Logjam of a Beauteous Mind: An Infinitely Gentle Woman

By Peter Simon Karp

A vivid, gripping and inspired portrayal of Mona, a splendid woman, diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer & given 3-6 months to live. And her loving Caregiver, who leaves his high-tech firm to stay at home with his frightened wife to help her find the doctors, clinical treatment and “threads of Hope” to empower and transform herself into a feisty Cancer warrior and believer in her own Survival. Until Mona’s mind betrays her with a “Logjam chemo brain” madness, and she is dropped by Sloan-Kettering, sent home like a soldier with PTSD to face a psychiatric ward and death. How her loving Caregiver’s close family team & “Orange Juice” manage to break Mona’s downward spiral!

“A Universal Love Story. A Beautiful, Deeply-Human, Well-Written Book. Mona’s Story will Move You! It Reads like a Novel.”
— Author/Editor Marcy Dermansky [The Red Car]

“Karp and his wife, Mona, were surprised when a doctor diagnosed her with stage 4 lung cancer in 1993. The mother of two, in her mid- 50s, had never been a smoker.”

“Her chemotherapy had physical side effects…But Mona was most affected cognitively. She called it a ‘logjam’—a mental fogginess that marred her short-term memory and concentration. This bright woman, a former English teacher who loved travel, was now prone to psychotic episodes.”

“Karp’s book is both melancholic and engaging. His love and devotion to his wife are without question. He fondly details joyful moments, from the couple’s meet-cute decades earlier to bouts of happiness they reveled in post-diagnosis. The author’s generally unadorned prose in this touching memoir boasts instances of lyricism.”

“An absorbing and moving account of a couple’s fight against a terrible disease.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“No one you Love is forever Dead if you truly Believe their Goodness and Beauty Cannot Perish...For precious moments, our Past was not dead; it was not even Past.” “Logjam of a Beauteous Mind”

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728373126

Peter Simon Karp

PETER SIMON KARP, President of BSI Global Research, Inc., and The Concept Testing Institute, became the instant “Caregiver” to his brilliant wife, Mona, when she was suddenly stricken with terminal lung cancer in her mid-50s. As Caregiver, he was with her every moment as they found the best doctors and most promising MSK clinical trial. When Mona’s mind betrayed her with “logjam chemo brain,” the hospital sent her home like a soldier with PTSD to face a psychiatric ward and death. But Caregiver and family team helped break her downward spiral, and Mona found the space to empower herself to become a cancer warrior and believer in her own “Survival”! Peter’s time spent as Mona’s Caregiver constituted the finest moments of the author’s life, with her day-and-night trying to save the life of his beloved wife.. A Hobart College graduate with a Columbia MFA in playwriting, Peter coauthored “Competing on Value,” Amacom, and authored,“Time Chords: Stones ~ Drowning,” two recent novellas.

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Copyright © 2020 Peter Simon Karp. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/25/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7314-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7313-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7312-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020916970

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Mona.jpg

Mona Leea Pecheux-Karp, Feeling terrific! two weeks before her sudden death. A Survivor at last, no matter how long she was destined to live. As her loving Caregiver, we had become as one.

EVENTS DESCRIBED IN THIS CREATIVE MEMOIR ARE BASED ON MY WIFE MONA’S STORY as I remember it, being Caregiver with her every day.

I document her struggles, internal reactions and psychotic imaginings of her once rigorous mind battling through her internal Hells & Madness toward Survival! While these are real-world experiences in LA & NYC’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Kettering, the names of all Oncologists and Doctors, save —our family doctor Fenster, MSK Oncologists and LA’s Dr. Cary Presant—have been changed. Any resemblance to persons living or dead resulting from changes to names or identifying details is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

In this Creative Memoir, unless specified, all language and dialogue were re-creations of the author

For

Sons,

Matthew

Henry

and Mark Andrew

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

T. S. Eliot,

Preludes

CONTENTS

Prologue: Dyspnea Rings Out in the Middle of the Night

Part One: From a 100 - Year Blizzard to a World Beyond

Part Two: Mind Betrayal — How A Cancer Warrior Emerged

Part Three: From Survival To A Sudden Final Act

Epilogue: Good Cannot Perish; All Beauty Shines Forever

PROLOGUE

DYSPNEA RINGS OUT IN THE

MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

As close as we can get to another infinitely loved human soul, there remains a hidden inner layer beyond our reach. And within ourselves, too, an invisible membrane exists set off from our uttermost selves—barely glimpsed at times, like glancing out the window of a fleet bullet train.

