WE ALL HAVE WINGS, BUT SOME OF US DON'T KNOW WHY

I still remember picking up the phone a year ago.  I was at work and I got word Mum was on the phone.  In hindsight,  it was one of those times when my life would irrevocably change forever.

Three words stood out. Cancer, tumours and brain.  And her crying.  We don’t cry.  We just don’t.  And here I was crying on the phone at work, trying to remain calm. What a shitty way to hear that kind of news.  But really, is there a better way to find out?  Doubtful.

 

Hindsight is 20/20.  I’ve begun to hate that phrase.

My biggest mistake in the preceding years was to ignore some major changes in Mum.  But see Mum was quite the Mrs Mangel of her street.  She knew the goings on of each and every neighbour within a 1 kilometre radius.  So when she started to say people were outside her window at night and throwing rocks on her roof, we were very concerned, but no overly alarmed.  She also started to get impatient with my children for relatively no reason.  I put it all down to a lot of things, mainly her age.

We stopped asking for babysitting favours and believe me it worried me to no end when I found her blood pressure and cholesterol medication within easy reach of my then 2 year old son.  Her sight was down to basically half an eye and Jack, well Jack is a human dynamo who was just scouting out opportunities to put one over on Grandma.

 

But she adored looking after Jack.  I just couldn’t take that away from her.  It was the highlight of her week.  So, on the day she babysat him, I made sure I scoped out the house for pills, hot drinks and pins and humbly requested that the universe return him to me that afternoon as she found him.

But of course that phone call changed all of that anyway.

See, that weekend before we had been in Brisbane, having a mini-break with the kids at the Ekka.  I got a text from Les, my brother to ask if I had spoken to mum, and “was her hand better”.  Um, news to me.   Mum had failed to mention any problems.

But there was a problem and suddenly, the previous fortnight when I had taken her to do her grocery shopping made sense.  She had stood in the middle of the produce section in Woolworths and looked at me angrily.  She barked at me “How much are the avocadoes?”  I asked an employee and relayed the price to Mum.  She then almost spun around on the spot.   Then she just stopped and asked me how much the avocadoes were.  I’m ashamed to say I didn’t cotton on, I just got cross.  Jack was screaming, I was tired and Mum seemed to be playing silly buggers in the middle of fucking Woolworths.

 

Hindsight.  20/20 and all that. 

 

The phone call was from the payphone outside the doctors.  She had been to three different doctors that day.  Three times, by herself, she had sat in the waiting rooms and waited on what she must have known wouldn’t be great news.  But she refused to have us with her, because “I don’t want you having time off work for nothing”.  You have no idea how much I wish I had of defied her that day for her news about "nothing".

 

So, on her own, she was told she had two brain tumours in her head.  They were secondary.  Funny how I had no idea what secondary tumour meant back then.  20/20.   

 

When she rang me, in between the small sobs all I got was “they’ve found tumours in my bloody brain”.

She sounded so small. 

 
One year ago she found out that the insidious disease that is cancer had invaded her body.   The doctors believe it had been residing within her body for many months, probably years. 

 
From diagnosis to death, Mum lived for three months.  In the middle of the spinning vortex, it felt like so much longer.

 
So on reflection; were there people outside her window harassing her?  Was there a big fluffy white cat that jumped on her security screens from time to time?  Were hooligans really throwing rocks on her roof?  I don’t know.  More than likely they weren’t.  I do know now though that if someone I love starts telling me something that is out of the ordinary or acting a bit differently, I won’t shy away from investigating it. 

 
Hindsight may be 20/20 but I think I’m better off putting on my glasses and seeing what’s in front of me.