Love Lift Me by Synthia St. Claire

anywhere. I needed to stay by her
side, even in such a melancholy place, and I couldn’t just come right out and
tell her how worried I was getting about her because she’d only dismiss it
again as me fussing over nothing. In only the last few days she’d lost much
weight; so much so that her cheekbones were plainly visible, becoming sharp
edges that seemed to cast a dark shadow on her weakening smile, and her eyes
had sunk into grayish circles that swallowed them like two sinking brown
pebbles.
    At
least her radiation treatments were going well. We went there every day, just across
the street from the clinic, after her chemotherapy was complete. The oncologist
we talked to had good things to say about her progress and didn’t seem overly
worried about her appearance. Whatever bits of cancer hadn’t been removed by
surgery were being zapped away by the radiation or destroyed by the cocktail of
drugs she was getting. As far as he could tell us, it had not spread beyond her
breast or the lymph nodes of that area. Before we left, the oncologist
encouraged her to try and eat more and prescribed a handful of new medicines
for her to try as a combat for the ever-present nausea that was slowly starving
her.
    Back
at the house, she adjusted her reading glasses and tried to decipher the
complex language on the pill bottles. “Lorr…azz…eepam,” she said, and
frustrated at that, picked up another bottle. “Pa-hen-ergan. Heck kinda name is
that? Lordy me. Now they’s giving me chicken drugs.”
    “That’s Phenergan , Momma. It’s to help with your nausea. The other one is for
your nerves. We administered both of them often when I was in nursing school.”
    “Ain’t
nothin’ wrong with my nerves! I’m as cool as a cucumber!”
    “Not
like that. It’s supposed to help you rest,” I tried to explain.
    She
set the bottle down and pushed it away. “Don’t need no help with that, Mary
Katherine. All that other stuff they put in my arm wears me plum out, along
with watchin’ all those folks sleep and snore at the clinic.”
    I
had to admit, she had a point. Sitting around for hours and being surrounded by
people sleeping had me yawning most of the day. A time might come when she
would need some help getting a little rest though, so I stored the bottle away
in the medicine cabinet.
    “How’m
I supposed to keep this thing down?” She asked, holding out the small white
pill between her shaking fingers. I could tell she hated to sound like she was
complaining, but it was a blessing that she was asking for my help at all.
    “Just
try your best, Momma. If it stays down for thirty minutes or so, you ought to
start feeling a lot better. If it doesn’t, then we can try again.”
    “Ugh.”
    With
a look of absolute disgust, she tossed the pill into her mouth and washed it
down with a gulp of apple juice. When she was done, she already looked like she
was getting sick. Thankfully, after some time passed, she began to settle down.
    “Better?”
I asked.
    She
closed her eyes and nodded lightly before she spoke again. Her body language
screamed that she was exhausted and stressed beyond even her uncanny capability
to hide it. “Still not hungry though, honey. Cancer was what killed your
grandmaw, you know. Not breast cancer mind you, hers was in the lungs. This was
back when the farm used to grow tobacco, and didn’t nobody know how bad for you
it was. Nearly everybody around here grew it and smoked the stuff, not like it
is today.”
    “I
remember. Hard to believe it’s been almost seven years since she passed,” I
said, remembering my grandmother’s cheerful face. Her smile seemed to last all
the way to the end.
    “She
knew she was dyin’ for a good while. The doctors wanted to treat her for it,
but she told ‘em all to go to hell.”
    I
nodded and agreed, “Sounds like grandma, all right.”
    “She
wanted to be in heaven, back together with your grandpa. That’s why none of us
could talk her out of it. We jus’