I would have chosen her, over anyone, to walk through a dark alley with.
Her straight brown hair and piercing dark eyes were visual precursors to a charismatic, vivacious personality. Her tangos and merengues made their way across many a dance floor with fluidity and grace, but folk and rhythm and blues were the musical beats that made her heart pump. She listened to Lead Belly, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. She was smart and political and taught me to stand up for my truth, even and especially when that truth was unpopular.
My mother was born on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx to immigrant parents in 1923, and her childhood was truncated at the age of ten when her father committed suicide. He hanged himself with a rope in their Bronx living room. My Grandma Sarah watched her young daughter with insatiable interest because my mother, who didn't drink or smoke, nevertheless had a rebellious streak the size of Texas. Her only sibling, her sister Ruth, was six years her senior. If they had been born on separate continents to dissimilar cultures, they could not have ended up being more different.
After high school graduation, eighteen-year-old Mom and her best friend, Milly Brody, marched into the army recruitment center in downtown Brooklyn and exited as some of the first women, other than nurses, to serve in the ranks of the army—two feisty, passionate WACs who refused to accept self-limiting stereotypes. My generation, with greater ease, lifted the not-dissimilar cause of feminism like a toddler and set her down on firmer ground.
Mom's introduction to army life was getting pummeled by a large and angry Southern woman who hated Jews. Katherine, a devout Catholic inhabiting the barrack bed beside my mother's, saved her life. A fierce sense of justice formulated. The year was 1942. The base's recreation center was decorated with streamers, a live band, and plenty of alcohol. As recalcitrant as Mom could be in certain regards, that is how determined she could be in others. For reasons unfamiliar to me, other than disliking the taste and effect, she drank one sip of alcohol and took one drag of tobacco and decided ardently and eternally to forgo both.
My father's wavy, chocolate-brown hair and his charisma drew others to him like a paper clip to a bar magnet. At five feet, eleven inches tall and 170 pounds, he wore army fatigues as they were intended: neatly, taut against a strong, slim body, and pressed to perfection. Good genes provided him a muscular and athletic build, which may have caused onlookers to consider him cocky. His laissez-faire swagger didn't help his case. Those who knew him were not fooled by the facade. On the contrary, they considered him a well-read, thoughtful, and deeply caring man.
His hazel eyes did not prepare a person for the complicated individual who lived behind them. After the war he became a CPA, because the engineering programs he applied to unilaterally rejected Jews. His bold character stood up for the underdog, ushered Paul Robeson from a concert crashed by people who didn't believe in an African-American's right to sing publically, and raised three children: one through divorce, one through what may have been ADHD before it became the catchall for fidgety youth, and one through the hair-raising trials of living with a sibling who behaved like he had ADHD. I inherited his love of beauty—both of our homes were decorated with original artwork in golden frames, vases filled with pink, coral, and fuchsia flowers, and shelves full of books.
My father was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1925. He had three siblings: an older brother, an older sister, and a fraternal twin. Two siblings died long before he and his twin were born, one during childbirth, and the other from a bout with influenza. My diminutive Grandma Fay was spirited and fashionable, which came in handy when her wealthy builder husband flew the coop. She had huge, healthy newborns and was the reason I knew I would not need a caesarian due to my babies' birth weights, which were considerable. Schoolwork came easily to my father, and he graduated high school at the age of sixteen. Although life circumstances moved him from orthodoxy, he didn't stray far from his Jewish roots. With no money for college, he worked until he was seventeen and then enlisted in the Army Air Corps wishing to become a pilot, but he was needed as a bombardier. In 1942, at the base's social hall, he met the ethnically beautiful woman who would become his wife and my mother.
CHAPTER 3
October 2008
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. —Albert Camus
The cliffs and rapids take on more treacherous terrain as Mom's symptoms progress. She has difficulty eating, and her skin and the whites of her eyes have turned an unnatural yellow. Dr. Anslow calls Mom and Chet with Dr. Consonant's endoscopy results. True to her practical self, my mother is more accepting of her fate and entirely more realistic than I. We make an appointment with the surgeon Dr. Consonant suggests.
"We need to find someone else. I don't like this guy," I say, departing his less-than-stellar consultation.
The trip to Manhattan takes an hour. Mom has aged, and this punches my ribs in staccato jabs. I loop my arm through hers and walk up to glass-paneled doors that snap open mechanically. The words Sloan-Kettering assault my nervous system like bio-hazardous waste assaults one's state of calm. Greeted by women in tailored suits and oversized smiles, we arrive in the Bizarro World of inverted realities as they hand us forms to fill out in an orange waiting room with a refreshment bar.