I DREAMT I HEARD A TELEPHONE RINGING OUT LOUDLY in the middle of the night. Frightened, I hesitate to answer. I’ve harbored great fear of late-night calls announcing an irrevocable tragedy. I’ll just let it ring until all the bad omens disappear. There is no need to answer, I tell myself.

The sound I heard was not a telephone ringing, but Mona sitting on the edge of our bed trying to catch her breath. This was not the first time; it was beginning to be a most worrisome occurrence, after three nights in a row.

Are you all right, Mona dear? Can I get you something?

Yes, I’ll be fine. Go back to sleep, please.

"Let me call Dr. Fenster in the morning?

I don’t know why you won’t let me call him.

That’s fine, she said, the hacking cough persisting.

Fine to call him? Is that what you said?

Call, yes call! she said, angrily. Please? Go back to sleep.

Since returning from our ten-day New Year’s trip to London, Mona had suffered from a deep cough that wouldn’t go away. She’d gone to Mitchell Fenster, our family doctor, who had given her a series of antibiotics; her cough seemed to be leaving, but returned full force with dyspnea, a shortness of breath. Nothing serious, except it refused to go away.

An extremely active woman, Mona had rarely been ill, hardly missing a day of school as a student or later as an English teacher at junior high school. Listening to her wheezing, I had a difficult time getting back to sleep. She must be deeply troubled if she agreed to see Dr. Fenster again. That trace of anger wasn’t like Mona. Her constant disposition was sweet, sensitive to the feelings of others: a kind and gentle lady who always had time for others. She truly enjoyed helping her dysfunctional students as much as inspiring her very brightest. The inner Mona was forever curious, on a quest to learn more, to uncover the beauty and delight of pure being. I’d joked about the fine Anglophile cough she’d acquired in London, but it was no longer a joke.

Walking was one of Mona’s favorite activities. She had amblyopia, seeing with one eye only, and had problems with depth perception. She’d avoided taking the driver’s test, even after we bought her a Peugeot, along with driving lessons. She could have passed, the instructor said, but she didn’t trust herself to park or drive safely on city streets.

So she walked everywhere and loved it: taking trains, subways or buses. As a teacher, Mona was on her feet seven hours a day; in Cities, she loved walking uptown, downtown, to stores, galleries, museums and parks. When we traveled, she found great joy in walking through the countryside of France or England to remote archeological sites, country homes, gardens and castles, or spending long afternoons pacing through churches or great cathedrals, her backpack filled with history and guide books.

Since coming home, it was alarming to see this strong, healthy woman unable to easily manage a flight of stairs or walk up our steep driveway to the mailbox.

Early next morning, I made Mona a Wednesday appointment, then looked up breathing problems in our medical books. Dyspnea, in eighty-five percent of cases, was due to asthma, pneumonia, congestive heart failure, a chronic obstruction or pulmonary disease, or from psychogenic causes. The medical book did not mention the possibility of a malignancy.

We’d spent New Year’s Eve in one of our favorite places, a Mona discovery: in Stratford, living with a fifteenth-century Shakespeare history play, and a champagne dinner upstairs with playgoers after the show. But we both felt sadness this year. Since aunt Annie’s death two weeks before, our beloved older generation was gone—Mona’s mother and mine, my father and aunt Annie, Mona’s closest friend. We’d sat in our old Mercedes on a back country road near the Brick Church 1774 cemetery, and between long silences, we spoke of them for hours. Hard to believe, but Mona in her mid-50s and I were now the oldest generation in our close little family.

