Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word by Linda Kelsey Page A

mixed
     cement. I can’t swallow it, but neither can I spit it out.
    Instead of shock or sorrow, what goes through my head is this:
Trust my mother to make a spectacle of herself. To put herself center stage, as usual. To turn the whole thing into a performance,
     as if she’s Meryl Streep in a Hollywood weepie
.
    My own mother has announced she’s dying, and this is how I react. It’s disgusting, I know. I look at my father, who’s opposite
     me. His eyes are watery with age but with tears, too. I want to race around the table and take him in my arms to comfort him.
     To tell him that it will be all right. That I’ll take care of him. I look at my mother and feel oddly empty. Who is this dying
     woman I hardly know?
    At the back of my mind, I always had this idea that one day my mother and I would sit down and talk and talk and talk and
     I’d ask all the questions that I so desperately craved answers to. Like, why haven’t you ever loved me? Why haven’t you ever
     supported me? Why haven’t you ever taken an interest in Olly? Why have you always been the center of your own universe? Why,
     if Daddy was the only person who ever mattered to you, did you have children? And the answers would make some kind of sense.
     And the difficulties between us would be resolved, and the distance bridged, and closure—as the therapists say—would be reached.
     But now none of that is going to happen. The mother I never had will simply die. And that’s something else I will have to
     come to terms with in the year of turning fifty.
    Maddy, being the doctor in the house, asks sensible questions. The rest of us are incapable of saying anything coherent. We
     learn that scans have revealed a large tumor on my mother’s lung. She has smoked thirty cigarettes a day since she was a teenager.
     When Sarah and I were young, we didn’t know that smoking was bad for you. We just used to laugh along with my father when
     she drew one of her chic du Maurier cigarettes from their distinctive red packet. We’d join in his chanting: “It’s not the
     cough that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in.”
    Despite what you read about smoking ravaging your skin, my mother looks ten years younger than her age. Recently, however,
     she has had a persistent cough. The tumor, which is called a non-small-cell cancer, is already very advanced. The cancer has
     also spread into the chest wall and the esophagus. Palliative radiotherapy is about the most the medics can offer.
    “I took your mother to the doctor as soon as we got back from South Africa,” says my father, “but she didn’t want to worry
     any of you until she knew for sure.”
    This is a side of my mother I’ve not seen. The side that wants to shield us from unnecessary concern, to avoid burdening us
     with her problems. My mother has never held back from complaining before. But maybe it’s always been small things she’s made
     a big fuss about. Inconsequential stuff, like the impossibility of getting a decent cleaner or the appalling seat pitch in
     economy on long-haul flights.
    Sarah walks round the table to our mother. “I want to hold you,” she says simply. And she does. She always knows the right
     thing to do. When she lets go, Sam does the same; looking awkward and upset, Olly follows suit. I stay where I am. My mother
     draws deeply on her cigarette. “That’s enough of that. Let’s change the subject.”
    I start gathering up the pudding plates. Olly says his goodbyes and leaves. Anita and Rupert file reports from their absent
     children. For once, Anita rushes around being helpful, offering to make teas and coffees.
    Soon they all start to leave. I find it so hard to touch my mother spontaneously, so I get her coat down from the peg and
     help her into it from behind; it’s the nearest to physical contact I can manage. She starts to button herself up. “Let me
     do that for you,” I say. But my hands are shaking, and I fumble with the