It will be okay.
This is what parents are obliged to tell frightened children and what some children must one day resort to telling their parents.
It will be okay, I said when she asked me about the nose tube. Each time they’d operated there was the inevitable nasogastric intubation, a plastic tube that is run through the nose down the throat into the stomach. This process can be used for feeding but in her case it was for removal of any lingering post-op detritus. Brutal but non-negotiable: the rational mind could understand—and appreciate—that advancements like these, however barbaric they seemed to 21st Century eyes, did a great deal to prevent infection and hasten recovery.
The patient with the NG tubes snaked down either nostril, however, is neither rational nor given to circumspection. Theirs is the sort of discomfort that makes forty-eight hours feel like unyielding and interminable torment.
My mother hated those tubes to the extent that she feared them. Before they opened her up for what would turn out to be the final time, she seemed more concerned with the tubes than whatever they might discover inside her stomach. As soon as she saw the surgeon it was the first question she asked him.
“Do you think they will need to use the tubes?” she asked me, again.
“Let’s hope not,” I said, a variation on the evasions I could not avoid.
“But the doctor said it might not be necessary.”
“Well, he knows best. Let’s hope he’s right.”
“He wouldn’t say that unless it was the truth, don’t you think?”
“Of course not.”
“It won’t be so awful if they don’t have to use the tubes this time.”
And so on.
It was too late: she had locked in on it and now it was all she could think about, her proclivity for obsession thrust into overdrive by this irredeemable anxiety. Once empathy eventually gave way to exasperation, I tried not to let it distract me. This was challenging not merely because I was filled with apprehension myself; I also recognized the engine that was amping up her insecurity. I used to be that person lying in the bed, in my way.
At moments like this I had to overcome the urge to read her the riot act, for her own sake. Why let yourself get worked up, I might say. You are just setting yourself up for disappointment. Why create unnecessary stress? If they have to use that horrendous tube we’ll get past it. Try not to invest it with more power than it deserves; if you do that you let it win…
And so on.
I said nothing of the sort. I knew it was too late; I knew it would not do either of us any good, no matter how genuine my intentions.
It will be okay, I would finally say, still holding out the slightest hope that she might be spared this nerve-shattering indignity. And when she finally fell asleep I would watch her and remember all the times she told me, patient and comforting, that it would be okay. When I didn’t want her to leave my sight in a shopping mall. Or the times I got nervous before a grade school field trip. Or when I was sick and needed to take medicine, back in the days when it actually tasted like medicine. Or when I woke up in the middle of the night, not old enough to know what a nightmare was but young enough to call out for the one person who always came. It will be okay, she would always say, and I always believed her.
My mother always told me what I needed to hear and I gradually came to understand—and appreciate—that none of these things were a matter of life and death. Eventually I acknowledged—and accepted—that it would be okay, because when your mother tells you this, she knows it is the truth. She would not say it unless she believed it, so you believe her.
You each get older and learn to recognize the things you can control and the things you can’t. You gain perspective and experience and grasp that life goes on no matter how you wonder and worry. You might get sick and you may need reassurance but that is all part of the process, another step in your journey. You adapt and endure because it always gets better. You remind yourself: it’s not a matter of life and death.
And so on.
So what can you say when, one day, it becomes a matter of life and death? What do you do when the person crying in the bed is looking at you for reassurance? How do you proceed when the person who always calmed you down is shuddering with fear and afraid to be alone? What else is left when actions have failed and, for the first time, even words are incapable of offering consolation? You tell your mother it will be okay. You do this because there is nothing left to do. You say it will be okay because you know it won’t and you hope she is still able to believe you.
*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone
