Ponies and Cats Always Win: the story of my mother and cancer

When my mom first got bone cancer, the first thing affected was her posture. She was hunched over a walker all the time like a wise old gnome. In fact, one time she had on a shawl and looked exactly like a townsperson from The Legend of Zelda. It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this. Haha mom, I thought, where’s the Triforce? What kind of asshole laughs at his prematurely aged mother riddled with bone cancer? The kind of asshole who thinks his mother is going to survive that bone cancer.

When I was a toddler, my mom told me, “I’m going to take a shower. Don’t let the boogeyman in if he knocks on the door.” I sat frozen in the chair across from the door for a good forty minutes, waiting for the boogeyman to come calling and wondering why my mom was acting so nonchalant about it. Why hop in the shower if you’re expecting a visit from the living embodiment of your nightmares?

Later in life, after I left for college, she started collecting animals and giving them inventive, Western-themed names. Cheyenne the dog, Sierra Snow the horse, Lucifer the goat, Cherokee Moon the horse. She loved horses and dogs and goats and birds, so she got as many as she could get her hands on. Everyone in the family gave her a hard time about it because if you’re going to turn your back on the regular human world in favor of animals with names from Louis L’Amour novels, your family is going to be like, “What the hell! Aren’t we better than a bunch of ponies and cats?!” No, ponies and cats always win.

My mom called me last week to tell me, she is no longer taking chemotherapy and she is entering hospice. I drove down on Saturday to see her. She can’t leave her bed or move her legs. She has to be bathed by a caretaker. I brought her a portable DVD player so she could watch Seabiscuit. I felt kind of stupid even giving it to her. Hey mom, I know that things have really taken a turn for the worse and you’re about to be confronted with your own mortality very, very soon but here’s the story of a scrappy horse and Tobey Maguire.

There was an episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor meets Captain Jack Harkness, and Captain Jack has this machine full of little nanogenes that cover your body and find all the things wrong with you. They get down and rearrange your atoms and cure whatever ails you. When I first saw what accelerated cancer had done to my mother after three weeks time, I had a really intense fantasy for a minute that the portable DVD player was full of Captain Jack’s  nanogenes and I was there to cure her with futuristic sub-atomic glowing orbs. What a fucking dork, right? In the face of the most awful thing I’ve ever seen, all I can think of is British sci-fi.

Fun fact: the chemotherapy was actually working, until my mother’s insurance ran out and they switched her to some kind of three hour fluid treatment that wrecked her body. Thanks a lot, insurance companies. My mother was a nurse at a hospital for more than seventeen years. This is her repayment for caring for so many people. No free rides, lady! Only people who are healthy enough to work can afford to be unhealthy. Seriously though, great job health insurance people- you literally made policies that sped up my mother’s cancer. You know my mom isn’t the Dread Pirate Roberts, right? You don’t have to hook her up to a machine that sucks decades off her life in the span of five minutes.

I’m sitting by my mother’s bed in my grandfather’s living room, the kind of hospital bed with the triangular bar you can use to pull yourself up, and she’s knitting me three potholders. Her hands shake too much to get the thread through the needle, so she’ll hold up the loose thread for me to do it. The oxygen machine has a rhythmic hiss, and the sun is shining through the window. I think about a little old wise zen master sweeping with a broom. Oxygen goes out, I thread the needle. Oxygen goes in, my mother knits. What is it with me and little old wise people? I think to myself that this is the moment I will remember later, the sun and my mother making something for me, the sound of the oxygen machine. I don’t even own a single pot or pan in my bachelor studio apartment. I don’t even own a fork. I do all my fork business with spoons. But I will always have these potholders.

My grandfather and I go through her truck looking for things she might want to save before we sell it. I find a stack of business cards for a horse training company she was going to start called Rainbow Gaits. “Natural Horsemanship Club,” it says. “For the Whole Horse Experience.” I can’t help but wonder what the whole horse experience is. “Hey it’s me, John Wayne the horse! Get on my back and ride me around, we’re going over the rainbow gates!” Then I see a line that says “Books/Mags/VHS library available” Oh, mom. VHS library?! I like to think of a frantic cowboy knocking on the door. “I’m here for the VHS library! Let me at them horse tapes!!”

I’ve been keeping my mom’s Rainbow Gaits business cards on me and pulling them out and looking at them. I like the little horseshoes around the type. I feel a little like the kid waiting on the boogeyman to knock.

I’d like for the world to know that my mother is a generous, compassionate, incredible woman while she is still alive, however short her time might be. The entire god damn world is about to miss out on the whole horse experience and I have no idea what to do about it. I am going to buy some pots and pans, I think.

Thank you, good night, the end.