Back in our room, we felt better telephoning our children, Matthew and Mark, and Matthew’s wife Irene, at midnight Greenwich time, five hours ahead of US time. It was difficult getting Mona to finally hang up and stop asking about the cats, as international calls cost a small fortune back then. Next morning, we went to a dairy farm outside of Stratford for a fine New Year’s breakfast of fresh eggs from free-range chickens, slices of ham and a splendid homemade goat cheese. I’d taken a photo of Mona on the farm afterward with that black-dog depression spread across her face.

Back in London, shopping at Harrods and enjoying some good plays put everything right again—except for our last night at the National Theatre with Nicholas Hytner’s Carousel, the biggest hit of the year. Standing outside of time with his angel, Billy Bigelow returned to earth to save his daughter (whom he’d never met) from a bad man like he had been, and she felt his frustrated slap as a precious act of love. As the show’s anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone, faded out, we both sat there, unable to stop the heavy flow of tears running down our faces; we were among the very last to be ushered from the large, empty theatre. Did we have a premonition then of the year ahead?

I’ve blamed myself for convincing Mona to leave teaching early to have our children. Mona was happiest as an English teacher; she’d found her bliss in the classroom, lecturing to the best students as well as creating new ways to teach her underdogs, some labeled hopeless, who nonetheless desired to learn. She’d taught her students with empathy and patience, achieving surprising results. She was called a creative English teacher, but no one worked harder: an early riser, she’d stay up well past midnight writing long, thoughtful insights on student’s papers. I’d expected Mona to go back to teaching after our two boys began school, but she’d become involved with our young children’s emotional problems. Mona had gone through a midlife crisis, seeing a low-keyed, local psychiatrist for depression and agoraphobia. She felt she’d learned much about herself; and treated with Elavil, she responded well.

My new-product research business had flourished internationally, and Mona enthusiastically pitched in, helping me work with clients and travel planning. She’d joined me on my project trips for IBM in many of the fourteen countries I had visited over a five year period. Mona approached travel planning with the same enthusiasm and intense study as she had in her teaching career. International business clients and friends would call Mona to ask for her advice about out-of-the-mainstream European travel destinations or cultural events. Nothing could stop her intellectual curiosity, as she began a love affair with travel writers, beginning with Henry James.

Mona was not a famous woman, nor did she live in a world of the rich or powerful. But she developed an awesome quest of her own. For the first time in our lives, we had some money, and with my blessings, Mona set out on a quest for world travel and discovery: to stretch her life of learning and to try to do it all. Her travel quest had began many years before with New York Metropolitan Museum’s erudite lecture series, starting with Claude Marks or William Dalzell’s Age of the Troubadours, a period of special Pecheux family interest. She’d been a Barnard scholarship girl, gone to Columbia Teacher’s College, and then became one of the gang of bright, active, curious women, mostly college graduates, taking trains, buses and subways to the Met lectures several times a week.

So Mona set off running with a burst of enormous energy, planning month-long August family discovery vacations while our boys were still very young (eight and four). In France, we followed the fifteenth-century life of Jeanne D’arc from meeting the Dauphin to Orléans and Rouen, where she was burnt at the stake. In England, we tracked Henry-the-8th and Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the Cistercian monasteries, Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx Abbey. Next, we went to France again, for the Troubadours in Provence, and later to the ancient cave country of Dordogne with the Grotto du PechMerl—which was still open to the public—to see the stenciled hands, animal paintings and footprints from twenty thousand years ago. Later, we followed the Romans 40s AD conquest of England, from Hadrian’s Wall to Bath. And, in Israel, Mona and I followed the pathway of Jesus from the magical countryside around Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives; then, we treked up to Qumran cave 4, where most of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ clay jars were found, and to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to read translations of the Essenes’ prophecies during the era of Jesus. A vivid image of Mona stands out most for me, sitting on a large entry stone in the Rievaulx Abbey courtyard, reading to our young sons and me from her backpack of Guides, Michelins, and histories. The mysteries of ancient stones, rocks and ruins from the world of Godly monks forever excited her imagination.

