Left Unsaid
The Woven Tale Press, November 2020
Left Unsaid
Donny, 2012
“It’s so fucked up,” something I didn’t usually say, was all I could muster. My brother was dying of cancer and that’s all I had. I was trying to be cool, acting like we were talking about something, anything, else.
“It is,” was his response, and all he ever said to me about the disease that would eventually kill him.
I said lots of stupid things to Donny instead of talking about his reality, and he pretty much played along. Two months before his death, I told him all about my trip to Austria. “I hope to get to Salzburg one day,” he said in reply. Around the same time, he told me he took his daughters to see a movie. I said, “I don’t like children’s movies.” When he told me he was tired, I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m exhausted too,” as though it was normal, as though we were all the same level of tired as someone with stage four lung cancer.
As his illness intensified, I felt the emptiness of our conversations bearing down on me. I went to Target and bought a journal with a blurry pastel cover. I was going to list every single thing I remembered. I was going to mail it to him in New Jersey. I pictured him reading it, sadly, but I could also see him laughing over memories. I wanted him to know how much all the little things added up for me, what an effect he had on me.
The journal sits almost blank up on my third floor now. I never was able to finish my list. He silently slipped away before I had a chance.
Mary, 2008
The woman who works at the Y, running and laughing alongside the cart of toddlers being pushed through the hall, is bald, eyebrowless, wearing a turban. Even after having three of my six siblings and several friends and acquaintances experience chemotherapy, I still feel the sneaking panic, the desire to stare or look away.
My oldest sister, Mary, has been bald for eighteen years. Most people don’t want to know you can get chemo for that long, but she has. Last July the count was 900 chemotherapy sessions. 900. She is 60 but is often confused for an old man. She once told me there are women wearing exceptional wigs and with such skillful makeup that you would not know they have cancer. It makes you wonder about all those secret cancer people, and how most people would rather it be that way.
In contrast, Mary calls it “the power of the bald head” and has acquiesced to its occasional effectiveness.
But when you are bald, people either avoid you entirely, insult you, or overshare. I remember once being at an event with Mary. She was winning an award, something to do with having cancer. Afterwards, I stood beside her as a line formed of well-intentioned people who wished to tell her about when they lost their hair or someone they knew who beat cancer or someone who died. One woman smiled sweetly at my sister and said with her cute Philly accent, “Don’t worry, honey, your hair will grow back. It will be beautiful.”
That was one of the days I got a peak into what it’s like to be a bald woman.
People just can’t take women losing their hair.
We would all rather not know about any of it.
Donny, 1990
I was surprised about his eyebrows. I never thought about eyebrows and eyelashes falling out. That night was when I learned that eyebrows are really important. Everything I knew about my brother’s face was different without his eyebrows.
Donny had a considerable red birthmark covering a large portion of his face and neck and chest. It was nothing to all of us, the family, but it was, looking back, the first of many unfair burdens he would carry in his life. People asked my mother if she burned him when he was a baby. One of my classmates in grammar school brought it up once in a group discussion. None of us noticed, to the point where I’d say, “What birthmark?” when someone unexpectedly mentioned it. There were many more important things about my brother than that birthmark, things people of course at first meeting would not know, maybe would never know.
The loss of his eyebrows made all his history, even the birthmark, disappear, he was featureless, disappearing into the crowd.
On this night, the night I noticed his lack of eyebrows, I was his booby prize date to see Fine Young Cannibals at Jones Beach. He couldn’t get anyone else to go and told me this outright. No hard feelings. This was Donny, my coolest brother, the one I wanted to impress. I was thrilled, although I am sure our conversation was stilted. It was the first time I’d seen him out after his chemotherapy treatments. He treated me to dinner at Sidekicks, the fancy-to-me restaurant on Broadway near the college all seven of us attended. I told him my college drinking stories over mozzarella sticks.
“Same play, different actors,” Donny always said in response to my stories.
This was his first bout (there would be three) with cancer. He was more prickly then, feisty, pissed. He hadn’t married yet, had kids.
Bald, eyelashless, I didn’t recognize him that night. We stood in the crowd at the arena. I went to the bathroom and when I came out, my brother stood in front of me and I had no idea who he was. I couldn’t pick him out of the crowd.
“Mag!” He shouted at me, a little angry, almost like he was waking me up. Annoyed, like this had happened to him before.
“Oh! Sorry!” I said. He just shrugged. We both pretended nothing happened, but it happened again at the end of the concert. Same deal- bathroom, crowd, no recognition, anger, annoyance, denial. On the way home, as he drove me back to my dorm in his red jeep, we sat in silence.
Mom and Dad, 2015
There’s not a lot that you can say that’s right when trying to tell your parents their son is dying.
