For Tai

There's a picture I don't let myself look at all that often of the two of us. It was taken in October of 2000, and there we are -- pregnant with our babies at the same time and laughing at the antics of our older kids. Except for the slightly green pallor I'm sporting, you can't really tell with me. But Tai was three months further along and her belly was obviously swelling with baby number three. Almost exactly three years after this picture was taken, at the age of 37, we buried her. A mother of three children, ages 2 to 6.

In the photo, just as you can't yet tell that I'm pregnant, you can't see the cancer that is eating Tai. An estrogen-fed monster of a breast cancer found the fuel it needed to storm and invade from the hormones of that pregnancy. When her youngest was three and a half months old, she found the lump. Already that cancer had invaded her chest wall and her lymph nodes. They could successfully beat it back for a while, but not long. It was just such an aggressive form of cancer--I honestly believe that early detection would not have helped--this cancer (from growing up in an industrial, toxic chemical soup of a town she believed) was going to take over and the result would have been the same.

I've been thinking of Tai a lot this fall. On the fifth anniversary of her death, I cried and cried and cried. I don't let myself do that much, because the situation is not anything I can affect or help.

Tai was the glue in her family. She was incredibly vain and frivolous--with a beautiful face and a bit of a princess complex. She loved shopping and goofing off and she hid her spending from her husband, who was so busy working he rarely saw. She indulged and indulged her two boys and as a result, they were wild kids--swinging from chandeliers and all--little tornadoes in motion. I don't think I ever saw her discipline them. She gave generously of herself and her love though; when you were around her, everything was fun.

Their dad of course was the opposite. The absent disciplinarian was his role. He seemed emotionally removed and spare with his love. He decided at some point in her illness that he was going to cut her off from her old friends. They moved into a big fancy house in a neighborhood where they knew no one, instead of staying in their smaller house here in the neighborhood where there were friends all around.

Part of it was her--vain girl that she was, she didn't want people to see her hairless and ill. But the driving force was him. I don't know what his emotional baggage and scars are, but they created a complex person who sees everyone around him not as separate individuals, but as a reflection of him. It took me a long time to work it out, but one day I realized. Her illness somehow reflected badly on him (he is a physician) and he didn't want others to see.

For a while, we managed to see her anyway. When she was feeling well enough, we'd meet for lunch or one fateful day I snuck up to the hospital when I knew he wasn't there. Instinctively, I knew that was the last time I would see her, that the illness progression would make future visits not doable. In my own way, I needed to say goodbye and so I did.

I hear glimpses of their lives occasionally, but their father made it plain that there was no real place for her old friends in this life. I know and live near her close relative, who helps take care of the three kids, now 7-12 years old, a lot of the time. So, from time to time, I see her or see the kids. I have other friends whose children are at school with Tai's, so I hear about them that way too. It's been a succession of live-in nannies, impermanent figures who come and go. Their father has girlfriends, and he works just as many hours as he ever did. He believes that providing for his children means making a lot of money, and he put many hours into becoming well-trained. His career comes first.

I think of my friend coming to the realization that she was going to die and knowing that she was leaving her kids with someone who could not possibly care for their emotional wellbeing. He is incapable of putting someone else ahead of him, and that's what parenting is. You know instinctively that adolescence is going to be trouble for those kids. It breaks my heart that they won't have a true memory of their mother, who loved them with all her heart. I just hope that some of the strands of love, some of the early seeds she planted, still rest within them.

And that's why I don't let myself look at that photograph very much or allow myself to think about her too often. I can't help those kids and that haunts me.