Once my mother's name is called, we follow the nurse down a well-lit hallway to a spartan and pristine examination room where Dr. Stanton, our young, redheaded pancreatic surgeon, rises to welcome us. The room has two large, uncurtained windows facing Sixty-Seventh Street and a screen that doubles as a partition for the changing area. Mom unfolds the light-blue hospital gown on the stool beside her, slides the thin cloth over her body, and cinches the sash around her waist. Chet and I lean against the wall opposite the windows, soldiers braced to hear the news of an injured comrade. When the physical exam is complete, Mom gets dressed and the doctor reviews her records and X-rays.
"Mrs. Miller, the tumor is wrapped around the portal vein, but I believe we can remove it," he says, turning his head from the lighted X-ray to my pale mother.
"With me alive?" she asks, partially joking, her voice pinched.
"Yes." Grinning, as if to make what he is about to say appear less hideous, he describes Whipple surgery. The head of her pancreas will be removed, along with her gallbladder, her duodenum, bile ducts, and the lymph nodes closest to her pancreas. Her entire digestive system will be rerouted. There is the very real fear of diabetes.
We leave Sloan and head uptown to meet New York-Presbyterian's Dr. Lanzoon. The hospitals stand in stark contrast: Sloan, new and inviting; New York-Presbyterian, aged and gloomy. I hold the door open manually with my left hand, keeping my right hand free to grab Mom's blouse as she maneuvers through the crowded entrance. A wobbly, wooden desk stands kitty-corner to my left with a prehistoric security guard seated behind it. He could take eons to unfold from his chair. Running is out of the question. The elevator arrives on the fourth floor as we walk toward threadbare seating and piles of disheveled magazines. We are escorted to the doctor's office and screened by Diana, the physician's assistant, who says, "Please be patient. The doctor is running late." My annoyance rises like a thermometer on a blistering day but cools once Dr. Lanzoon, with the calmness of Buddha, sashays into the room. His eyes are kind as he addresses each of us with a smile and firm handshake. While the doctor studies Mom's records, we look around his office. Deep colors suggest an air of respectability. Blood-red and navy-blue medical books with cracked bindings line his shelves like stationary soldiers. Sitting in maroon chairs across from his desk, we notice three strategically placed mahogany framed photographs of his family. They remain loving reminders as stepchildren to his first love, surgery.
"Mrs. Miller, the tumor has surrounded the portal vein. I've performed the type of surgery we are discussing many times, usually with favorable results. Whipple surgery is one of my specialties. Do you have any questions?" he asks, looking from one uncertain face to another. Dr. John Lanzoon's steadfast patience, twenty-plus years of surgical oncology experience and sterling medical credentials answer our final question. He will perform the surgery.
In rush-hour traffic, our ride home is slow. I glance toward the passenger seat where my once-feisty mother rests. She has retreated into a semi-slumber. I perceive her in a way I never have before. I am in this struggle with the vengeance of a lioness protecting her cub, only this cub is my mom.
CHAPTER 4
1952–1954
You know that place between sleep and awake; that place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I will always love you. That's where I will be waiting. —J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Life was magical. I was the epicenter of my parents' universe. My baby naming took place in September, at a nondescript red-bricked temple on West Seventh Street in Brooklyn. My Hebrew name, Minucha Simcha, and its English translation, Peace and Joy, gave me large shoes to fill. It is said that one's Hebrew name is an act of prophesy from one's parents.
My white crib was embossed with pink rosebuds and immediately visible from the bedroom door. A sizable window was positioned to my right, making the space light and airy. I crawled through squares of nursery rhymes on my gently padded linoleum floor, pausing to examine Old King Cole's merry disposition, Little Miss Muffet frightened by the proximity of a spider, and Jack and Jill carting their pail of water before meeting their fateful fall. My parents spoke the words as I fixed my gaze on the pictures, igniting an early curiosity in reading. On the wall directly behind my crib were artistic cutouts of the Pan characters: Captain Hook and the ticking crocodile; Tiger Lily and the Lost Boys; Peter Pan with Wendy, Michael, and John Darling flying through a midnight sky with pinholes of light as dotted stars. My parents spun a working cocoon within which I thrived.
I remember standing in my crib, cooing and singing and shaking the slatted railing until somebody noticed I was awake. I thought I was content until one of my parents appeared in the doorway. My smile widened and I bobbed, knees bent and then locked straight, until Mom or Dad lifted me in their arms.
At the age of three, I sat in my living room on a wooden rocking horse painted in tans and browns, strands of yarn forming the makeshift mane. A black-and-white television set was centered between a record player on the left of the console and a speaker on the right, in the faux-walnut Magnavox cabinet. A beveled mirror covered the expanse of wall above it. I watched Annie Oakley and Roy Rogers. Westerns, cowgirls, and Native Americans were the subjects of my favorite shows. It is possible this began with my name, Wendy, who was kidnapped by Peter Pan and brought to Neverland, where the brave and defiant Tiger Lily lived. My life had the perfect patterning of stability and adventure.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Moon to Play With by Wendy M. Karasin. Copyright © 2015 Wendy M. Karasin. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
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