From a dim corner of her hospital room I surveyed the patient, who appeared, tucked primly under the crisp sheets, not so much recouping from surgery as steeped in a late-evening reverie. Her blank face registered none of the pristine grimness which so often pervades medical environs; hopeful hints of rose could be discerned in her pale skin; and with each gentle inhalation, her chest lifted slowly but reassuringly heavenward. Mine, by contrast, palpitated so furiously that I braced myself for cardiac arrest.
I do not know whether she spied me as I gazed downward, contemplating the unjustly colloquial sound of "lumpectomy," or if some primally maternal instinct alerted her to my presence, but in a coarse, ragged voice, she breathed my name: "Dan."
Clearing my throat, I approached her bedside; a crimson pinwheel bloomed on the bridge of her nose-the surgical mask had broken a blood vessel-and her eyes roved thoughtfully beneath their lids, like patient fish below the surface of a pond. I suddenly wondered whether she had spoken at all.
"Yes, Mother?"
"Dan." She fixed with a look so sudden and direct that I quailed; from the blanched desert of her face flickered twin oases, fiery and deep and decidedly alive. "I want you to..." She expelled a long, uneasy sigh, allowing her eyelids to descend over those burning pools.
The silence discomforted me. "Yes?" I pressed her.
"I want you to write to your colleges and tell them your mother has cancer."
Until then, the word had not been pronounced; my cheeks burned as I nodded gravely. "So they'll understand if my grades drop?"
Once more she regarded me. "So they'll have pity and be more inclined to admit you."
Typical. Even when sidelined by an advanced case of breast cancer, my mother had the wherewithal to choreograph my collegiate strategies, to govern my life with the same savoir-faire and efficacy she had displayed for seventeen years. Of course, during the two months which remained between that first night of surgery and the first of April, her deteriorating condition forced her to relinquish control; so as the eldest of four in our single-parent household, I was consumed during those seven weeks by freshly assigned familial duties (to say nothing of a particularly cruelly timed blitz of academic work)-I had graduated to the ranks of adulthood before I had graduated high school.
I will pause here to note that, while I am indeed setting the stage for a moral, it's not the one you may be predicting-that weirdly foreboding adage of optimism "Take nothing for granted." Without question, this trying period fully awoke me to the awesome effort demanded of any truly savvy suburban matron, but I had not been entirely blind to that effort before my mother's illness; besides, the lesson which I hope to impart is of a less mundane (if less selfless) nature.
But I upstage myself. Amid the barrage of new commitments I faithfully wrote to my schools; every week, impassioned (yet inventively phrased and grammatically flawless) records of my tribulations were borne by the American postal system to various destinations along the Eastern seaboard. I lamented, in the sweeping, tragic prose of a Brontë sister, the unsettling darkness of the master bedroom, where my mother, reeling from bombardments of chemotherapy, lay for days huddled in a fetal position; John Webster himself would have applauded my artfully nuanced accounts of endless nights reverberating with the sound of her bloody heaves. And as for the vividly rendered depictions of fearsome hypodermics and blood tests-these not only rivaled any medical passage ever concocted by Crichton, but boasted a formidable array of SAT words ("sanguine," "nocent," "torpor," etc.).
"Wait a moment," the principled reader might interject. "It sounds as though you exploited this illness." Well, of course I did; Why shouldn't I? As my mother often remarks, "If I'm going to suffer, I want-I deserve-to get something out of it." Call it unethical, call it morbid, call it what you will, but call off the criticism until I'm finished; I hardly feel I capitalized on tragedy-rather, I merely squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons.
And so when, in early April, I received a denial from Princeton, I wasted no time in composing a letter to Dean of Admissions Fred Hargadon:
"You heartless bastard. My nine-year-old sister just delivered to me your smug little letter, which I opened in the presence of my bedridden, cancer-ravaged mother (in whom this rejection will most assuredly incite a grave relapse). What kind of latter-day Stalin refuses admission to someone in my plight? Not that I ever seriously considered gracing your godforsaken institution with my presence-you should be so lucky-but I'm nonetheless relieved to know that I won't be attending a university whose administrators opt to ignore oncological afflictions; perhaps if I'd followed the example of your prized student Lyle Menendez and killed my mother, things would have turned out differently. Best wishes for your cancer-free Class of 2001, you sorry botch of nature."
Harsh? Ah, yes. Justified? To some degree: after all, I'd suffered, and this unexpected disappointment reduced my anguish to naught-it smacked, as did any fresh burden, of deliberate malevolence. Now, perhaps only an adolescent could lash out with such overt hostility, but I'm convinced that even an adult whose life is subjected to so unpleasant and unforeseen a reversal of fortune might react similarly in the face of an additional setback (however trifling, however ultimately inconsequential).
And so we arrive at the promised (and, I hope, timely) moral: Make suffering worth it. When the silver lining proves elusive, when the situation cannot be helped, nothing empowers so much as working for one's own advantage; I happily cling to a buoy of self-servitude when tides of oppression mount. Armed with this philosophy, I wade without apprehension into the melee of term papers and final examinations, secure in the knowledge that should my efforts go awry, I can antidote those ills with several bags of candy corn and a few screenings of Austin Powers. To be sure, I fret-as would anyone-about the ramifications of a botched test, of a social faux-pas, of a mother's cancer... but crises such as these should inspire self-reflection, not self-affliction. Given the recent flurry of religious controversy on campus, I think it fitting to close with an amended commandment: Thou shalt not suffer in vain.
Dan Mallory, a Trinity sophomore, is a writer for Recess.
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