Human Happiness. Brian Fawcett

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days, what the lump might be, she booked an appointment with our family doctor, a man named Peter Jaron I remember mainly for having skin rashes on his neck and hands. In a leisurely sort of way, Dr. Jaron arranged for a biopsy, and about a month later called my mother on the phone just as I was arriving home from school. The biopsy, he told her, “was positive.”

      “Positive?” I hear her say, with such careful calm that I should have been instantly alert. “What do you mean by positive?”

      Peter Jaron’s answer is equally calm. “The growth in your breast is malignant. You have breast cancer. You should come in sometime this week, so we can get the process going.”

      “Process?” my mother asks, disturbed by Jaron’s matter-of-fact tone. “What process are we talking about? The process of dying?”

      “The treatment process. There’s some urgency about this,” Jaron admits.

      “When can I come in?” she says.

      There is some fumbling at the other end of the line. “Let me see when I’ve got an open spot.”

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      My mother slams down the phone, and bursts into tears. I ask her what is wrong. “Nothing,” she says, gathering herself together. “I’ll be fine.”

      Satisfied, I wander downstairs to my bedroom, close the door, and begin to work on the 1/25th scale model car I’ve been customizing, a late-model Ford I’ve painstakingly decorated with several coats of maroon candy-apple paint. It looks fine.

      But my mother isn’t fine, and over the next several days, she does something about it. She contacts a family friend, Larry Maxwell, a doctor who has recently taken a sabbatical from the local hospital to improve his oncological expertise. He agrees to take her on as a patient, and the worst three years of her life begin.

      There are several things about the above tableau you should know. The first is that it is a fabrication drawn from the wispiest shreds of fact and memory. When this reconstruction started, I had just three ciphers to work with, other than the knowledge that my mother contracted breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy of her left breast at some point between 1956 and 1966. I had to call my sister Nina to get the dates straight, and we were able to pinpoint 1960 by cross-referencing events in Nina’s life: the breakup of her first marriage, and the subsequent year she and her infant daughter spent living with my parents. It took us a while to sort out the few certainties we could muster between us.

      One of the certain ciphers is a memory fragment of mine in which my mother is telling me that I will be going to a new doctor.

      “Why is that?” I asked.

      She grimaced. “I don’t think,” she said, choosing her words deliberately the way she did when something was difficult, “that Dr. Jaron pays proper attention to his patients.”

      The thought of having a new doctor interested me. But maybe it was that I didn’t like Jaron’s skin rashes and the fact that his arms and neck were coated with Band-Aids. Shouldn’t a doctor be able to cure himself of something like that?

      “What didn’t he pay attention to?” I said.

      She thought about this for a moment. “Well,” she said, “I’ve had a bit of a problem and he didn’t catch it. I don’t want him doing the same thing with you.”

      She didn’t mention the word “cancer,” and she didn’t explain what Dr. Jaron had done and not done about her “bit of a problem.” I suspect—now, not then—that he’d been slow to act when she found the lump, and then had been too laconic when the biopsy proved the lump malignant, treating it as if it was her problem and not his. Many years later she told me, out of the blue, that he hadn’t caught it because he didn’t like to touch women’s breasts.

      No doubt his casualness after the fact had something to do with covering his ass, as doctors do, then and now, by acting as if everything is routine, what’s the hurry? Yet it might have been more simple. My mother may have decided that Dr. Jaron either lacked sufficient expertise, or interest—who could trust breast examinations to a doctor who didn’t like to touch breasts? So, she took matters into her own hands. When she did that, how could she continue to send her children to him?

      Or maybe I just didn’t ask any questions. A new doctor? One without skin rashes? Why not?

      The other datum I have is more flimsy still. When she announced that “Larry” Maxwell was her new doctor, she made a point of saying that he was a man that she trusted. I may have thought about asking why—simple curiosity. But more likely, I deduced that she’d gone to Larry Maxwell because he was a family friend with whom she and my father often socialized. I didn’t think to ask why I was now going to a third doctor, which would have forced her to explain what was really going on. When she announced that she was going to Vancouver for a trip, I didn’t ask why, either.

      I was, in other words, oblivious to the most catastrophic event in my mother’s entire life while it was happening. My obliviousness didn’t end there, either. I remained woefully ignorant about dates, times, effects of the mastectomy and the several courses of radiation treatments she suffered through over the next several years. Worse, I was utterly without empathy about the pain and suffering she experienced. For instance, I believed that the diagnosis had come in 1958, when I was 14—thus partly excusing my indifference on the grounds of my youth. But it turns out I was 16, and the 3-year crisis from diagnosis through surgery to radiation treatment took me past the age of 18—making me a self-involved near-adult instead of an oblivious adolescent.

      I have just three other memories of it to work with, and all three of them are brief and mainly about me.

      The first is a vague recollection of my mother coming off the plane from Vancouver with her left arm in a sling. I’d gone out to the small airport in Prince George along with my father and sister Nina—my sister Serena was already married and living in Kamloops, 500 kilometres south, and god only knows where my brother was that day—did my father have him stay behind to deal with some delivery that needed to be made? I remember this event more because of the novelty of going to the airport than any sense of dire occasion. As she descended, very uncertainly, the steel staircase from the plane onto the tarmac, she had, I recall, her light-coloured coat half on, her right arm in the coat sleeve, the left sleeve draped over the sling that immobilized her left arm, obscuring it. I remember being surprised at the sling, and I have to imagine, now, that she was pale. Did she smile when she saw us?

      What happened after we picked her up is a total blank. It is blank about the remainder of that day, and blank for months and even years after that. Now that I think of it, I have very few tactile memories of any kind from this period of my life, except for sideswiping a telephone pole with the new-from-the-Europe-trip Volkswagen when my father forced a driving lesson on me as a sixteenth-birthday present.

      The driving lesson hadn’t felt like much of a birthday present even before I sideswiped the pole and had to sit through what seemed like the 650th lecture about what a boob I was. I knew my father only wanted me to get my licence so I could drive delivery vans and trucks for him. I had no objection to that, but no burning interest, either. The important thing, in my mind, was that I had no choice. I was correct about not having a choice. Three days later I took my driving test on a 1956 3-ton Chevrolet flat-deck painted Orange Crush colours. The truck, mercifully for me and for the safety of others, had been unloaded for the test. I passed, but I was a lousy driver. I had four small accidents over the next two months before I smartened up and recognized that I had to actually

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