The Anniversary Blanket

I love making lists. I live for the satisfaction of crossing off entries, the visual confirmation that I’ve won a round in the heavyweight battle of Time v. Tasks. On any given day, the completion of a project is a cause for celebration.

Today, however, was different.

Today, the triumph came not from the finishing, but from the doing. It wasn’t the result so much as the act. Does that make sense?

Maybe I should back up.

When I was twenty-nine years old, my mother taught me to crochet. I had gone to visit her in Phoenix—not to learn yarn-based crafts, but because she’d been diagnosed with cancer. After radiation, and with ongoing chemotherapy, it became clear that my mom needed a caretaker. I applied for the job, even though I’m sure my sisters could have managed without me. They lived with Mom, whereas I’d leave behind my husband, my home, and my job in Austin to be with her. Yet the moment I’d decided, my stomach stopped tying itself in knots and I knew, as I’ve rarely known since, that I was Doing The Right Thing.

I was lucky to have a husband who supported my choice, despite the distance it would mean for our marriage. And I was fortunate for the financial help I received from my sisters (one of whom gave freely and generously, the other grudgingly, yet both kept us afloat).

So, I “moved” to Phoenix, and somewhere amid the unexpectedly hectic schedule of life with a cancer patient—the blood draws and doctor visits, the hospital stays and staph infections, the porta-caths and PET scans, the weekly transfusions, daily shots, and hourly management of more than thirty simultaneous prescriptions—somewhere in there, my mom taught me how to crochet.

She was so proud when I finished my first blanket. And so I hurried to the craft store and purchased supplies for a new blanket—one I would make just for her. The yarns I chose matched the southwestern décor of her living room. There was sandy beige, to compliment her pictures of Navajo pottery and pueblo settlements. And three shades of teal, all of which could be found in the Kachina dolls that danced beside the television.

I began the blanket in the autumn of 2002, nearly ten years ago. At first, Mom and I would crochet together. We’d take our respective projects to her chemo appointments and pass the time in the soothing rhythm of wrapping yarn over hooks. She would beam at the nurses who stopped to admire my (her) blanket, especially when I boasted of her having just taught me how to crochet. Soon, Mom was crocheting slippers for the nurses—she always made friends easily—while I continued my slow but steady progress on the pieces of our blanket.

After the first two or three rounds of chemotherapy, Mom stopped crocheting. Her hair fell out. She was sick—violently and constantly. She slept. A lot. She battled neutropenia, as well as a host of other chemo complications. The doctors wanted her to have six chemo sessions in total, spread across six months. Mom wanted to stop after four.

I pushed her to have the fifth.

She never made it to the sixth.

As in many cases, it wasn’t the cancer that killed Mom—she’d been in remission for several months. It was a pulmonary embolism: a blood clot in her lung.

The clot probably formed in her leg when she'd broken it a week earlier. The broken leg happened when she'd fallen, and the fall happened because she was too weak to hold onto a walker. The weakness happened because multiple organs were shutting down. And the organ failure happened because of the last chemotherapy session. The fifth one. Which she'd only let happen because of …

Yeah.

I was crocheting Mom’s blanket the first time she died. That sounds odd, I suppose. Most people only die once. But not Mom.

She’d been in the hospital a few days at that point, thanks to the leg, the clot, and the rest of it. My sister had just left—visiting hours were long over, but I was going to sleep in my mom’s room again that night. I remember asking Mom a question and getting no answer. I wish I could say that was unusual, but the cocktail of painkillers made normal conversations a distant memory. There were treasured moments of lucidity, but they’d grown rare. So I waited a few minutes and asked the question again.

She was watching the television on the wall—or so I’d thought. Her eyes seemed fixed on it, but they would have held the same expression for a blank wall. When I went to her bed and asked my question a third time, she turned to look at me. But she still didn’t answer. I rang for the nurse and told her my mother seemed unresponsive. Before the nurse arrived, some technicians appeared for a pre-scheduled, in-room x-ray. I told them she wasn’t acting right. They made me wait outside while they did their work. I called my sister, asked her to come back. By the time the technicians left, Mom was unresponsive physically as well as mentally. I got the nurse. The nurse called the doctor. The doctor ordered my mom transferred to the ICU. My sister arrived. It took far too long to disassemble my mom’s traction-ready bed in order to fit it through the doorway. Together, five of us finally managed it.

