A Mother’s Story: The Moon to His Sun
From the late Marjorie Williams, the story of her own mother’s life and death:
“It was only in secret that she was queen of her own domain. It was the land of late at night, when I would hear her downstairs, moving quietly around her kitchen, straightening a thing or two in the living room, then back to the kitchen. Clink, went her ashtray on the counter, as she stood at the sink to start the dishwasher. Chrhissshh, went her Bic as she lit another Carlton. She sipped from her glass of cranberry juice and soda, which might or might not also contain an illicit jolt of vodka. It was the world of the kitchen, where she made such bounty that you never thought to wonder at the fact that it required her constant removal to a part of the house where she was alone.”
A Matter of Life and Death
We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, I felt weirdly like an actor in a melodrama. I had—and still sometimes have—the feeling that I was doing, or had done, something faintly self-dramatizing, something a bit too attention-getting. (I was raised by people who had a horror of melodrama, but that’s another part of the story.) In two months I will mark the finish of year 3 B.T.—my third year of Borrowed Time. (Or, as I think of it on my best days, Bonus Time.) When I was diagnosed with Stage IV(b) liver cancer in early July of 2001, every doctor was at great pains to make clear to me that this was a death sentence.