For Life

Posted on April 7, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged cancer, death, grieving, losing a husband, loss, mothering, parenting, Sarah Kilch Gaffney, separation, wife • 22 Comments

By Sarah Kilch Gaffney

Sometimes it’s tentative and other times it’s brazen, but at some point people almost always ask if my husband and I got pregnant on purpose.

When I was twenty-five and my husband Steve was twenty-seven, he was diagnosed with a large brain tumor that we were told would ultimately be terminal. We could treat and hope for the best, but due to the tumor’s type and location, there would be no cure.

His doctors optimistically gave him five to ten years because he was so young and the tumor was slow-growing. As he recovered from his first brain surgery, we started talking about whether we wanted to be parents. We did, though we also recognized that it was an enormous responsibility to bring a child into this world knowing that Steve might die at any time, and knowing that he almost certainly would die while they were still young. It’s one thing to end up in that situation as a result of fate; it is entirely another to willingly choose that fate.

Steve and I had met five years earlier on a backcountry trail crew and had been married for just over three years. We had always talked about having kids someday (when we both had real jobs with benefits, were more financially stable, etc.) but before that time it had never been a pressing issue. We were young and felt like we had all the time in the world.

One night soon after his diagnosis, we huddled together in front of the wood stove and talked it through. We made our decision and never looked back. Less than two months later, I was pregnant with our daughter. We named her Zoe because it means “life” and we could think of no meaning more fitting for our child.

And so the questions started. Some people were certain she must have been an accident. Why on earth would we get pregnant, knowing Steve was going to die? Others felt similarly to us – it was the best and bravest thing we ever could have done given the situation.

Even after Zoe was born, I was a little quiet about our decision. I would tell people the truth, but I was not always terribly confident. I would watch people start to do the math in their heads and then realize she was born long after he was diagnosed. I could see the moment that the shock unintentionally spread across their faces, and the stunned looks became a predictable conversational theme.

Now, I simply tell people out-right, sometimes before they even get a chance to ask. We decided to have her after he got sick. She was not an accident. We wanted to be parents, wanted Steve to have the opportunity to be a father, wanted to live life with the same options as any other twenty-something couple. We also wanted to be hopeful, optimistic, and have something other than ourselves to live for.

It is an epic understatement to say that the last few years since Zoe’s arrival have been challenging. As I write this, she is about to turn three in all her purple-and-princess-loving, world-investigating, temper-tantrum-throwing glory, and Steve started hospice a couple of weeks ago. We had a blissful several months after her birth when there were no treatments, no bad scans, and where other than the faint trace of scar, we felt something like normal parents.

Shortly after Zoe’s four-month check-up, the first of many scans showed that Steve’s tumor was growing again. Since then, he has had another brain surgery, six weeks of brain radiation, three different chemotherapies, and a proton beam radiation therapy. Nothing has worked. The tumor progressed far faster than anyone could have predicted and the unanticipated severity of radiation side effects caused extensive long-term brain damage. At this point, it is unlikely that he will make it to five years post-diagnosis, the short end of his original prognosis.

All that said, we both agree that having Zoe is the best thing we have ever done with our lives. It’s a lot harder to fall apart and give up when you have a baby who needs you. It’s a lot easier to focus on the positive when you have someone in your life who needs to stomp in every visible puddle, who will sit for hours cutting paper into little tiny pieces, and who has no idea why you wouldn’t want her to draw on the television screen with a pen. There also seems to be nothing the folks in a cancer center love more than a babbling baby in the radiation wing or a tutu-and-glitter-bedecked toddler telling everyone how much she likes their pretty wheelchairs.

What I still don’t talk about much is our phantom second baby. Just before Steve’s second brain surgery and when Zoe was around 18 months old, we decided to try for another child. Though from the beginning Steve insisted I would meet someone else and marry again after he was gone, I didn’t want to think about having children with anyone else. I wanted to have another child with him, the love of my life. Steve and I each have a brother, and we both wanted Zoe to get to experience the love, challenge, and companionship of having a sibling.