They wheeled Mom into the hall and told us to pack the stuff from her room. My sister grabbed stuffed animals and balloons, good luck bracelets and photographs. I reached for the half-crocheted blanket.

“Code Blue: Four South,” said the mechanical voice on the loud speaker. “Code Blue: Four South.”

I looked at my sister. We were in the south wing of the fourth floor. And out in the hallway, somewhere between the room and the elevator, our mom’s heart had stopped beating.

A nurse shot into the room and kept us there, kept us from the sight of running doctors and crash carts, of chest intubations and the raw violence that comes with battling death.

It was much later when someone, a doctor, I suppose, told us Mom had died. My sister and I stood in the empty hospital room and held each other, the cocoon of grief wrapped so tight we could scarcely breathe.

One of the nurses hovered by the door, as if torn between her respect for privacy and the urge to comfort. She kept glancing down the hall, where I knew my mother—my wonderful, crazy, bursting with love mother—lay beneath a sheet.

“Hang on a minute, girls,” the nurse said. “It looks like … I can’t tell, but …”

She went to investigate while my sister and I stared at each other, dumbfounded. We learned later that a passing security guard had noticed a blip on my mom's monitor, long after they'd pronounced her dead. The doctors returned and continued to “work” on Mom. After several more minutes, my sister and I were told we’d be going to the ICU, after all. Mom had a weak but steady pulse. She wasn't dead.

We spent the next several days in the ICU. The roller coaster of hope and despair had been designed by a madman, yet we rode each twisting, turning loop-de-loop until the ride's inevitable breakdown. A long line of doctors ran tests and gave opinions. Mom wasn’t alive so much as she was being kept alive. She couldn’t breathe without a respirator. Her organs were failing fast. Most damning, however, was the fact that she’d spent nearly half an hour without oxygen to her brain. She was in a persistent vegetative state. Even if she could survive without the machines, her brain, in all likelihood, was damaged beyond hope.

Having medical power of attorney, it was my signature that removed her from life support. There are times when I still wallow in the appropriateness of that—I was the one who pushed the final, fatal chemo on her, so it was fitting for me to finish her off.

She didn’t pass immediately, once removed from life support. I kept squeezing her hand, waiting for her to defy the odds and open her eyes. She did neither. Instead, she was transferred to a lovely hospice center where she died the following day.

January 24, 2003.

Nine years ago today, I held my mother’s hand as she drew her final breath.

Little by little, we have all moved on. I have a daughter of my own, and I have learned, mostly, to stop blaming myself for my mother’s death. Only in my darkest moments am I back in that hospital room, berating myself for not acting faster. If only I’d fought harder for her that night, if only I’d insisted more and conceded less—if only I’d had half her courage.

If only.

Those words still haunt me. I no longer use them when I think of Mom’s chemo, though. My daughter has helped me move past that. I sat beside her crib one night, stroking her hair and trying not to cry as I sang the same lullaby my mom once sang to me. And that's when it hit me—a blinding flash of realization that squeezed my chest so hard I nearly choked.

I would do anything for my child. Anything.

I would welcome the poison dripping into my veins, not only because it gave me the best chance for a cancer-free life, but because my daughter had asked me to. And if I ever found out she was blaming herself for the consequences of my decision—and ultimately, it was my decision—there would be hell to pay.

I have to believe my mom would agree.

Armed with that belief, I took an old, plastic bin from my craft closet last week and pulled out Mom’s half-finished blanket. I decided it was time to finish it, or at least it was time to stop avoiding it. And so I took up yarn and hook and completed the last of it today.

It wasn’t easy, of course. With each stitch, I sat beside her once more—in the chemo chair, in her hospital room, and in her teal and sand-colored, Sonoran Desert living room. Each row brought another memory, and each memory brought a fresh helping of guilt, with a side of anger and pain. Perhaps hardest of all was the moment I stood back to admire my work.

“It’s done,” I said to my empty house. “Here’s your blanket, Mom.”

I hadn’t realized how much it would hurt to hold the finished product in one hand and the knowledge she’ll never see it in the other. But it did. It does.

When my daughter comes home from school today, I’m going to give the blanket to her. I think my mother would have liked that.

There was no satisfaction from crossing this particular item off my to-do list. But there was catharsis. And in time, perhaps, there will be closure.

Thanks for teaching me how to crochet, Mom. And most of all, thank you for teaching me the endless depths of a mother’s love. Today and always … I miss you.

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