“Let Me Pass Away”: When Your Mother Blames You for Your Cancer Diagnosis

“My mother assumed I must have done something to bring a rare blood cancer upon myself.”

Let me pass away, nobody bother you, my mother texted after yet another of our phone arguments.

She blamed me for my cancer.

She also blamed the ghosts of the victims of 9/11. She blamed the fact that I’d worked in Lower Manhattan for two years, inhaling all those thirteen-year-old fumes from the fallen Twin Towers. She blamed my urban “lifestyle” of eating out at restaurants. She blamed my daring to leave the Bay Area suburbs where I grew up. She blamed my wife’s preference for turning up the heat in the winter. Buoyed by the infallible teachings of her favorite TV medical practitioner, Dr. Oz, she blamed my diet. She assumed I must have done something to bring a rare blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome, upon myself.

On the phone, I began yelling at her to stop. She yelled back that I was a terrible son and that she was pushing seventy and no one—not my brother, not me, not my father (who lived a mile away from her, with his girlfriend of twelve years)—wanted to take care of her. She said she should have had a daughter, because a daughter would have surely been more helpful.

She gasped for air between sobs and rants, and I regretted losing my temper. But I refused to be moved by my mother’s ploys to guilt me—her most effective maternal skill. “I’m trying to be a better son,” I said, my voice level. Be as honest and sincere as possible, I thought. The bone marrow transplant had saved my life just six months before, and I wasn’t going to waste the new time I’d been given pretending anymore. “You just make it hard,” I said. “You never say anything good about me—about anyone, or anything. Sometimes I just want to hear something good.”

I waited for her response to my heart’s outpouring, my sincere expression of grievance. Then I looked down at my phone. The screen was black.

She had hung up on me.

*

How is a mother supposed to react when her child becomes gravely ill? She’s supposed to help in some way. Provide hugs, tell me to stay positive. Tell me she loves me. Isn’t that what mothers do?

My mother has never, even under the most ideal circumstances, done any of those things. In her house, she keeps framed photos of her standing next to my brother and me at our respective college graduations. When I first noticed those pictures, it was the closest I’d ever felt to being an object of my mother’s pride.

When it comes to medical matters, for her, nothing counts as cured if not cured by Eastern medicine. After my diagnosis at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the top cancer centers in the nation, my mother was skeptical that the only cure to my disease was the risky and grueling stem cell transplant the doctors recommended. She suggested that I try acupuncture instead.

Five months before the transplant, I appeased her by making a special trip back to the Bay Area to visit her—and a miraculous cancer-curing acupuncturist she had found. “I’ve explained your illness,” my mother said. “He says, for sure, he can treat you.”

My wife, my brother, my parents, and I all converged upon the acupuncturist’s office. The building was one of those nondescript commercial spaces that resembled the shabby real-estate firm in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross. The acupuncturist we saw was in his late sixties, bespectacled, and as thin as Nosferatu. He spoke English, which was helpful, because my Cantonese was terrible. He asked me to recap my diagnosis, which I did. Then he turned to my mother and explained that Eastern medicine is used to complement, not replace, Western medicine. He was happy to provide an acupuncture treatment, but cancer could not be resolved by acupuncture alone.

My mother frowned. My family left the room, and I had a few needles stuck in my head, hands, and feet. While acupuncture was quite relaxing, when I was done, I was not cured. Of course I wasn’t.

My mother said she didn’t like that acupuncturist after all. She thought he was disrespectful, and promised to find me another.

*

I understand that losing one’s son to cancer is a scary prospect. In the absence of control over a situation one fears, one may be compelled to act irrationally. After my transplant, my mother sent daily texts and emails with suggestions of new foods to eat and avoid in order to prevent the return of my cancer. One week, I wasn’t eating enough goji berries, while consuming too much garlic and too many bananas. The next week, I wasn’t eating enough garlic and bananas, while consuming too many mushrooms. She read somewhere that corn could be especially beneficial to helping me pee out all the toxins from chemotherapy, and campaigned for it like she worked for ConAgra (eat corn keep good piss, she texted).

At one point, our food-related argument became so heated that I began to sweat profusely on the phone with her. My wife grabbed the phone from my hand. “Leland is shaking,” she said to my mother, after calling her by her Western name. “Please stop.”