What I never saw coming was how desperately I would want to have another child. After getting pregnant with Zoe so quickly, I also never anticipated that we would have any trouble conceiving – at the time it seemed like simply making the decision was the hardest part – a thought that is laughable now.

Almost as soon as we started trying for baby number two, we found out that Steve needed to start chemotherapy, a treatment route he was initially not a good candidate for. We went to bank his sperm before he started, only to be told that his counts were extremely low. We banked anyway and then made the difficult decision to try a “mini” IVF therapy. We utilized our tax return and some of our savings. Not our smartest financial decision, but one that felt absolutely necessary. We got to the last step and the eggs didn’t fertilize. We had to try, though, otherwise I would have regretted it for the rest of my life.

Down the road we were able to try a couple of times on the rare occasion that Steve got far enough out from a final chemo dose, but never more than a month or two at a time and never with success. All the while I was kicking myself for thinking we had so much time, for thinking we had the luxury to space our babies a couple years apart, for believing that, despite the odds, he was going to make it.

When I finally realized and accepted that we would never have another baby was when I truly admitted to myself that Steve was going to die. For a while, it hit me harder than his impending death itself. And the thought that I might, even for a moment, grieve the loss of a non-existent child more than the loss of my husband (and existent child’s father) riddled me with guilt. The double punch of knowing Steve was going to die on top of the possibility that I might never get the chance to be a mother again took the breath from my chest. My heart was broken, and if it weren’t for Zoe, I don’t know if I would have been able to set my grief aside enough to even function.

When Steve started hospice care, I finally started selling all of the baby stuff. I had held onto everything, even every last little onesie and bib, a physical manifestation of my hope tucked away in grey bins. I made a future grandma extremely happy by selling her almost all of our gear for a fraction of the price. It was devastating to let go, but relieving at the same time. I still can’t bring myself to start looking through the baby clothes, but I know someday I’ll make an expectant mother very happy with those.

As our days together as a family grow shorter, we’re trying to hold onto them as best we can. We take lots of pictures. We put pillows between the hospital bed and our bed so that we can still snuggle as a family. We let Zoe help as much as she can.

In the months before she was born, I started writing letters to Zoe and I continue to this day. Hopefully someday she will read them and learn more about her father and I, and about our love for her and each other. Hopefully someday they will help her understand this path we chose.

Losing her father will affect Zoe for the rest of her life, but I can also see how much his illness has already shaped her in a positive way. There are moments when her intuition into his struggles stops me in my tracks, and I cannot fathom what it would be like to face the future without her by my side.

Author’s Note: Steven Gaffney passed away on March 22, 2014 after a 4 1/2 year battle with brain cancer. He was 31 years old. The following day, this piece was accepted for publication.

Sarah Kilch Gaffney lives in rural Maine with her daughter.

Sew The Labels

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Randi Olin • Posted in Articles Page, General • Tagged growing up, Randi Olin, separation, sewing, summer camp • 1 Comment

“It’s spring,” I said to my children, as I noticed the newly sprouted crocuses around our white mailbox post.

For me, the deep purple and yellow specks peppering the blades of grass meant something entirely different than Little League games and warmer weather. Rather, Mother Nature was reminding me to start my annual spring undertaking – sewing the nametag labels into the clothing Emily and Daniel would be bringing to camp. With two children, this meant that I would spend about 15 hours sewing at least 350 labels. So, why like many of my friends had I not chosen an alternative to this time-consuming method of labeling my children’s personal belongings?

My 10 and 13-year-old children had been going to sleep away camp for the past four and seven summers, respectively. A few months before that first summer, my mother presented me with a baggie filled with three things: a needle, a spool of white thread and a small square of paper. I was confused. It had been almost 25 years since home economics class when I had sewn a lopsided octopus I affectionately named Gus. “What’s all this for?” I asked my mother. “The camp labels,” she replied.