So, it was New Year’s Eve with the Bard of Avon, then back home to a rich life of music, plays, and lectures at Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera, Balanchine’s New York Ballet, Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, and the Brooklyn Academy’s Einstein on the Beach. Our home became overloaded with world travel discovery materials—magazines, Michelins and a Mona library of thousands of carefully chosen books, read or skimmed, drawn from outstanding bookstores like Blackwell’s. I’d expected that Mona would return to high school teaching. Now, I came to believe she was preparing herself for a higher calling—acquiring a depth of knowledge to become an erudite New York Metropolitan Museum lecturer intern herself, while sharing her intellectual journey with all of us along the way. The boys and I couldn’t have been more thankful; her quest was itself the gift of an ever-fascinating lifetime.

Home with bronchitis now, Mona hadn’t been able to go anywhere; she’d given our event tickets to others or donated them. And she’d halted all planning work on her next proposed trip—to St. Petersburg, then to find a small town near Kiev where my mother’s family had a mill. Annie had traveled there years ago (with her husband Mack), but she’d left no notes for Mona to follow.

In view of the illness to come, it is important to know that Mona never smoked cigarettes or drank more than a glass or two of wine, and she chose not to experiment with drugs. She carried boxes of wet wipes in her bag, and avoided pesticides and toxic household chemicals. She tried to do everything right. I once teased her that she’d live to be a hundred.

Apart from Mona’s intellectual drive and inner strength, there was a shy, quiet gentleness about her, and a frailty—a vulnerability that people close to her sensed, and they sought to protect her. Yet pity was the very last thing Mona herself ever sought from others.

It’s also vital to mention Mona’s phobia about death and dying. Mona was eight when she came home from school, skipped through the unlocked front door and found her grandmother’s body lying face up, her eyes wide open, on the living room carpet, dead from an instant stroke. Mona flew out of the house screaming for the Jewish lady next door! The shock of that moment, when she discovered that her grandmother’s soul had vanished, affected Mona for a lifetime. She’d been a well-behaved but stubborn child, brilliant in school, but at times borderline neurotic, dancing to her own inner music. Her parents couldn’t budge her from her room the day of her dear grandma’s funeral.

By all that’s fair in God’s just world, the Angel of Death, whose shadow rattled invisibly through our front door that snowy winter morning, was either blind drunk or visually impaired, and had selected the wrong house or victim. But it’s always the good ones, those with grace, who are taken first—sayeth those ancient women gathering logs around the well. Whether mistake, destiny, or an unlucky random event, a door marked Exit swung open that pre-blizzard morning, twisting Mona’s field of vision as grotesquely as her soon-to-be collapsed, trapped lung.

In her shattered life ahead, a profoundly changed Mona was forced to evolve. It was frightening at first, but I came to more deeply love and cherish that magically transformed other woman: her quiet grace, her courage and fierce cancer warrior spirit that battled black-dog depression, denied death, and endured an unexpected logjam chemo brain betrayal—which stripped her of Taxotere, the most promising chemotherapy of the era that was saving her life. Yet she discovered an inner resilience, found threads of hope, and learned to live with little victories every day. She came to believe herself a potential long-term survivor right up to the instant of her sudden death. Those last days, still another black cloud of destiny appeared, chasing after both our lives. But Mona’s spirit and her Goodness did not perish, and her Beauty will shine forever.

~ PART ONE ~

From a 100 - Year Blizzard

to a World Beyond

1.

FOUR BLACKBIRDS SITTING ON A LOWER LIMB of a once majestic ash tree: I hadn’t noticed them at first for all their noisy cackling. Waking early that Friday, I’d bundled into my warmest winter clothes, stepped off the front porch of our mountainside home overlooking the Hudson River, and went to work shoveling our long, steep driveway. A few inches of snow had fallen overnight, but a great blizzard was headed toward us, scheduled to arrive early that afternoon. I had to shovel the driveway to get my old Mercedes up to the one-lane mountain road in order to get to Mona’s bedside at White Plains Hospital in time for Dr. Fenster to unravel the mystery of her illness.

