T Incorporated

In August of 1989 we moved. I had spent the first nine years of my life living in Longview Washington. A dreary mill town, where most high school graduates simply cross the street and attend Lower Columbia Community College delaying their entry into the lumber mills. Huge Ford trucks adorned with flood lights lined the streets, and the town always seemed cloaked in gray. If it wasn’t the overcast weather then it was the twenty-four hour mill stacks polluting the skies. I remember my mom breathing a sigh of relief when we left. “I was worried you’d end up at LCC and then Mill,” she’d say. Just finishing up second grade, I hadn’t given it much thought. He-Man and Transformers were more important, and so I was nervous to move. The new place wouldn’t have Loren’s tree houses or John Null Park—moving was not what I wanted to do.

My mother picked out the house. Stwa entrusted her to find the “right one” and would approve the decision. Very managerial. Very Stwa. She hated trying to pick out the house; she had a realtor who was pushing her into the more upscale neighborhoods in the area. She felt each new development looked like Disneyland. You could stand between two houses and touch them with your outstretched arms. She finally settled on one in the suburbs of Portland, a little known “cookie cutter” town called Durham. Located in a cul-de-sac and surrounded by large fir and maple trees it was a stunning home. There were even a few people my age to play with. I instantly warmed to this moving thing. Yet, the most noticeable feature of our new house were the three large picture windows gracing the front. From there the entire cul-de-sac was visible, and I don’t think it was any mistake the house my mother chose had them.

Before the cancer began to restrict her, my mom was never sitting. She’d be in the kitchen, cleaning, doing laundry or helping us with homework. My farther, perched upstairs watching TV did enough sitting for the both of them. It wasn’t until she was forced to stop moving that I think she really got to use the windows she’d chosen.

Ten years later, my mom crouched in the corner next to the couch, she was staring out the lower pane of the window. Her eyes were fixed at the sword ferns covering the concrete foundation. The sun was a burnt orange streaming through the windows falling on top of her head. She was slightly curled up on the carpet. Our house was notoriously cold being nestled in all the trees, even in the summer, and I assumed she was just warming up. The house had vaulted ceilings, and I was upstairs on the couch watching TV, but it was a commercial when I turned and looked down.

She didn’t know I was there. It was mid-June, and I was home for the summer from University. Later I found out the doctor had just called. It helped explain the tears on her face. I’d learned not to ask why she was crying. She’d already been through a lot: a mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy, and was going through an insane regiment of homeopathic remedies. Flaxseed oil lined the fridge, special tea was brewed on Sundays, and the twelve bottles of herbal pills were covertly contained in the cupboard. “I don’t feel sick, so I don’t want to have all the pills around making me look it,” was her reasoning for hiding them. The doctor had just explained to her the rash that had formed where her breast had been was indeed cancerous and that she’d be undergoing more chemotherapy treatments. She didn’t want to lose her hair again.

She’d joke she was “Nancy Drew” and tell me about the comings and goings of the neighbors. “I haven’t seen John out today I wonder if he’s alright” or “Gary’s out smoking on the side of the house with a beer again. I’m sure Marie hates that,” she’d inform me when I’d be home to visit. Occasionally, a bit of doubt would creep in and she’d say, “Why me? Look at him he’s always smoking and drinking,” but only very rarely. Propped up with three to five pillows and sipping water, she’d taken to that spot on the couch — Her perch to watch the neighbors and enjoy the sun.

When she finally had to leave that spot and move into the bedroom you could see it in her face. Five years of fighting, five years of continual optimism finally slipping away. She was always going to win, she’d tell me how she was beating it, how she didn’t feel sick. It was why she didn’t stop working and “save her energy.” “If I do that I’ll just sit at home and worry about being sick,” was her response to critics. “If you think you’re sick then you are, and I’m not sick.”

It was when she left those windows that we all knew—she was sick.