Growing up, my mother put a lot of time and effort into the sewing she did for us. Her mustard colored sewing kit looked more like a cross between a picnic basket and a toolbox. An assortment of rainbow colored spools of thread in different thicknesses and sizes dotted the main compartment of the basket, along with a variety of scissors and mini plastic bags filled with an array of buttons. The entire interior flap was lined in a floral fabric filled with stuffing, creating an oversized cushion to store different sized needles and pins. In addition to shortening pants, hemming skirts and sewing buttons, my mother also created my costumes for school events, like the American Indian dress she made for my 2^nd grade bicentennial celebration. The hand-made linen colored tunic-like dress was adorned with fringes and beadwork. On the back, she had sketched a colorful scene with an Indian woman sitting cross-legged next to a fire.

Unlike my mother, I was never much of a sewer or a seamstress. Instead, over the years, I had opted to pay my local tailor or occasionally ask my mother to sew a button that had fallen off a pair of shorts or the sleeve of a jacket. But when she handed me my very own needle and spool of thread the summer Emily was heading to sleep away camp, something had stirred inside of me and I was determined to figure out what it was. So, with a big pile of my daughter’s tee shirts beside me, I began to sew. I threaded the needle, pinched each label in half, and knotted the thread by rubbing my thumb and index finger together. My stitches were far from perfect and the knots often looked messy. The label was usually not folded exactly in half, the “y” in Emily’s name often cut off and instead, included with our last name on the back. I would prick my finger nine out of ten times and with each “ouch” I would look at the remaining piles and resume my labeling. So, why had I chosen to spend so many hours sewing in nametapes with a far from perfect result?

Many of my friends had paid someone to sew their labels. Others had tried laundry markers, which, in my opinion, could either bleed onto the clothing or fade with each wash. A few had opted for iron ons or peel n’stick clothing labels, “easier alternatives” but perhaps not sturdy enough for the camp laundry.

It was during that first year that I figured out why my mother had given me, a novice sewer, my own needle and thread. Between the 18 pairs of underwear, 10 pairs of shorts and the long list of other clothing and accessories, the camp packing list had recommended ordering between 100-200 nametapes, each I would have to sew. It was when I noticed the suggested 24 pairs of socks that I felt like I wanted to quit. Instead, I rolled down the top of each sock and then folded and sewed on the nametapes. Although tedious, with each finished pair, I had a renewed sense of accomplishment and pride. But, more importantly, I realized that the labeling represented much more than just branding my daughter’s name onto every article of clothing so she wouldn’t lose things that summer. It was about sending a piece of me with her, with my maternal imprint on each item she would have with her throughout her seven week journey at sleep away camp.

Now, years later, that same baggie sits in my bedside drawer. The spool of thread is much thinner and the needle is fastened to a now tattered square of paper. My labels are still crooked, my stitches are still sewn in no particular pattern and my knots are still messy. But, at least I know that both of my children have a constant reminder of me throughout the summer. Whether that is more of a comfort for them or for me I am still not sure.

The Mermaid of Mull

Posted on March 11, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, From The Archives • Tagged family reunion, Heather Dundas, Scotland, separation, teens • 1 Comment

By Heather Dundas

The Isle of Mull rises like a green shoulder out of a raw gray sea. I stand in the milky light of a June morning, smelling seaweed and sheep in the damp breeze. Just ahead of me, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Adena, scrambles over dark boulders. Her hair twists in snaky tendrils, a wild red flare in this landscape of gray and green. The ocean is everywhere, the whoosh and gargle of the waves, the pulse of the surf throbbing under my feet. Ankles aching, I pick my way toward her along a rugged rocky median between cliff and water.

