English 280: The Journalistic Essay

By Brittany Benson

Everything about Dyanne Benson appeared perfect. Her personal appearance rivaled that of a Martha Stewart Living model. The house—kept spotless; her marriage even appeared still in the stage of honeymoon bliss. All was perfect on the Benson home front. Unless you were the little girl hiding in your parent’s closet listening to your mother cry into her pillow cursing how unhappy she was. Not unless you happened to notice the hole in the door from her slamming it so hard in the heat of an argument.

To the world she appeared to have the poise and grace of a senator’s wife at a million dollar function. I saw my mother in ways no one else, not even my father was able to understand. I only understand her so well, because my character and personality was exactly like hers making it easy to interpret how she was really feeling.

One summer, right after my twelfth birthday, I was carelessly lying on my back in her garden looking at the sky.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked me when she walked over, precariously stepping over flowers she had just planted earlier that day.

“I’m just thinking about leaving for gymnastics camp tomorrow. I can’t wait.” I nonchalantly replied.

“No you’re not,” she replied abruptly. “You’re thinking about heaven aren’t you? I used to lie in my mother’s garden as soon as the weather got warm and dream about the angels dancing through the flowers,” she reminisced. “I would always picture them with beautiful, sparkly wings, and white flowing dresses,” I remember her saying while smiling. “You’re just like me you know; you’re just like your mother.”

I remember that conversation more than any other, simply because she had been exactly right.

Once I entered my teen years, one would think my mother and I hated each other just from our lack of daily interactions. My best friend, Leigh Frens, always dreaded getting rides from my mom. “You two would fight with each other constantly!” she recounts. “On the surface it seemed like it wasn’t about anything, but it seemed like you both just knew how to get on each other’s nerves because you were so much alike, it was uncanny really.”

Such “uncanny” similarities ended when mother first found out she had breast cancer when I was sophomore in high school. Our fights changed from petty arguments into her secretly being angry with her diagnosis and me being upset that she wouldn’t show it. Her words were, “Everything is going to be fine. I’ll do everything the doctors tell me to, and I will be in remission and healthy again very soon.” But my mother’s emotional instability became evident as her moods were as constant as a roller-coaster. Though only 15 during her first diagnosis, I began to question the truth in the positive prognosis she was proclaiming to our circle of friends

I never once went with my mother to her appointments; it made everything too real. Such reality was easily avoidable for me as I wasn’t the one sitting with cancer specialists several times per week at different hospitals all over the state.

According to Dr. Fenton, a reputable oncologist at Rhode Island hospital, her prognosis was fairly good. “I would expect that by following the instructions given to you, and through medicine and chemo-therapy treatment, your chance of survival would be near 80%”, she told my mother in December 2003.” The cancer wasn’t at a serious stage, and it had only spread to a few of her lymph nodes, which had been removed. All seemed to be going as expected.

Her chemo-therapy began that fall and she lost all her hair; this also coincided with a loss of much dignity as well. “Hair defines a woman,” she said. “To have no hair is like denying oneself of womanhood.”

With the chemo came much sickness, another unfortunate side effect. The sickness seemed to tear away at her pride. Vicki Frens, a longtime family friend, did all she could to keep my mother upbeat and hoping for the best.

“Sometimes we would just be talking on the phone and she would just start crying, completely unable to talk. It was always about you though, Brittany; and her loss of dignity. She always felt like your relationship was never going to be fully developed until after she was gone.”

The only person, who ever saw her hairless head due to the chemo’s effects, was her own reflection in the mirror. When asked why she was so ashamed, “Because no healthy mother looks like this!” was the only reply I ever got. It was a constant reminder that she was not well and that it wasn’t about to change anytime soon. Dr. Fenton and her team of other oncologists prescribed her Tamoxifen, currently the world’s largest selling drug for treatment of breast cancer, hoping it would ward off any of the remaining cancer cells which had made her body their home.

The Tamoxifen transformed my beautiful, 5′4 slender smiling mother into a slightly over-weight depressed, cancer victim. Her co-worker, Dr. Leslie Johnson, immediately noticed a change in my mother’s attitude after she was diagnosed. “She was always such a perfectionist, and cancer clearly made her realize she wasn’t perfect. Not being able to change that really depressed her.”

The depression continued for nearly three years, only progressing after she was diagnosed with liver cancer in August of 2006. A benefit, probably the only one, was that my father began spending more time with her. His work had kept him very busy during her first diagnosis and treatment sessions, but this time her team of doctors didn’t have such a positive prediction for her outcome. He began attending the meetings and sometimes even video-taping the conversations.

“Do you want to die?”

The nurse looked expectantly at my middle-aged wearied mother sitting nervously.

