Two Mothers

Mark and I went to the Rainbow Babies & Children’s Gala this past Saturday and while we were there, I bumped into a mother I had met on the floor during Austin’s first round of cancer. Her daughter also had Wilms but was diagnosed at a much older age, which is unusual for this disease which tends to strike kids under five, and it had already spread to her lungs.

I remember the day we met: A friend of mine who happened to work at the hospital back then introduced us, thinking we might want to talk since our kids had the same cancer. Well, it might have been the same but our circumstances couldn’t have been more different. We stood awkwardly in our doorway while Austin, having just celebrated his first birthday but not yet walking, crawled around on the floor and her daughter, eleven at the time, walked dizzily about the halls under a cloud of chemo.

We didn’t really have that much to say to each other that first time, both being so caught up in our own insular worlds, so we wished each other well and let it go. But we sure had a lot to say to each other on Saturday, as we stood on the ramp to the bathroom and shooed women past us so we could talk, talk, talk.

Her daughter passed away last summer, which I knew before I saw her so there was no awful moment of truth. But she was okay, this woman, she was doing well. I mean, I trust she has had horrible times and I don’t doubt that she misses her daughter every second of every day. But, even with all of that, she was still standing.

Which I found enormously refreshing.

There were no tears between us as we stood there and shared our stories and expressed our sorrow for all the other has endured. We have both had terrible experiences (her’s obviously more terrible than mine), and yet we are both okay.

I am sure that some people would have looked at her that night, all dressed up and cheery, bidding on auction items with one hand and holding a glass of wine in the other, and thought she was faking it or somehow hiding her deep grief. As I am sure that some people look at me and think, “She can’t really be that okay; she must be putting up a  front and breaking down behind closed doors.” But it’s not like that. You simply learn to adapt, a child with cancer becomes another (albeit overpowering) part of your life, and you take the horrible and mix it in with the wonderful and you find a way to live no matter what befalls you. You just keep going. Not only because you have to (which you do), but because you want to.

So there we stood in line at the bathroom, two mothers of children with cancer, one gone, one still fighting. We hugged and we smiled and we even laughed. But we never cried.

Because we are both standing.