Mull is the second-largest island in the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. It took us two days to get here. We flew from Los Angeles to Glasgow, rode a train up the Scottish coast and then a ferry out to the island, and ended our journey with a hair-raising sprint in a Range Rover along a single-track road in the pouring rain. We’ve come to this remote place for a family reunion with my father and stepmother, and my two brothers and their families. My brother the banker has rented a manor house straight out of central casting: a huge, stone pile on a rise overlooking the sea. It’s the sort of place that I, a recently divorced freelance writer, could never afford by myself. However, thanks to my brother, my kids and I have spent a week in period drama, all creaking stairs and windy towers, vast bathrooms with iron tubs and carpets, and feasts around the baronial dining table, with my father stabbing the “reeking haggis” with a silver knife.

I don’t see my family very often; as soon as I could, I ran from my New York state home to California. I’ve built a life on the West Coast, and it’s the only home my children have ever known. Still, since the meltdown of my marriage, my family is now asking me why I don’t move back home. Certainly this would make financial sense. In California, the kids and I have already moved from our house in a fancy neighborhood to a more affordable rental in a suburb. And as I watch Adena and her brother get to know and delight in their extended family in this absurd movie set of a house, it seems like cruelty to pull them away again. But I don’t know if I want to make the big move back home; I don’t know if I can.

It’s a lot to think about. And, even with everyone on his best reunion behavior, and despite the Brigadoon setting, three generations in one house will inevitably lead to petty irritations (who drank all the bottled water? whose turn is it to cook? why did they get the bedroom with the view?). So Adena and I decide to take a walk by ourselves. We fix on a trek along the Mull coast to reach the Nuns’ Cave, where Catholic women are reported to have hidden during the Reformation. According to our guidebook, in the cave we will find crosses of various designs carved on the walls, some dating to the sixth century, as well as images of ships in full sail. The guidebook says it’s an easy four-kilometer walk to the cave from Carsaig Pier, just down the rise from our house. We’ve packed a lunch, and plan to picnic with the ghosts of the nuns.

Scotland is full of ghosts, beginning at the wrecked stone pier. During the clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, farmers emigrated from that pier; we’ve seen the ruins of their stone cottages, entire villages of them. Tenant farmers were forced off the land to make room for sheep; wool was a profitable commodity in the new textile mills of the industrializing Empire. Where once there were ten thousand residents scraping out a living from the rocky land and the sea, modern Mull is essentially empty except for tourists and the people who cater to them. The depopulation of Mull was just a small part of the great Scottish diaspora, I think, a movement that also sent my ancestors to America. I think of my sandy-haired brothers and my father, whose red beard has turned white, back at the house. We are all descendants of redheaded James Dundas, my great-grandfather, who emigrated from Forfarshire at age sixteen. I stand on Carsaig Pier and imagine stepping onto a boat and sailing away. Instead, Adena and I head down the black sand beach on our way to our picnic.

The beach curves in a half moon toward a hulking mass of basalt cliffs up ahead. To our right, fat sheep hug stone walls. The island’s sheep are ubiquitous companions of any outdoor activity, adding rustic charm to every landscape and snapshot. But they also crop every plant in their reach straight down to the ground and leave their droppings like stinky landmines in every path and swarm across the single-lane roads, blocking the forward flow of traffic with their idiot sideways ambling. When I arrived in Mull I had seen pictures of the sheep—they are a visual cliché in the travel books—but nothing could have prepared me for the visceral, physical experience of their oily smell, their startling gassy baas, the depth and springiness of their oily wool coats. I want to hate the sheep, but instead I find myself overcome by an intense, uncontrollable love for them.

A few days earlier Adena and I went to a craft market at a local church hall and saw handwoven blankets made with the rough wool of these island sheep. I wanted one, but my politics got in the way. The people were pushed out to make room for the raw materials of an industrial revolution, I thought … and now the island is depopulated and the revolution is obsolete and these same raw materials are being offered to descendants of the emigrants as souvenirs of the very culture that they destroyed. I grabbed Adena’s arm and tried to explain the conflict to her sotto voce: Surely today’s Scots don’t use these rough blankets; surely they buy their blankets from Marks and Spencer like everyone else in Britain. But without tourism, this island would die, so perhaps we should buy one after all … Adena cut me off.