There was the ticking clock, the round table where he loved to sit, drinking coffee, eating toast, pitching one-liners. He wasn’t there. He was in New Jersey, dying. There was nothing I could say to my parents that they would accept. They always switched into hope-mode. What parents readily give up on the life of their child? Especially Donny’s life, a life they’d been fighting and hoping for for years.
“Mom, they are out of things to try. They are just doing an immunotherapy drug as a last-ditch effort, but they know it won’t work.”
The ticking clock. The round table. The empty chair. A creak out of nowhere.
My mother’s face was resolute. Her hands were busy cleaning plates.
“Well, we just have to believe it will work.” With that, I walked out of the room in frustration. I wanted to prepare them, to help Donny by telling them, but after several attempts it seemed futile.
“Leave it to Donny to tell them, to explain,” my sister Bubsi had advised.
But he didn’t tell them. When he was told himself his first words to his wife were, “What will I tell Mom and Dad?” As though there must be a way to spin it, a verbal exit.
Rule #1: Do not tell your parents you are dying. The rest of us didn’t need to be told. We knew enough by now to know stage four lung cancer=death. All I had to see was a photo of my emaciated brother, with that look, that impending death look I had seen before on strangers, and the truth was crystal clear.
That day, Dad followed me out of the kitchen, down the long hall to the den. Where was I going? I didn’t know. I turned to see my father’s sagging shoulders behind me, his pleading eyes.
“Dad, we have to somehow face this,” I said, covering my face with my hands, sobbing. Dad’s arms encircled me, comforting his 46-year-old youngest child, something parents always know how to do. Certainly easier than saying goodbye.
Donny 2016
· You got lost as a very little boy after we moved from Connecticut to Newburgh, New York. You went to a neighbor’s door and said, “I’m Donny Doo from Old Saybrook.”
· You were famously carried off the playground by Mary, kicking your arms and his legs, enraged at some other kid.
· You beat up Joe Cantone on the sidewalk of Sacred Heart School outside the busses.
· When I was about twelve I got a Ralph Lauren polo shirt for my birthday, and, when I opened the box, I said dramatically, caressing the shirt, “My first Lauren.” You teased me about this for the rest of your life.
· Tears ran down your high school face at the dinner table after getting in trouble for your poor grades, the only brother out of three I have seen cry.
· You always paid for my dinner, even when I was well beyond thirty.
· You had a big, round head as a baby and sat and stared at a plant for many months, maybe years.
· You got in a car accident when you were a teenager. I remember the blood on your shirt by the washer the next morning. It was the first time we almost lost you.
· You picked us up from the pool in the summer and you’d tap the brake to the beat of Boz Scaggs on the eight track as we waited at lights.
· When you were little, your younger by one-year sister, Bub, sometimes dressed you for school.
· You would often sneak cash into my hand before saying goodbye.
· Every Bruce Springsteen song will always make me laugh and cry and think of you.
· You always picked me up at the train station, which wasn’t always convenient. Once, when the train was late and my trip got really screwed up, I started crying; you said on the phone, “Are you okay? Do you want me to come get you?”
Bubsi, 2011
The waves were turning and pulling out. On another day, in another life, I’d be calm, transfixed by nature. That day, the waves just sounded angry. Their relentless crash polluted my ears. Everything was harsh. The sand. The sun. The heat. The people. Even the children playing, burying each other, packing and patting sand sculpture, seemed sinister. All other beach goers obese or emaciated in their flimsy swimsuits. Everyone had a hairy backs or bellies, enormous boobs or butts. Conversations rose above the tiresome ocean, high-pitched laughter, an incessant seagull caw.
I removed myself from the circle of friends in beach chairs to speak to my sister on the phone. I was waiting for the call. My expression was pinched as I shoved a finger in one ear to hear her tell me her breast cancer had returned. My second sister, my third sibling to suffer this fate. Tears. My heart dropped to the ocean floor. “I’m sorry, Bub,” I gasped/screamed, despair rolling up in my chest, crashing.
Donny 1989
We didn’t know anything about cancer then. We were part of that persistent crowd who thinks cancer belongs to others, those who smoked or have the gene or did not get checked often enough, people who earned it, cancer people.
That early spring day I awoke in my dorm room as one of the others, the noncancer people. By late morning, I’d be walking down my sister’s dorm hallway, toward the window at the end where she stood in hazy light waiting to tell me that Donny didn’t have walking pneumonia, as we thought. He had cancer.
Now, I know how I’d receive that message. A sharp breath inward, a clenched fist, a tightening, protective muscle. Now I would first feel anger, and then I would direct my energy toward protection, control, a narrowing of focus. What I know now that I didn’t know then, is that cancer is a process: one must get in line, one must wait their turn, be patient, follow directions.