Two days before, on Wednesday, Dr. Fenster had taken one hurried look at Mona’s chest X-ray and had me rush her from his Valhalla office to White Plains Hospital. He hadn’t explained much, just showed Mona and me the X-ray—which revealed a large clouded gas bubble where Mona’s left lung should have been. A pneumothorax of air, Dr. Fenster called it, and alerted the hospital’s emergency room to expect her.

TV announcers had been ringing out warnings of a great blizzard about to strike the northeastern states on March 12th, alerting the public to stay home and avoid all dangerous travel. Many storm warnings were media hype, but that morning’s weather reports had a portentous cutting edge.

When I first awoke, I’d phoned our older son Matthew at his New York Beaumont apartment. He’d spoken with Mona the night before.

She can’t wait to get home. They’ve all been nice to her, but she hates being doped up, chained to a bed, feeling useless. She has bills to pay, people to call; she’s falling way behind in her work. Dr. Fenster had promised a diagnosis today. But why does he want to see us first, Pop?

Maybe a complication? He may want us to take Mona somewhere else for special tests. They seem confused about what kind of strange virus or bacteria your mother brought back from Europe.

I’m worried, Pop. Mom’s never sick. Did Dr. Fenster tell you anything you haven’t told us? Is there anything between you two?

I told you everything I know. We can’t have secrets between us, or your mother. Everyone’s got to be open, transparent. We need total trust.

Then why see us first? Why not see Mom with all of us at the same time if everyone’s gonna be transparent? Matthew insisted.

I’m worried too, Son. If the blizzard’s as bad as they say, Fenster may not get there. But we’ll probably lose power, no heat or lights at home. It may be better if Mona stays snug in a warm, lighted hospital room even if it drives her nuts. She’ll have lots of time when she gets home.

I suddenly heard cackling sounds! I looked up from my shoveled path, and on a lower bough of our once majestic, now diseased ash tree, sat three large blackbirds, crows, or ravens, looking like wise old owls. A fourth bird dove down to join them after flying loops and turns in the sky above, as if part of an old-fashioned air show.

A weird fear hit me: were these chattering blackbirds trying to convey a message? Never before had a group of birds gathered in that organized fashion by our home, but the oncoming blizzard had driven them. I felt a sense of omens in the air. Scientists claim there are animal frequencies of instinctive communication that we humans are no longer able to tune in to. Elephants in Indonesia sensed tsunamis forming far across the ocean, and marched safely into elevated hills long before our oceanographic scientists had warned the public. The presence of this small band of blackbirds disturbed me. What could these dumb birds possibly know or sense about Mona’s illness?

Stop overreacting, I muttered to myself. Get on with the shoveling.

In our hemisphere that day, a great storm had formed. Some later called it the Storm of the Century, the Great Blizzard of 1993. Over five days, the storm would affect more than 130 million people, causing over three hundred deaths and the loss of electric power more than ten million homes. The last blizzard with such a ferocious effect was the Great Blizzard of 1899, nearly a hundred years before. Jet stream hurricane-force winds, freezing temperatures, massive snowdrifts and record low barometric pressures were about to cause havoc and destruction up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

The cackling stopped. Now their silence disturbed me. Why should weird birds appear today when Mona’s destiny was hanging in the air? Being a terrific worrier (my strength and weakness), I feared the worst—that something might be seriously wrong with Mona. I feared that these birds were omens sent to trigger my wildest fears. Stop! Get on with your shoveling! Damnit, I’m talking to myself again. Yet, had there been no blackbirds, I’d have felt the same cold shivers down my backbone—that something in our life together was about to go terribly wrong.

Mona had been plagued by that rough bronchial cough for over two months, since returning from our Boxing Day, New Year’s trip to London. These were always wonderful trips. The year before, a producer from the TV show Good Morning America had handpicked Mona out of the crowd of shoppers at Harrods for an unexpected interview with host Joan Lunden. Mona enjoyed playing the role of a bright, middle-class American businesswoman taking advantage of the US dollar’s favorable exchange rate to the pound sterling, and she proved surprisingly sharp at articulating exceptional values she’d observed in several departments throughout the store. A handful of business associates back home, who happened to tune into that morning’s broadcast, thought Mona came across remarkably well in her TV debut. She’d kept pace intellectually with Joan Lunden, able to create some enjoyable wit in this entertaining TV experience and her exchanges with the bemused host—two bright girls gossiping together.

