The last time I saw Nancy

The last time I saw Nancy she was standing at her kitchen sink at midnight, washing the family’s supper dishes, while her chronically unemployed, FOX news watching husband lay snoring loudly on the couch, mouth hanging open, legs sprawled wide.

Nancy showed me the stitches on her lower back. I tried to contain my shock. They’d just taken bone marrow from her pelvic bone to be used in the stem cell transplant that she’d be having soon. I was speechless.

She smiled at me and told me how much she thought of her doctor, the one in charge of the stem cell transplant. He was a good looking young man that impressed her with his confidence and his consideration in explaining everything to her. He warned her, she said, that the procedure could be fatal, and he wanted to make sure she understood the risk. She told me, with a proud look of wisdom, that she had said to him bravely, in her soft, timid little voice, ‘Cancer can be fatal.”

She was proud she had shown this good looking doctor her courage.I tried to hide my fear. I don’t know how much she saw. It was a struggle to smile. She died within 24 hours of the transplant.

I was a thousand miles away at the time. Nancy had taken a turn for the worst after the transplant and I spoke with her over the phone. No one told me that she had taken a turn, it was obvious from her voice. I’d been speaking to her every night. This night was completely different.

She was using baby words as she spoke. “I wub you.” she said. “I wub you bewwy much.” She hadn’t spoken to me like that since I was a small child. She gasped for breath between each word. The gasps were strong and hard and frightening.

My mother took the phone and said to me, with an air of nonchalance, “Well, I think I’ll go back to the motel and read for a while.” I was shocked. I almost never corrected my mother because that was a dangerous thing to do. But, this was serious. I blurted out, “You’re not going to leave Nancy when she’s like this, are you?”

The fact that she was audibly struggling to breathe was terrifying. My mother grunted and then snapped at me in response, “Well, there are nurses here.”

Three hours later we got the call that Nancy was gone. Mom had left Nancy alone and gone back to the motel. A couple of hours later she returned to find her surrounded by nurses trying to revive her. The nurses discovered she was in her room alone when she stopped breathing.

I will never know if my mother alerted the nurses that she was leaving Nancy alone, because I never spoke to my mother about this. The guilty look on her face the next time I saw her told me that nothing needed to be said. We both knew what we knew, understood what we understood.

I could never feel the same about my mother after that day. We never spoke about it, my mother and I, although I let my little sister know very clearly how I felt about it.

My baby sister condemns me for holding these bad feelings about my mother. She doesn’t give me credit for the fact that I continued a civil relationship with her for the rest of her life.

It’s true I have an unforgiving opinion about it. If she hadn’t treated Nancy monstrously for her whole life, it might have been different, but she had.

If, 45 years too late, she hadn’t made everyone else in the family feel like they were in the way and run them off, with her proud ego, trying to make up for the lifetime of abuse, Nancy would never have been alone that night. This was beyond anything i ever expected to see in my life. My own mother spent 50 years torturing my sister and ultimately assuring that she was abandoned until her last breath on this earth.

While Nancy stood at the kitchen sink, on our last visit, I looked down at the new red tennis shoes on her tiny feet and complimented them. She said it felt nice to do something for herself for a change, now that her children were grown and needing less. She tried to put on another proud face, as if she had to defend her new little red shoes.

She was like me, always apologizing for herself, as if apologizing for her very existence, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Brother Johnny used to apologize like that as well.

Nancy’s coworkers adored her because she was a giving person. She was always a giving person.She’d just bought a new house and a new car, based on her credit alone that she’d built over the years with no help from either parent, and certainly not from her deadbeat husband. The only people who ever bailed her family our were her in-laws, who adored Nancy and were eternally grateful to her for taking their unemployable son off of their hands.

After the purchases of the new house and car, stress began to mount. She had wanted a smaller house with a more manageable mortgage but he insisted on the larger, two story one.

She wanted the car with the standard transmission because it was cheaper but he didn’t know how to drive a standard and refused to learn, insisting on the more costly automatic. Once she bought it, her daughter took it over, needing it to get to college classes, while Nancy took the city bus at dawn, through downtown Austin, TX, meeting a whole new class of people, while wearing a kerchief over her bald little head.

After her death I walked by the new car that Nancy had bought and saw that already he’d littered the interior with his cigarette ashes. Nancy was nothing but a disrespected memory to him. He went off and tried to get a new wife a little too soon for my comfort.

He was not there when Nancy lay there dying, ravaged with a fever, struggling to breathe. He lay sleeping peacefully, 30 miles away.

I was 1000 miles away on another emergency, biggest mistake of my life.

Nancy went to her minister for counseling and he told her that she had to obey her husband no matter who the breadwinner. The husband was to be in charge of the bank account and the bills and it was not my sister’s place to manage it in any way, despite that it was only her paycheck that ever went into it. To my absolute shock, Nancy explained that the pastor said it was her responsibility to deposit her paycheck and to leave her husband in control because he was ‘the man of the house’. I was appalled, but she was raised to be submissive and subservient, it was the only way she could survive.