My mother was unimpressed. “You will call me Mom!”

My wife continued to say my mother’s name, trying to convince her to stop shouting. Suddenly there was silence. My wife turned to me and said, “She hung up on me.”

I know my mother loves me. But she’s always appeared to love me like something she owns. In bad times, I have thought she loves me rather like she loves her car: You take your car to the shop, get the oil changed, make sure the paint is polished—you want your vehicle to run as long as possible. That I have grown to be sentient and verbal in my disagreement is as baffling to her as if her car suddenly started talking and expounding upon the disadvantages of late capitalism. From deciding to go to graduate school in creative writing, to marrying my best friend, to moving to New York City to chase my writing dreams, my mother has objected to all of my major life decisions.

When I visit, she’ll ask me to stand still while she inspects me from head to toe like an auto mechanic doing a diagnostic. She’ll demand that I stick out my tongue so she can check its color and coating and comment on everything from my tan to the size of my belly. Even while I was recumbent in the transplant ward, watching my blood counts dwindle to deathly low levels, she would thrust her phone in my face to show me photos of my father’s girlfriend, insisting on my outrage. When the doctors decided to release me from the transplant ward after just three and a half weeks instead of the six to eight weeks originally planned, while my wife, my brother, and I celebrated, my mother complained about the hassle of having to travel from her Airbnb on the Upper East Side to my apartment in Brooklyn Heights to see me.

I know I don’t always love her the way she wants to be loved, either. I can’t be the obedient son she wants. I want to be treated like someone my age—a person, instead of an object that exists solely for her psychic gratification. I want to be told, on occasion, that I’m decent and good and everything will be fine. I want my mother to tell me she loves me and actually care about what I want.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes think about her passing, as she talks about so often. I’ve imagined what it would be like to live without her constant criticism. It’s hard to dismiss the guilt I feel. A friend of mine—a man in his sixties—once said that when his mother died, he was just glad to be free of her. I know that many people never find a happy resolution in their relationships with their parents, the storybook ending with the glimmer of hope and redemption. Some just get the darkness.

*

By Mother’s Day 2016, twenty-one months after my transplant, my hair had long since grown back. Physically, I felt like my pre-transplant self. I knew I had to call my mother, and I had been dreading it—dreading hearing her plaintive voice in my head all day. When I finally ducked into the bedroom and made the call, she answered immediately.

“I’ve been waiting all day,” she said.

She was unusually cheerful, despite this mild complaint. She told me she had just had lunch with my brother, his wife, and my five-month-old niece. “She’s pretty cute,” she said, sounding almost surprised. “When I get a baby to play with, I’m so happy.”

To my surprise, she didn’t go on to criticize my lack of desire to have children, or my chemo-borne inability to have them. She didn’t ask me (as she had in the past) to simply “get one from China.”

“She’s very cute,” I agreed, smiling.

My mother said she couldn’t talk long. She was walking my brother and his family to their car. “Mommy love you, okay?” she said.

“I love you, too,” I said without hesitation.

We hung up. I stood there in shock, realizing what I had said. Had that just happened?

I walked out of my bedroom and looked at my wife, who was tending to dinner on the stove. I thought about telling her what my mother said. How rare it was. How it may have been the first time I’d ever heard those words from her; how it might have been the last. For once, we had behaved like a mother and son were supposed to.

I decided to keep the moment between my mother and me, as she most likely would have preferred. I moved forward with my day, an act I have never taken for granted since my cancer diagnosis.

I wish I could report that our relationship has been fantastic since then; that the act of vocalizing our love was an everlasting salve. In truth, not much has changed. My mom still blames me and the gods for my “having problems.” I still bristle when she rants about everything from acupressure to the miracles made possible by consuming dates.

Part of our rift, I’ve realized, will always be caused by the fact that not only do we not share a native tongue, we don’t share any common interests beyond a desire for each other’s general well-being. The act of loving my mother has always felt like playing one hand of blackjack after another, both of us busting every time. But sometimes, as on that day, that call, we both win. It was a reminder that, despite everything, something good between us is still possible—a possibility I haven’t let pass away.