This year’s trip had a somber tone. These past four years, we’d suffered through four deaths: our mothers, my father, and my aunt Annie. She’d suffered a stroke and died in this same White Plains Hospital after missing Matthew’s wedding to Irene, a bright and pretty girl from a good Italian-American family of craftsmen. Aunt Annie’s funeral took place in mid-December; days after, Mona and I left for our pre-scheduled Boxing Day trip to London. Now, only months after Annie’s death, something was terribly wrong with Mona. I’d seen horrible fright pass across Mona’s face when Dr. Fenster showed us the shocking X-ray of her missing lung.

Almost at the top of the driveway, I shoveled quickly, observed by the silent blackbirds. Their presence evoked vultures in African trees, like those that appeared to Hemingway’s writer, drawn there by the odor of his oncoming death. It was a ludicrous comparison; I chided myself for such childish superstitions. How could these birds have sensed Mona’s illness? She wasn’t even home. All their vibes were related to the oncoming blizzard. Yet when one bird suddenly flapped off the tree limb past my shoulder, I slipped backward into the snow, wrenching my lower back. Sweating profusely, breathing heavily, back aching, I felt all of my sixty years as I struggled with that last island of snow near the top. I was anxious to get to Mona well before the massive blizzard hit.

But I’d become so frustrated by the bloody blackbirds that I screamed out, cursed them and banged my shovel against our newly constructed limestone wall. Ignoring my crazy outburst, only one bird flew off the limb and quickly rejoined the group. To this day, the memory of those four silent blackbirds on the lower limb of our blighted ash tree haunts me—their unnerving passivity in the face of my frustrated cursing and shovel banging.

Let me confess to an embarrassing moment. I was so amazed by the silent birds that I’d gone down the porch stairs to knock on our kitchen window and have Mona come outside to take a look. She’d always enjoyed an encounter with potential omens, ghosts or spirits—any unnatural events. About to knock on the window, I stopped. How crazy of me. Mona, who was always there for us, was in a hospital bed in White Plains across the river. There was no way I could share these enigmatic blackbirds with her—to enjoy her ready wit or an enlightened view of birds’ cosmic meaning in literature over time. For one of the rare times in our life together of nearly forty years, we were not together to share intimate thoughts, even childish phantasies about omen blackbirds.

That morning, our symbiotic personal relationship had begun to unravel, and change shape. I tried not to think that way. Mona would soon be back home and we’d pick up our rich cultural life and travel where we’d left off. Our tight little family depended on our brilliant, hard-working wife and mother for so many of the precious things in our daily existence. I couldn’t consider life without her.

Nor could I stand the thought of Mona suffering a long, serious illness. I knew our two boys, Matthew and Mark, had those same protective feelings. Mona was the kind and gentle, yet vulnerable woman we might take a bullet for had that unlikely situation presented itself. Such a situation had recently occurred for my young brother, Sam. Confronted by a wild-eyed mugger with a blade when cutting through a back alley in Puerto Rico at sunset, Sam wheeled round and dashed off as fast as he could, leaving his wife of twenty years behind. Fortunately, wife Dianne ran pretty fast, too—in the opposite direction—and escaped on her own. I couldn’t imagine myself or my sons running off to save our own lives and leaving Mona behind.

Mona relied on us, too, in a profound way which brought out our deeper protective instincts. Only once in my life had Mona turned to another man for protection: an ex-airline pilot in a critical life-or-death moment. Returning from England, our jet lost one engine, dumped its fuel, and was running out in a stormy winter night over the Atlantic. Our pilot was forced to abort from his dive onto a secondary landing strip in St. Johns, Newfoundland, due to intense wind shear. Everyone aboard panicked. The man Mona turned to was the calmest passenger, an ex-pilot who assured her there were small strips nearby where our jet could land; so I didn’t blame her for leaving me and moving back into the seat next to him. But it’s me she’ll need now, as well as her sons, her daughter-in-law, and the rest of our close little family.