Nancy held to her faith and obeyed her minister, while the lights and water were shut off from time to time, as the ‘man of the house’ would forget to pay the bills.

My sister treated this minister as if his word was the unquestionable word of god and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. She needed a god, I suppose. There was no arguing with her about that.

But when that same minister preached at her funeral I made a point not to listen to a word that he said. He knew nothing about Nancy. In fact he’d kept her trapped in a prison, and I talked to her in my head as he preached.

Nancy was a faithful servant to everyone in her life. I sometimes wish she had not been so faithful. I watched her being broken as a child and that’s one reason I feel compelled to try and tell her story.

Nancy was also a faithful secretary all of her life, wherever they lived, she always worked. Her last job was with the Texas State Education Department, just across the street from the Texas state capitol.

When her turn came for a very large and well deserved promotion she was passed up because she had become indispensable to a particularly difficult boss. They needed her to stay right where she was. A lot of her coworkers were outraged that Nancy had been passed up and demanded that she stand up for herself, but she didn’t.

The powers that be didn’t want Nancy to be moved because her empty position with an impossible boss would have been very difficult to fill. Shortly after that came the cancer diagnosis. Her boss was unsympathetic to Nancy’s cancer regimen, never seeming to understand that the chemotherapy treatments were real. I saw her at the funeral, looking shocked, but did not approach her.

Nancy gave up her new car to her college aged daughter and for the first time in her life began to take the bus to work in the early morning hours, her little red kerchief covering her bald head, and then later a wig. She met and bonded with a whole other class of people on that bus, supportive working class people, in the last few months of her life and I think it was opening her eyes to more of the world, more kindness in the world. I’m glad I was there for her, to hear all her stories, all her worries and hurts, all her desires and her ears.

She was done speaking to our psycho sister, she said, because the words that came out of her mouth were too hurtful. I asked her for details but she didn’t want to explain. I could only imagine.

I sat there at the kitchen table, after the funeral, paging through her checkbook, looking at her deposit entries. Her deposits were the only deposits going into the checkbook for as far back as I could thumb, and I was saddened to see that her paychecks were no more than what I was making as a house cleaner. Sure, she definitely got better benefits but the pay seemed minimal for all her years of hard work and professionalism.

Nancy’s boss looked pretty shattered at the funeral. She knew she was never going to find another Nancy again.After her death, my father initiated a lawsuit against the doctor who performed the stem cell transplant. I’d spoken with professionals about it and knew that the choice for a stem cell transplant was a reasonable choice in light of the very aggressive form of cancer that my sister had.

In truth, the fault in the system lay in the managed care rules and the original physician who told Nancy to wait another 3 months until the mammogram would be covered, despite that you could actually see the lump in her breast.

By the time Nancy got the biopsy the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.

If anyone should have been sued, they were suing the wrong person. When their attorney called to tell me I was a part of the lawsuit that ‘the family’ had filed, I immediately told him to take my name off of it and that I wanted no part of the lawsuit.

The rest of the family sat through that embarrassing lawsuit, that they roundly lost, while my father explained on the stand that he could tell right away that the doctor was nothing but a playboy.

In return, because it was beneficial to them, they falsely accused me of caring only about money when they knew not one bit about my life.

I just walked away without one word to defend myself.

Instead it appears that I’ve almost written a book in response.

So I guess the bigger question is, why did I ever care what they said or thought? And the answer is, because there are younger ones who will never know me and more than that, never know their grandmother, Nancy. So many stories I could have shared with them about their grandmother, but sadly those stories were not welcomed.

I’m sure that they’ve heard the story that their grandmother and weird Aunt Kay were best friends all their lives, but they’ll probably never understand what happened. It took me ten years to figure it out. They gas lighted me, scapegoated me, blind sided me and it was all about the effing money and 2 remaining siblings who literally cheated everyone else out of their fair share. Let them have it. Their lives have always been miserable, dishonest and will continue to be.

There never was a person more true than my sister, Nancy, and yet she was betrayed very often in her life from her earliest years, denied by her father, denied by her grandmother, denied by a half sister, denied by two step-mothers

Just a few months before she died she went to a photography studio alone because she could not get either daughter or her husband to come to the studio with her for a group shot, and the offer she had paid for was about to expire. And these are the same people who openly accused me of being a bad family member with selfish motives.

That’s probably why she was such a faithful soul. She pretty much had no one to depend on but herself for the better part of her life which did not last 50 years.

In the last few weeks of her life Nancy begged me to learn how to use the computer proficiently, she was so excited about the revolutionary new tools for her job. She wanted me to get out of housecleaning and I’ll always regret she never knew that I did and I became a teacher for the last career move, actually taught computer programming successfully. I think she’d be tickled pink about that.

I cry for at least one of my siblings once a week it seems. It’s a healthy thing to do. People are in our lives for a reason. Memories are in our lives for a reason. This week my memories for Nancy grew strong again and forced the words out of me. Thank you for listening if you’ve come this far.