Hope

I sketched this the same evening my mom's surgeon delivered a sucker punch to our family.

After Umma ended up in the hospital for some intestinal twistage (a phenomenon I didn't even think possible), her surgical team opened her up to fix it...and found several metastasized spots of her old stomach cancer.

The news sent my sisters and I reeling. It hit particularly hard since we’d only just celebrated her remission this past summer.

Remission is a funny word for cancer patients. On the one hand, it’s a celebration - a triumphant acknowledgment of a hard journey’s end, after every visible and microscopic trace of the pernicious disease has been scraped off and poisoned away. On the other hand, there’s always an implicitly understood 'for now' beneath every cheer. Because even after five years of being cancer-free, we're always waiting and wondering about a tipping point.

When one has tussled with cancer, it’s impossible to return to that youthful mindset of invincibility. Suddenly all things feel marked with an inevitable expiration date - health, mobility, energy, even life itself.

Pre-cancer, she could power walk for miles with the best of New York City’s bullish sidewalk striders. Now, her atrophied muscles could barely hold her up for a doctor-prescribed stroll around the hospital floor.

Having said all that, I'm sure you're starting to feel a little sad for her, maybe even a little pity. But if my Umma knew, she'd likely have none of it. Even with a hospital gown and IVs tangled about her limbs, my mother remains a woman radiant with hope.

While at the hospital, she was kept on a full liquid diet - nothing but cups of water and lukewarm broths. I myself was tempted to feel sad. My lifelong obsession with food was formed from birth under her parental apprenticeship. Umma loves food - eating it, cooking it, thinking up new recipes - more than anyone I know…and now she was spending her days sipping bland soup.

But when I'd get to her room every morning, she’d ask me to find the Food Network on her hospital room’s television set. And left it on practically all day. She watched excitedly when I showed her recipe reels from TikTok and Instagram.

“That looks delicious,” she marveled when I showed her a clever sushi bake. “Let’s make that when I’m well again.”

Sometimes hope shows up in hunger.

When I arrived at the hospital room with a pair of black gaucho pants she’d never seen before, she fingered the material, made me turn around so she could check the tag with the cleaning instructions, and asked me how much I paid for it. My mother loves to bargain hunt, and I can’t tell you how it brightened my heart to see hope for a future shopping trip flickering in her eyes.

After her surgery, the doctors informed all of us that the best sign of recovery was gas.

That’s right. Farts. For all the medical terms and procedures bandied about in a fancy hospital, it all came down to a wishing, praying, and waiting for bottom burps. For days, nothing happened, and whenever the doctors and nurses came by - with all their clinical professionalism - and inquired about whether she’d passed gas, we’d purse our lips and shake our heads demurely. Then, when they left, she and I would burst into laughter. No one honks louder about bathroom humor than my mom, and we were tickled pink that an entire medical team was waiting so hopefully for her to cut a stinker (spoiler alert: she finally did a few days later, and I’ve never celebrated flatulence more).

Hope is laughter mixed with tears.

Now that Umma's back home, she can’t do all the things she always did. In recovery, her diet is still limited and she tires almost immediately. Soon, she’ll be back in her oncologist’s office to discuss chemotherapy options. But every time I call her, she’s cheery.

“Once I finish chemo and get my energy back, let’s go on a family cruise together,” she sang into the phone recently. All at once, I remembered a line from Pablo Neruda -

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming."

In similar fashion, John Gaure once said, “It’s amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.”

I don’t want to make light. Cancer is an ugly disease. It not only takes over the body in pernicious manner; the very fight to recover robs one of hair, health, and vibrancy. In our family, chemo is another sinister C-word that we love to hate. All of it reminds us that none of us have control over what happens in our body - health today and hospital tomorrow is always a likely possibility, even for the best of us.

But watching my mom fight this disease has been revelatory. In the throes of disease, she dares to dream, fantastize about food, and chuckle at all kinds of childishness. She reminds me that even where there’s little control over health and wellness, there is still choice in happiness. In my entire earthly circle, there are few people who I think would have more right to complain and grumble about their lot in life, but she weaponizes hope in a way that - in my own dreams - makes those cancer cells cower, wither up, and die.

Here's to my brave Umma, who embodies courage and a ferocious will to live in her hope-filled smile.