Hero Sandwich

On some level I always knew this day would come, though I hoped to avoid it. But now, staring me in the face is this: my mother, alone and destitute, has cancer. And it's fallen to me, three thousand miles away, to support her, arranging for her treatment, housing, home health care support and emotional support. In the week since we've had the news, cancer has become an almost full-time job, piled on top of my responsibilities as a mother with a part-time job and a life full of commitments.

They say you don't know what you don't know. Little did I know that attempting to figure out her health care coverage would cause me to become unglued. Little did I know that every day, I would move one step forward and two steps back, yet still make time to bake birthday cakes and cupcakes for my two daughters, whose birthdays fell during Week One of cancer, and for whom I wanted to keep things as normal as possible. Now, facing insomnia after a particularly frustrating day, I worry that my youngest daughter, who has been suspiciously scratching her head for weeks, is harboring a nest of lice in her thick red curly hair. Lice (and cancer) is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

My mother dreads the nights, but I dread the days. The endless to-do list that is not do-able at all because of incorrect information, insurance loopholes and the sheer overwhelmingness of it all. The constant phone calls. And somewhere, buried beneath all that is the emotional toll of the news on my mother, me, my kids. It sneaks up on me, but frankly, I don't have time to deal with it.

A woman who recently lost her mother told me that she looks forward to this summer, so she can finally grieve. She's been busy with caregiving, death, the holidays and now the estate, that there hasn't been time for grieving yet.

I know I am luckier than many. I have a wonderful supportive husband, I don't have to work full-time and I have an understanding boss. Many people, friends past and present, have stepped up to offer support, the karmic pay-off of my mother's lifetime of giving to others and maybe even a reward for some of the giving I've done too.

But here I am, a native English speaker, intelligent and healthy, with time on my hands. And I am kerflummoxed at trying to make sense of Medicare and Medicaid and to figure out what makes the most sense economically. How do people with more daily challenges manage this at all? There are blogs and articles and books and they help, but they aren't enough.

It's been a bad week for me and for the universe - Haiti, cancer and the election of Scott Brown. There are a million homeless people in Haiti and red tape is preventing them from having tents to sleep in. Scott Brown was elected, they say, because of frustration over the economy, and now health care reform is stalled. We all want the same thing - simplicity, honesty and a humane approach to caring for people in good times and bad. Is that really so difficult to achieve?