“Mom,” she said, “the question is, do you like that blanket or not? If you like it, buy it; if you don’t, don’t.” And she drifted away to the tables of silver jewelry, and today has new little Celtic knots dangling from her ears.

Her impatience with me is new. I’m told that it is to be expected, that all teenagers find their mothers to be exasperating. I wouldn’t know. When I was sixteen, I was locked into a wary dance with my stepmother, my birth mother having died a few years earlier. My father’s wife meant well, but I never accepted her enough to be exasperated with her. Her overtures always felt a step removed, like a representation of motherhood instead of its primal reality. Rather like the difference between a photograph of the placid Scottish landscape and its windy, salty, sheep-stink reality, I think. Once my mother died and my father remarried, I could never accept the fiction that my family was whole. That’s why I ran and never came back. By now I’ve known my stepmother for twice as long as I knew my mother, and the painful teenage scenes we had are distant memories. I respect her, and I think she respects me. But even here in Scotland we are awkward with each other, as though we speak different languages, and my father’s voice becomes unnaturally loud and hearty as he tries to translate between us.

Adena and I reach the end of the half-moon beach, and the path becomes pebbly, then rocky, and then it’s no longer a walk but a scramble over the boulders. We take this slowly at first; each of us is nursing a bad ankle. Two years earlier I tripped on a pebble in a city street and snapped my fibula. A year after that Adena fell in a high school badminton tournament and snapped her fibula in the same place. I was able to pass on my crutches and ankle brace to her, and we argue who had the least glory in her accident: her, wiping out in a gymnasium full of her peers, or me, crumpled on a sidewalk surrounded by smashed groceries.

Despite my hiking boots, my ankle twinges as I try to find footing on the rough path. I can imagine one of the rocks shifting unexpectedly as I step on it, my ankle rolling and the bone snapping again; I realize that I’m favoring my right foot, my good one. I catch up with Adena, who is balancing on a rock the size of her backpack. The boulder field stretches in front of us until it vanishes around the elbow of the cliff ahead. Adena’s injury is much more recent than mine.

“What do you think?” I ask her, “How is your ankle?”

“I can feel it, but I’m fine,” she replies. “Let’s see what’s up ahead.” And she jumps from that rock to another, to another, on toward the cliff.

I’m still getting used to Adena’s being the same size as me, being as strong as me. For so long I have been used to designing outings to accommodate the limited energy and abilities of small children. Now there she is, our lunch on her back, leaping from rock to rock as I plod cautiously behind her.

We round the corner, and I’m relieved to see the path head up from the rocks. We climb up into a muddy field, water to our left, cliffs to the right, and sheep obviously somewhere close by. The ground is easier to negotiate than the rocks, but I still need to concentrate on my footing: The path is narrow, and stones hide under the mud. We use stepping-stones to cross a small stream. I tell Adena the Gaelic word for stream is sruth, proud to display some of my guidebook reading. We’ve heard Gaelic spoken on the train from Glasgow to Oban and on the ferry across to Mull. It’s a language full of sibilance and open vowels, like whispering, and wholly appropriate for this land of wind and water. “Sruth” we say, watching the stream meander down to the ocean. “The actual name of this place probably has half a dozen more syllables,” says Adena, as she bounds on ahead. She’s right, I think; it probably also has a specific historical referent to place it exactly, like “stream-where-the-nuns-found-water.” So many of the names here are ghosts themselves, imprecise glimpses into the story of that particular spot.

But most names tell stories. My parents gave me as Scottish a name as could be: Heather, for the shrub; Dundas, the clan name, which translates roughly to “south fort.” But this is my father’s first visit to Scotland; my mother never made it here, so what story exactly does my name contain? Not nostalgia for a real place, certainly, but perhaps a romantic longing for an idea of a homeland. Adena’s name also bears a meaning her father and I never intended. Adena was named after my Swedish grandmother, and only after she was born did I find out that the word meant sweet or gentle in Hebrew. Her surname, Rivera, is “of the river” in Spanish. So, to judge by names, Adena and I occupy different environments: I am solidly of the land while my daughter is a sweet creature of the water.

