Patricia’s Story

This is the story of my mother, Shelly, born on November 17th , 1949 in Beirut, Lebanon. She always said that she had a happy childhood, the youngest of three siblings, in a community and neighborhood where everyone knew each other and lived like one big family. Although her memories of her young years were joyful, early on she had to build resiliency, sometimes escaping into her creative mind and vivid imagination. She grew up through wars and conflicts, bombs and threats to her community, until her father was assassinated in 1971. This was maybe the beginning of a lifelong grief that became silent, a grief that she carried with her even through the joy of the birth of her first two daughters. Years of uncertainty, fear, and moving from country to country followed to escape the civil war raging in Lebanon. A few years later, my family was able to settle in Hong Kong and build happy memories again. I was born a decade after my sisters, I thought I was an accidental pregnancy but my mom always told me I was the post-war baby she always wanted once the family situation settled, stabilized and flourished.

I was the youngest of the sisterhood, the one she would carry with her everywhere. Growing up in Geneva, Switzerland, I was blessed to spend a lot of time with my mother from school pickups and drop offs, to after school activities, doing homework in the kitchen while she was cooking or drawing by her side while the family watched the evening news. I can’t list all the memories I have with her, that would fill a book; but, for years it was just her and I until my parents got divorced and my mom moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil. Even thought I was in my mid-twenties, I took a leap of faith and followed her to Brazil. What a blessing that move turned out to be.

Over the next ten years, I would meet my husband, get married and have my three children but it would be last time my mom and I would ever spend every day together. Living in Brazil enabled me to learn Portuguese, talk to the hospital and doctors she would later need when she got sick as well as take care of her final arrangements. In those ten years together, we had countless sushi lunches, coffees at Starbucks and dinners at her house. She was by my side when I launched my first line of jewelry, got engaged, married and pregnant. She was with me for all my doctor appointments, my kids’ checkups, the first days of schools and pickups from school for my own children. In my first years as a mom, she was my boys’ second mother.

When I announced in 2015 that we were moving to New York, she was crushed. Her heart broke into a thousand pieces, despite knowing that this was the best choice for our family. It could have gone smoothly but on the day we moved to New York, my step-father was suddenly hospitalized and needed emergency surgery to remove a tumor in his colon. Leaving was bittersweet but with this unexpected hardship, it was almost impossible. In December 2017, we learned that he was terminally ill, the cancer having spread to his lungs. And what we did not know at the time was only a month later, my mother would wake up one day with a yellowish undertone on her skin and eyes and the doctor would immediately send her for a scan. The following morning, Friday January 12th, 2018, I woke up to the news that my mom had a tumor in her pancreas. That was the first message I read on my phone as soon as I woke up along with dozens of missed calls from my mom and sisters. All I remember was panic, uninterrupted crying and immense despair. The day after, the oncologist and the surgeon were able to schedule the surgery for the following Friday. I talked to my kids, told them I would leave the next day as Mamy Shelly would need surgery and stay in the hospital for a while and that I would be by her side. My middle son wanted to get her a gift that I could take with me to the hospital. He got her a golden bag, that I still have, because he wanted her to look chic and impeccably dressed as she always was, even in the hospital. The ten hours surgery was a success, they were able to remove it all but she would still need to go through some treatment and a not very aggressive chemotherapy so to be sure that it will clean any cells that were left.

Ironically, my mom had her last chemo the week my stepfather passed, in July 2018. We though they had both freed themselves from that cancer, him forever and her for the time being. Little did we know that this new start in life, as a widow and a remission patient, would place more obstacles in her path. She was praying for new beginnings, for healing, for recovery, but grief, pain, fear, resentment, anger, sadness and loneliness can find ways to stay with you, and sometimes in the wrong places, deep down in the tissues of an emotionally and physically exhausted body.

In October she came to New York to visit us and she was feeling like herself again, going for long walks, shopping, going out with me and the kids. She needed her time alone at home but at that moment, I had no idea that grief could have such an impact. She was grieving her husband and the future they would no longer have together. She needed some time off to restore and care for herself too. The last day of her trip was Halloween, she just loved it and scheduled her routine scan on November 2nd so she could stay in New York until November 1st and enjoying the street decorations, dressing up as a leopard and trick and treating with the boys. It was so much fun; she was radiant and walked for 2 hours before leaving a bit earlier to rest. A few days later, after this wonderful trip, we all thought that the scan would be just a routine and that the oncologist would tell her to keep doing what she was doing and enjoy life and this well-deserved break, but there was no second chance, the tumor had come back. We were devastated! How was it possible? She was full of life just two days ago! I booked a trip to Brazil a couple of weeks later to discuss her treatment with her doctor and to buy a wig, this time the chemo was going to be much more aggressive and hair loss will be one of the side effects. For someone who use to get her hair done twice a week, this was a big deal, but we were able to find a wig that would match her blonde hair perfectly. If that were the worst that could happen from this treatment, she could face it.

