When Your Genre Kryptonite Has Its Own Kryptonite

One of my “genre kryptonites” – i.e. the genre of book guaranteed to part me from my money – are books about books, specifically of the memoir variety.

Read a book a day for a year (Nina Sankovitch’s Tolstoy and the Purple Chair)? Sure.

Your dad reads to you every night from grade school until college (Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise)? Yep.

Examine all your childhood heroines and how they are helpful or problematic (Rebecca Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine)? Yes!

Decide to “better” yourself by reading 50 specific books (Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously)? Yes, HarperPerennial, you know me well.

Examine how your relationship to a specific work of literature has changed as you age (Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch)? Yep, yep, yep.

And (my personal, current favorite), read one book from EVERY country in the world in ONE YEAR (Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers (US)/Reading the World (UK))? HELLZ YES.

Gimmie. I will take them all. Hand them over.

Until I can barely force myself to read the blurb of a particular book.

On the first Sunday of December 2011, I was working at the bookstore. It was the holidays, there were more customers than would seem to fit into the aisles, then my brother called. He told me to get off the sales floor and go to the back – he wouldn’t tell me why. When I did, he told me he was at the emergency room, with my parents, and my mother had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

My manager told me to go to the ER to be with my family. Immediately. Once there, I convinced the doctor to show me the CT scan. The tumor looked like a small golf ball lodged in the back of her right ventricle. Over the next week Mom underwent brain surgery, rehab to make sure she was regaining her balance and strength, and the critical meeting with her oncologist and radiation specialists.

My mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, grade IV. A tumor that is perhaps two percent of brain cancers which are only two percent of all cancers diagnosed in one year. Aggressive, very aggressive. Insidious, hard to get “margin” surgically. The best clinical trial evidence said that half of all patients are still alive eighteen months after diagnosis. We were lucky in that my parents live near one of the best teaching hospitals in the country and that my day job is there as well, working in research for the hospital epidemiologist. I knew Mom’s surgeon was the best we could hope for, my boss is neighbors with her oncologist. She was in good hands. We counted off the days of radiation treatments, watched her white cell counts, bought her books (and a Nook – Mom had a noticeable decrease in her field of vision so it was easier for a while to read “one page” at a time with larger print on a tablet than navigate the pages of a paper book), counted out chemotherapy pills, and we waited to see what would happen.

That fall, a book was published that should have been in my wheelhouse, The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. When his mother was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, they began to read and discuss the same books. All sorts of books, up until her death two years later.

When I had to stock the store display with shiny new hardcovers of The End of Your Life Book Club I could barely open the packing case. Ordinarily, I’d have been all over a book like this, happily reading a personal account of books read. I would likely cry over what would probably be a beautiful rendering of a mother-son relationship. Instead, reading the first paragraph of the blurb made me feel nauseated. I couldn't read a memoir about a mom-who-liked-to-read dying of cancer. I couldn't – in a rational world, I could, but my irrational mind was worried that it might jinx my own mother’s treatment.

My genre kryptonite had developed its own kryptonite: my mother.

Three years later, Mom is doing better than anyone could have predicted. She wasn't able to go back to work as a parish administrator, but she has started playing the organ for church again (on occasion, it’s still too much to prepare for two services every week). She helps my nieces practice their piano lessons. Her balance isn't, and will never be, back to normal but as long as we make sure the kids don’t leave toys in her path it’s fine. She’s still my mom. All these extra months and years are a gift.

The End of Your Life Book Club is now out in paperback, it’s been included in promotional sales, and a few copies of the hardcover have popped up in the bargain bin. And I still won’t read it. Not even the first paragraph. I wish Schwalbe all the best, but I will probably never read his book.

There will be other books about books to make me weak-at-the-knees. And that is just fine.

God bless us, everyone!

Merry Christmas!

My family was so thankful this year for one very good reason:

Mom (and yes, that's the hat I started knitting when she was in the SICU).  We got to have her for about six hours today for the Christmas holiday and it was so nice to have her home for a little while - it was the best present of all.  She'll be discharged from rehab on Wednesday!! 


So to quote Tiny Tim:  God bless us, everyone.

A hat for my mother

I am knitting a hat.

I am knitting a hat using a pattern I like.

I am knitting a hat using a pattern I like out of a yarn I loathe. 

I am knitting a hat using a pattern I like out of a yarn I loathe because I am sitting in the waiting room of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit waiting to go back and see my mother.

I am knitting a hat using a pattern I like out of a yarn I loathe because I am sitting in the waiting room of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit waiting to go back and see my mother because my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor less than a week ago and underwent brain surgery yesterday.

My mother needs a hat.

My mother is allergic to wool.

This yarn is acrylic. I hate acrylic.  It's a royal pain in the ass to cable with and it feels wierd.

But my mother needs a hat when she goes home because it is December in Iowa.  It is cold and I don't want her head to be cold. 

It took two hours of searching through my stash two days ago trying to find a non-wool yarn because I didn't have time to go to the yarn store.  It took two hours because I was crying so hard I couldn't see.

My mother has one of the best neurosurgeons available.  I know he does great work.  I know he does great work because I work at this hospital.  I know the SICU nurses are the best nurses you could find anywhere.  I know because I have worked with them on some of our research studies.  I know they will take good care of my mother.  I work here and I have made sure she is getting the best care anyone could ever find.  I know all of this and I am scared as hell.

I am wearing my staff ID and pager like a shield.  I slept with my pager last night, a talisman against the phone call in the night.  I work at this hospital and they will take good care of my mother.  They will.  I tell myself that with almost every stitch of this yarn that sticks to my fingers as I knit.  I tell myself this as I struggle to make this inflexible yarn work a C10F or C10B.  Every single stitch of this infernal yarn keeps my mother here.

This yarn is acrylic. I hate acrylic. It's a royal pain in the ass to cable with and it feels wierd, but it is going to be a hat for my mother whether it wants to or not.  When it's a hat, I will find time to go to the yarn store and get some natural-fiber, warm, non-sheep yarn and do the hat over again.

Because my mother needs a hat and she is allergic to wool.  I take a deep breath at the end of each row of stiff stitches and give thanks that my mother has come through surgery with flying colors.  The road ahead is still bumpy, though, and she will need a hat.  Many hats.  As many hats in as many colors as she wants, as fast as I can knit them for her.  Because she's my mommy and I still need my mommy.

So....I am knitting a hat using a pattern I like out of a yarn I loathe because I am sitting in the waiting room of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit waiting to go back and see my mother because my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor less than a week ago and underwent brain surgery yesterday and she will need a hat when she goes home.