2007, Detroit, Michigan

By June Gilhouse

My mother’s hair is all gone.

I hate “tear-jerking cancer crap” just as much as the next person. But her hair is gone, all the same.

In the movies, when someone sees a cancer patient’s bald head for the first time, there is always a little breakdown by the person who still has hair. What a joke!

When you see the bald head for the first time, you have to pretend that it’s no big deal, as if you’ve seen it 1,000 times: You’re bald? Whatever. So what? Of course you’re bald. What time is Jeopardy on?

It is later, when you’re home, when your husband’s already in bed, that you shut the bathroom door and sob into one of the bathrobes.

The story doesn’t get better. There’s no inspiring community drive to raise money for a treatment not covered by insurance. There’s no long lost friend who emerges and sweeps Mom off to the Hawaiian vacation of a lifetime. There’s no windfall that results in her debts being paid and her worries being over. And there is no theatrical retching and writhing like when Hollywood does chemo.

There is a little refrigerator in the living room that holds big white bags of liquid food. There is a small orange Tupperware container on the floor next to the couch that used to hold sugar. There is a powerful little patch on her arm full of the good stuff. And there is a little tube coming out of her arm and stomach.

She isn’t completing that book of piano music she has always wanted to write. She isn’t even writing a will or calling old friends.

She is doing Sudokus and watching American Idol.

And she has no hair.

I recently chopped off 9 inches of my own hair and donated it to Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths program. They take the donated hair and make wigs for women who have cancer.

I thought, hey, my mom has cancer, so I should do something with cancer. I can’t cure cancer, but I can cut off this stupid mane and give it away! I’m helping!

For some reason, I didn’t stop to think that my own bald mother doesn’t wear a wig. After I dropped off the puffy envelope full of my hair at the post office, the irony of my donation dawned on me.

“Hey, Mom, do you want to get a wig?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said, adjusting one of the scruffy knit caps that she wears.

My mom frowns on personal vanity. She was never one for makeup, spas, or manicures. And now that cancerous lesions are dotting her organs and bones, she’s not going to break out a big blonde wig a la Jessica Simpson.

When I was an awkward and self-loathing teen, I turned to my mother, crying, “Look at me! I’m ugly, and I hate myself! I hate my hair!”

Not an ounce of sympathy was forthcoming.

“If that’s really how you feel, maybe we should go over to the pediatric cancer ward. Then we’ll see how you feel about your hair,” she said.

This wasn’t just there-are-starving-kids-in-Ethiopia hyperbole. We knew exactly where the pediatric cancer ward was, how to get there, and where to park. We knew how to get free juice and crackers from the nurse’s station. We also knew that the best cookies were in the jars on the counter at the Ronald McDonald House.

My little brother lived in that cancer ward for a year. That was the year her hair turned from brown to white.

My mother’s 62nd birthday is in four days. I haven’t planned a single thing to celebrate. I could fill volumes with tributes to her achievements, her personal sacrifices, her masterpiece contributions to this world in the form of five beautiful children (not including me). I could invite 100 people, and they would all come, bearing gifts and love and birthday wishes.

A better daughter would hire a caterer, rent a tent, call in a marching band. A better daughter would assemble a touching and poignant PowerPoint presentation with family photos and funny quotes, synched perfectly to a soulful Bette Midler ballad. A better daughter would do it better.

But I can’t. Mom, I can’t give you the party of a lifetime. I can’t accept the end of your life. A crappy store-bought cake and a few wrinkled streamers will have to do.

And for a present, maybe a new hat.

June Gilhouse lives in Michigan, writing only when she’s completely out of excuses not to. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 | Email This Post

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