Unfortunately, with scan after scan, the tumor would not shrink until Easter where we had the first good news that the tumor was finally responding to that third chemo she was undergoing. She was exhausted by the nausea and some side effects but still energetic enough to pull herself together and live a normal life, even traveling to Israel to pay her respects to her mother who had been buried there 24 years earlier. When she came back after a wonderful trip surrounded by my two sisters and many of her grandchildren, she was full of hope and will to live more. The next scan for sure will show that the tumor had disappeared. Well, the tumor had shrunk further but this time metastasis on her liver appeared. Pancreatic cancer is bad, but when the word liver comes up, it cannot be good news. She called me on June 26th 2019, when I was taking two of my sons to their sleep away camp. A minute after they hopped on the bus the phone rang, it was my mum in total despair. There was metastasis on her liver and the oncologist believed that they had exhausted all the different type of chemo to treat her cancer.

They decided to resort to the very last option, a trans-arterial chemoembolization that they will put through her groin up to her liver to bombard all the cancerous tissues. It was risky, it wasn’t covered by her insurance, it didn’t have a high success rate but it was the last hope and my mother was not going to take any chances. She decided to risk it for any chance of survival. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. Other parents came to me trying to reassure me that my kids would be ok in camp; little did they know that that I had just learned of my mom’s death sentence and I had already forgotten about my kids on the bus. I called the oncologist as soon as my husband and I were in the car. He tried to be reassuring but he made it clear that the chances were small and that it was risky with a lot of side effects.

I spent almost a month in São Paulo with my mom, before and after her treatment. Before she was still her usual self, wanting to get dressed and go out. After, she was tired and that was expected. I needed to go back to New York to pick up the kids from camp, when I left my mother was fine and looking forward to traveling at the end of the summer. Sadly, she was hospitalized again at end of August, due to a major liver infection which was one of the risks of her last treatment. My sisters and I took turns being by her side for a month, and when she came back home, she was a different person: frail, tired, fragile, with minimum autonomy, no appetite or strength to eat, walk or talk. Being hospitalized had aged her a decade. And even in this situation she kept hope and her desire to fight the killer that was now in her liver. I arranged for everything at her house before leaving again: home care twice a day for her injections and drain, physiotherapy multiple times a week and her gym coach that would make her walk 100m at a time, because at that point all she wanted was to regain some autonomy to walk alone and to be strong enough to stand tall on her two frail legs without help.

My husband and my kids traveled to be by her side a couple of weeks later for Yom Kippur which is our most important holiday in the Jewish faith and I couldn’t acknowledge that it might be our last religious holiday together. She could not go to the synagogue, so I went for her, to pray for her recovery. When we left, I told her that we will be back for the weekend of November 17th for her 70th birthday. My oldest sister had visited her as well right after me, and on the day of her departure my mother had terrible tachycardia. Her doctor thought it could be anxiety due to my sister leaving but the next day she was rushed to the hospital as her heartbeat was getting higher. They discovered water in her lung and she went into surgery. My mother in law called me and I took the first overnight flight to be by her side. Two days after I landed, on October 31st 2019, a year exactly after our memorable Halloween, her oncologist came to me, outside of my mother’s hospital room, to tell me that they found cancer cells in the water they had drained and now the metastasis was in her lungs too. I was still in my pajamas, barefoot in a hospital hallway when my world collapsed as I listened to him telling me that there was nothing left they could do for her. I froze. My mother was sleeping a few feet from us, unaware she was dying. How I was supposed to announce this to her? I asked the doctor to come back the next day to have this conversation directly with her, with the help of the hospital psychologist. I had to call my husband, my sister and my dad, while remaining calm and without having any breakdown as my mother could wake up at any minute and I didn’t want her to see me this way. I wanted to look composed and hopeful for another 24 hours, I just did not have the strength in me to have this conversation.

I needed this time to think about all the consequences although I was totally unaware of how I would live life without her. I know anticipatory grief is a thing, but it’s not the real deal, it doesn’t prepare you to the long-lasting absence of your loved one. I eventually broke down in tears that night with my husband over the phone once my mom was asleep for the night. I have vivid memory of the hallways and waiting room of the hospital, and all the phone calls and conversations I had to have there during those last three weeks. When the doctor came back the next day I was with my oldest sister on the phone, in that damn waiting room with six chairs, a coffee table and two vending machines, when the psychologist came to me saying that my mom had requested my presence. At that point my heart stopped, and I thought I was going to faint.

When I entered the room my mom looked at me and just said quietly that she won’t be able to attend my three boys bar mitzvahs. I cried and told her that I had known since yesterday, but I simply could not be the one to tell her. We had what I felt was a long conversation but it must have been ten minutes only, the four of us, where she made the doctor promise that she would not suffer or feel anything at the end, and then asked to talk solely with the psychologist. It was November 1st and my mother passed on November 22nd, 2019, five days after her long-awaited 70th birthday that she was able to celebrate surrounded by family and very close friends.

Those three weeks seemed like little time to have with a loved one, but enough time to have all the conversations I wanted to have with my mom. I spent days and night in the hospital, so we had plenty of time together, to say goodbye. But the last days, once she was on morphine and breathing two to three breaths a minute seemed like an eternity. She was not conscious anymore, she could not feel the pain, she probably felt our presence, and as much as we did not want her to leave, we wanted her to rest, in peace, finally. Her inert body was not her at the end, her soul was there but we did not recognize our mom anymore.

The final days were about counting the oxygen in her blood, her heartbeat and her breath until she took her last one, with my hands on her eyes, reciting a very last prayer, the one that will accompany her soul to the other world, before I kissed her on her forehead and covered her with a sheet just like she did with her own mother twenty five years prior, following millennia of our Jewish traditions.