Adena climbs a stile on a rise ahead. She yells, “Mom! It’s amazing!” as her red head disappears over the far side. Hot and panting, for the sun has unexpectedly come out, I trudge up the path after her. Over the stile I see a wonderland: On this, the sunny side of the slope, there are no sheep and the path is dry and firm. Overhead and to the right, a fine waterfall sparkles in the sun. Up ahead Adena has thrown off her pack and lies splayed in knee-high wildflowers.

I sit down next to her. In her bed of flowers she could be Titania, queen of the fairies. Or perhaps, I think, looking over to the ocean, Calypso on her island. I don’t remember Calypso having a mother, but nonetheless I imagine us alone on our very own island, our footsteps circling and circling the shore. It’s not the first time I’ve thought of fleeing to an island with my children, a thought that’s grown more intense as I’ve watched them struggle to maintain a relationship with their own father, who has recently given them a stepmother of their own. I haven’t known what to say to Adena when she’s asked me how to cope: Pretend? Run? How can I advise her on a situation that I have yet to resolve in my own life?

I lie down next to her, trying not to grunt with relief as I stretch out in the flowers. Lying on my back, I can feel blood throb in the soles of my feet and in the joint of my bad ankle. My back relaxes into the ground, and I am aware of the bang of the surf in my bones, a different rhythm. I wait, closing my eyes as the pulsing in my feet and my back move into phase and back out again. The manor house, my family, California, all seem very far away, less real than this island that pulses under my back. Maybe this is home. Maybe we could just stay here forever, just Adena and me. It’s so nice to be together, to have this almost-adult female companion who is mine by blood. I remind myself that the difference between her experience and mine is that I’m not dead. I get to be the mother I never had, however imperfectly, to both of us.

“Water?” offers Adena. She sounds far away. “Uisge,” I whisper without opening my eyes, thinking of the Gaelic word for water. She’s silent—either she didn’t hear what I said or she thinks “ishker” is just some nonsense word. Or maybe she understands it perfectly, I think, and she’s really a muir-gheilt, a Scottish mermaid. All she needs to breathe underwater is a special red hat, and once she finds it she’ll disappear forever into the sea. Or perhaps she’s a selkie and just needs to find her sealskin. The sun is warm on my face, and I drift in my imagination. Why, I wonder, do the mythical creatures always want to run away? If I could keep Adena with me by hiding her hat or her skin, would I?

Then, suddenly, it’s cold. I open my eyes; clouds cover the sky, and the breeze has picked up a chilly edge. Adena is gone. I start up, looking along the coastline, squinting for her bright hair along the path ahead of us.

“Mom!” The voice comes from behind me. I twist up and back, searching through the flowers, up the field to the wet craggy cliffs. “Mom!” I look again, and this time I see her, waving at me from the other side of the waterfall. She’s ghostly behind the water, an apparition. I lurch up onto sore feet and limp up the hill. I want to get to her before she disappears. It’s time to go home.

Author’s Note: Adena is now a college student in New York, and is spending the summer interning at a literary agency in New York City. Mostly, it sounds like, she reads manuscripts. (It’s true, by the way: Submissions are evaluated by interns.) We haven’t seen each other in months, though we talk by phone or e-mail several times a week. I sent her this essay for her approval, and I got back two single-spaced pages of notes, most of which I used in rewriting, as well as her blessing.

Brain, Child (Fall 2008)

About the Author: After a career in theater, Heather Dundas is now studying at the University of Southern California for a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing. Her story, “Trivial But Numerous,” was published last year in PMS: PoemMemoirStory 11. Her website is http://heatherdundas.net/