During the past few days, Mona had been transported back and forth between different sections of the hospital. She started in the MRI and sonogram area, and ended up in an operating room, where the hospital’s local lung doctor pierced her lung to gather fluids to be analyzed in their lab or sent to an outside lab, if it indicated an obscure disease requiring more sophisticated analysis.

Up to this point in time, no doctor, nurse or test clinician had remotely mentioned the possibility of a malignancy. We believed our eyes: Mona was the same strong, healthy woman in her mid-fifties fighting off bronchitis with dyspnea, and the doctors would find the right medicine to cure her just as soon as they properly identified the disease.

Thinking of the worst. If it turned out to be a rare disease, we’d take Mona immediately to a New York City hospital like Columbia-Presbyterian—where they have internationally recognized experts on staff to deal with exceptional cases: an obvious course of action. Just three years before, my mother, Esther, had made the fatal mistake of relying on a local hospital in Jupiter, Florida, and their handsome young Jewish oncologist with lovely blue eyes. It took weeks before biopsy results came back from California’s City of Hope labs; meanwhile, he treated her odd looking, young person’s lymphoma with standard chemotherapy that seemed to be working. But within months, mother relapsed and become deathly ill; only then was her lymphoma diagnosed as extremely aggressive. I made a frantic call to Memorial Sloan-Kettering and arranged for their lymphoma expert, Dr. Wong, to take mother’s case. Mother was pleased. There’s still some juice left in this old lemon, she bragged, quoting a character from Dickens.

But by then, mother had become too sick to make the journey up to New York City, and she was growing weaker every day. Mother had one good shot to beat her aggressive lymphoma, Dr. Wong later told me—if she’d been treated with their most powerful chemo and medicine regimen immediately, when her body was strong enough to withstand the powerful side effects of the treatment. We drove mother to nearby Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where doctors confirmed it was futile to try a more powerful treatment.

Just this one little thing, my mother kept repeating in her delirium, shaking her head sadly. Just this one little thing. With mother’s fatal error in mind, we would rush Mona to Columbia-Presbyterian for a second opinion immediately if her disease proved rare or if the White Plains lab reflected any uncertainty whatsoever.

Mona’s mother had always trivialized her daughter’s anxieties about serious illness. Oh, you know Mona, she’d say with her shy, self-conscious grin. It was her outgoing, generous grandma Loeb who had raised Mona, while her mother, Meta, worked long hours six days a week at Lederle Chemical Labs. Her large, ruggedly handsome father, Henry Pecheux, had been a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yards during World War II. But after Mona’s grandma died, there was was no steady, evenhanded, gemütlich presence at home when 8-year-old Mona returned from school.

Well, she’s old enough to take care of herself, Meta said, never financially able or truly wanting to give up what turned out to be her lifetime gold-watch job at Lederle Labs.

The atmosphere at home changed when the War ended and Mona’s father started a butcher block cutting/cleaning business with equipment passed on from his father. Being his own boss, with a wife working, he’d return home mid-afternoons to smoke multipacks of cigarettes, drink six-packs of beer, read his paperback historical novels or watch baseball and sports on his new TV. He’d become an Archie Bunker prototype before the TV show. Without Grandma’s ruling hand, the family sank into a quiet dysfunction: a dominant husband no longer chief breadwinner and his sweet hard-working wife—inheritor of their home, trying to survive a difficult marriage without her steady mother’s presence, happier in many ways with her many friends at work. In the face of that uncertain home life, Mona listened to her own inner music, driving herself to excel culturally and achieve in school while trying to become a caring person like her grandmother.

All of this I marveled at when we first met. While her father was proud of her and bragged about his bright girl, he resisted Mona going off to Barnard College, even on scholarships, and entering an upscale world that he would be no part of. It’s hard to