Although obvious, the physical toll of the cancer was not nearly as evident as the emotional effect. She hesitantly adjusted the stylish, but itchy wig she had placed on her head before getting out of bed, terrified my brother or I would see her hairless scalp. The jacket hand-made by close friends for her first chemo-therapy session was tightly wrapped around her, in hopes of some sort of security.

“I’m not afraid. I’m sick–I’m sick I know. My children…”

Cancer ruined her. It crashed all hope of the “Mother of the Year Award” along with her desire to live. The diagnosis with liver cancer was “a death sentence” according to her. This confession occurred during a rare moment of emotional truth while we were out on the boat lazily drifting around that lake that summer. That was a pivotal day. It was not until she was helping me untie the boat did I realize that I had never learned how to do it for myself. And then that she likely would never have the opportunity to teach me. As I was lying in the boat getting sunburn, I begin thinking, “Soon she’s never going to get mad at me again for using too much tanning oil and coming back burnt after being out all day.”

It was not until she realized she was going to die, that she accepted it. I asked her, “Aren’t you afraid?” Her confident response was not one a daughter never wants to hear from a mother. “What is there to fear in death, if you know where you are going when you die?” Selfishly, I didn’t like that answer. I wanted to keep her forever. When I told her of this, I brought up all the things I was sad that she would miss. I thought of my college graduation, of her being there at random times to tell me to pull skirt down or that my feet would be just killing me in those shoes. Or on my wedding day in the back of the church, or for those times when things just aren’t going right. I told her, “During those moments, I will look at the world around me, and know I will never miss you more.”

“By then your father will probably be remarried to a skinny, blonde supermodel and I’m sure she’ll do just as good of a job,” she joked. That response spoke volumes about the inner turmoil I had suspected for so long. In a way, I was relieved; it was like she was finally letting me know it was okay to be upset, angry, and mad; because I finally understood that she was too.

Our last fight is still very vivid in my mind and it was also revealing towards what we were each thinking in regards to her being sick. Car rides were torturous because escaping from each other was impossible, therefore we would normally argue the entire ride until one of us would finally open the door when arriving at the destination and breathe a huge sigh of relief. This time we were driving to New Hampshire for a family party and it was just the two of us in the car. As expected we began to argue.

“Sometimes I think I hate you just because you’re sick!” I screamed.

“Well don’t worry about that because pretty soon I’ll be gone!” was her angry reply.

“And that’s why I think I hate you, because you’re going to leave, and you don’t even care.” After I said that, the ride was silent.

“She was very hurt by that fight in the car ride,” my mother’s best friend, Donna Emerson, told me recently. “It wasn’t that she wanted to leave you and your brother, she just didn’t think she had a choice because she was so sick. Then she realized how unhappy she was, and I think at that point she didn’t want to live; until she later changed her mind during her last few weeks here, but by then it was too late.”

It wasn’t until the last few weeks that she was alive that I came to understand my mother more than just from hiding in the closet, or interpreting one-sided phone conversations. It wasn’t until this point that I understood why she acted the way she did, and why certain things upset her.

The morning before she died I was sitting by her bed whispering in her ear all the things I loved most about her and all the things I already missed about her. It was finally easy to be honest because she was no longer capable of arguing back about decisions I had made and past failures. I didn’t actually know she could even hear me until she opened her eyes and looked at me. That last words I remember her saying were, “I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live.”

A woman only known by her first name, April, became very close with my mom during the last few months she was alive.

“When she first found out about the liver cancer, she wanted to live, even if it was solely for the purpose of seeing you and your brother grow up,” she revealed in an interview in November of 2007. “But after spending so much time in treatment centers, often by herself, her desire to live seemed to subside, until she seemed to realize she was going to die,” April said emotionally. “It wasn’t until she realized she was going to die, that she began wanting to live.”

This seemed to be my mother’s tragic flaw; she didn’t begin to live until she was going to die. Some of her friends say this lack of desire was due to her depression and unable to lead a perfect life. My father also attributes it to her perfectionism. “No one could keep up with her, she just had too many things going on, and they all had to be flawless. No one can live like that, and be happy, because they are set up to fail. And that “failure” depressed her,” he remembers. “But she was never afraid to die; she always said she just wanted to live. I never really understood that.”

As she told me out on the lake that summer we spent under the sun, I understood she just wasn’t afraid to die because she felt that it wasn’t until reaching heaven that one begins to live.

When I think about that conversation that took place in the garden when I was twelve, I realize I really did know her better than anyone, and we were very much alike. However similar though, I am not waiting for the opportunity to die in order to realize the opportunity I have been given to live.

But that’s how I see her now, just as she described in the garden; living in heaven with all the other angels in white dresses and beautiful wings, dancing among the flowers.