Back then, I just collapsed in tears, tears whose origin I could not fathom and whose energy and volume were extreme. My subconscious knew this was the end and a beginning. The choking of sobs was all I could show, the only sense I could make. Cancer was chemo, and then, not long after, death.
That’s all we knew about it then.
Mary, 2001
I stood on that 30th street platform hundreds of times, and I would stand there a hundred more, but I had never run into my sister there before. I picked her out easily, a bright head scarf emerging from the throng of commuters. She carried what to others might be an art portfolio. I knew even then it was not art, it was full of scans. She was coming from the renowned breast cancer doctor at the renowned institution nearby.
Onboard, we sat across the aisle, shouting above the rush hour din and the clunks and screeches of the train.
Palliative care, the new words I heard that day.
“I cannot be cured...so they just keep the cancer under control until…” Her voice, lost in the other conversations emerging from the crowd, her face, blank.
Was this what shock looks like? Do I look the same?
I remember only the uncomfortable figure of silence, a third sister, sitting, wedged between us, for the rest of the ride. The racket of normalcy pressed in on us, defined us as different from everyone else, or so it seemed.
Donny, 2015
I didn’t see my brother die as I imagined I would. Somehow, I assumed I would be there. There were lots of people there: Mary and Bub, their husbands, my brother’s wife and daughters, plenty of his many friends. But not me.
I was at the Dark Horse, dinner with a friend. I knew my brother was in the hospital, but it was at that stage where he was in and out a lot. The last text from Bub: Blood pressure good, breathing good, resting comfortably. I kept the phone beside me on the table. When the screen lit up, I saw it was a call and not a text. My body instinctively rose up and headed for the exit.
“Mag, you need to say goodbye to Donny now. He is slipping away. I am holding the phone to his ear.”
No time for explanations.
I crouched and cried into my brother’s dying ear. Leaning into a cold wall I searched my panicked mind for words, something good, something right. But I repeated one vague thing: “Donny, I know. I know everything.”
I hope every day he heard me and understood.
Honora 2015
My closest in age sister, Honora, and her husband, Toye, flew to New Jersey for a final visit. It was Halloween. Donny would be dead in 20 days. Trick or treaters rang the doorbell and his girls dressed up amidst oxygen tanks and the burden of impending death.
Later, Honora sobbed to me, “I was such a wimp.” While saying goodbye, she found she could not look him in the eye. He also averted her gaze.
I get it. Siblings can’t say goodbye. Won’t.
No matter how many times I go through this, despite my mind’s insistence on acceptance, my eyes will always want to look away.
Mary, 2019
Her 60th birthday, November, her last.
In July, beneath fairy lights, accompanied by the warm sounds of a Latin band staged on my patio, she told me what she would like for her party: “Karaoke and dancing.” I told her, with a semi-conscious air of gravity, “If that’s what you want, then that’s what you’ll get.” She smiled, exchanging a quiet knowledge of why this one was important. It could be because it was her 60th. It could be because she was told at 43 she would not live to see 45. But the quietest reason was that she was failing. Visible by her gait, her color, her pain, her spirit.
That night on my patio, she seemed, as she often did during the eighteen years of her stage four breast cancer, the younger sister. Before, she was always quite the opposite. Eleven years older than me, she helped my mother care for me when I was a baby, taught me, inspired me, guided me, annoyed me, yelled at me, pushed me, led me in so many ways. But that night she stood in my arms as we danced and stared at me with hopeful eyes, adding, “I think you are the most stylish person I’ve ever known.” During the years of her illness, for better or for worse, she relied on me for support, and I gave it as much as I could. But it was never enough.
For the party in November, my brother-in-law planned a beautiful Italian lunch. There were speeches by her sons, impromptu stories. Mary told all of us how much she loved us, how much family meant to her, how she dreamed someday of Nerz Road, a place where we would all live together, just houses apart. We were hushed as she spoke what felt like a final statement.
Back at the house, we made her wish come true. An Amazon strobe light transformed her living room into a Victorian disco. Spotify chugged out the Mary’s Party playlist full of seventies power tunes. Queen’s “We are the Champions” felt glorious as my siblings and nephews and in-laws and I stood with Mary and sang with Freddy and raged against cancer, holding our arms up in the air, swaying together. My husband and I have our own karaoke setup so everyone was playing with it, screaming lyrics to all our favorites. Mary’s son, Joe, sang “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus.
Mary got tired and put on her cozy pink robe, so did my five-year-old son, Pedro. They cuddled on the couch, snapped into a picture. For months afterwards, Pedro said it was the best party ever.
In 30 years of this cancer thing, never seeming to know what to say or do, this one was good, and somehow, finally, everyone said the right things.
