Sölvi Sigurdsson - The Last Days of My Mother

I had decided to take Mother to die in Amsterdam. The terminal echoed the discords of the northern gales outside, and behind us herds of drowsy people trudged along toward the security gates. Mother stood next to me in silent conversation with the cosmos while rummaging through her handbag. She believed in maximum utilization of carry-on luggage and made sure I carried my weight — and hers. I’d suggested sending a box or two by mail or paying for the extra weight, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It was simply depressing to watch how I squandered money.

“Like that apartment you shared with Zola,” she continued while we fed our things onto the conveyor belt for the X-ray machine. “Very high maintenance, that woman. And then she just takes off with some Frenchman.”

“That’s not quite what happened.”

“Mind you, you’re much better off without her, Trooper. I know you don’t like to talk about it, but let me just say this once and for all: she didn’t deserve you.”

Mother walked through the security gate and was stopped by a young woman in uniform who ran a metal detector up and down her body. “Anything in your pockets? Belt?”

Like always, when astonished by something in my presence, Mother turned around and stared at me.

“Just take off the belt and go through again,” I said.

“What nonsense. I suppose I should take of my shoes, too?”

“Well, yes, since I see you have a metal heel,” the woman said.

“I’ve never met anyone so rude in my life. And I’ve been all over.”

“It’s standard procedure. Heightened security after 9-11.”

“Nine-eleven? Do we all speak American now? Do you mean November 9th?”

“Mother.”

“No, I mean it. First you’re asked to strip and then you’re ordered around in gibberish.”

“Let’s just get this over with.”

Cursing under her breath, Mother walked through. The officer turned to me with a tiny pot of hair gel that I’d recently bought for a small fortune.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you take this on board.”

I sighed, snatched the jar out of her hands, scooped out the contents and smeared it into my hair.

“Hah!” Mother roared with laughter. “Look at you, Trooper! Quelle coiffeur! It defies gravity. Excellent!”

I was about to crack a joke about exploding hair gel but managed to bite my tongue. There was no way of knowing what Mother might do if this dragged on any longer.

“ Mein Gott! ” she groaned as we headed into the passenger lounge. “Finally, Trooper, we’re on our way! Well, I think we deserve to sit down and have a proper drink. How about it, Trooper? Ein Schnapps? ”

*

My life hadn’t always been like this. Just a few months earlier I had been living with a woman who’d have sex with me with the lights on and found comfort in a double bed and a dishwasher, still confident that the future would roll out at least a slightly discolored red carpet. But Fortune turned her back on me. Love kicked me in the balls. Over the course of a single disastrous week in January, a seven-year relationship went down the drain. I found myself lying stark naked in a hotel room in Dublin, blinded by toxic levels of alcohol and in total ignorance of who lay next to me. My intoxication was such that I had difficulty discerning the gender of the person and didn’t realize until I was alone again that whoever it was had been sexually stimulated by beating me with a stuffed animal. The experience was unpleasant, but necessary for my personal growth. I was slowly coming to understand that the various doubts I’d harbored about my relationship had been based on misunderstanding. I had squandered my happiness. The lesson was terrible and all I could do was head back home.

The dreary spring of 2008 hung over Iceland like rotten debris from the murky depths of history, threatening financial devastation, sleep deprivation. And then Mother was diagnosed with cancer.

I had accompanied her to the hospital, less than a month before we embarked on our journey. She wore a red, fitted wool two-piece, as if she believed that the better she looked the harder it would be for the doctor to deliver bad news with conviction. A woman who looked this chic at her age could hardly be at death’s door.

The doctor, however, was grave. He held a pen up to his chin and gave the desk a small tap before he spoke. The test results were back and as we could see on the X-rays, the gray area on the shinbone was growing. “We believe that what we have here is sarcoma of the connective tissue.” Mother gave the doctor a cold stare and waited for him to expand on the subject. “Fibrosarcosis is one type of osteocarcinoma, which is, in fact, rather rare in patients your age. We do see it in other mammals, cats and dogs in particular, but it’s extremely rare to diagnose this disease so late in life.”

“Really now. And is there a prize?” Mother asked.

“Pardon me?”

“No. Spare me the circus act, Herr Doctor. You tell me I have a disease only found in children and pets as if I’d won the lottery. It’s absurd!”

Mother’s impatience was palpable. She would grumble about the medical corps being comprised of sadists who flocked to medical school fascinated by stories of Mengele’s ghoulish experiments. To her the nurses were variations of Herta Oberhauser, a Nazi nurse who murdered her victims by injecting them with kerosene. Mother had played Herta in a controversial play in a small Montparnasse theatre and knew what she was talking about. I ignored these rants. After all, the sentiment was not a recent development. Mother had suffered from a phobia of hospitals for as long as I could remember, and made several efforts to cultivate in me a similar distrust of the medical profession. It was wiser, she thought, to follow the example of Great Aunt Edda when you were under the weather: have a little drink to ease the pain, and then another just for luck. I pointed out that strong spirits were hardly a cure for cancer and that she had to be a bit more understanding of the hospital staff. And I suppose she tried, even though she failed fantastically.

“Maybe I should have gone to the vet, Herr Doctor?”

“No, no, not at all, Mrs. Briem,” the doctor stammered. “Cell division in people your age is not very rapid, which means that the disease spreads more slowly.”

“Right. And so you will, of course, fix this before that happens.”

“Well,” the doctor began, breaking into a long speech about matters being slightly more complicated. There certainly were cases where doctors had managed to surgically remove sarcoma from connective tissue, but a very large team of specialists was needed for such an operation. Unfortunately, Icelandic hospitals had neither the equipment, nor the manpower for such an undertaking. The operation would have to take place in the United States, but since the procedure was still experimental, it would not fall under the Icelandic Health Care System. Mother would have to pay for it herself.

“There is, however, quite a good chance of getting sponsors for semi-profiled operations of this magnitude. Surgeons may waive their fees, research institutes invest in the operations in exchange for exclusive rights to acquired information.”

“Ok, alright,” I said, my hopes already up. “And how do we do this?”

“I can look into it, make a few inquiries. The fact that this is such a rare case should work in our favor.”

“I don’t understand where you’re going with this,” Mother said. “Do you think I’m some kind of guinea pig? We both know perfectly well that no one is going to pay for this operation. I’m not a celebrity. And what company will put up a fortune for an old hag from Iceland?”