With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn Read Free Book Online

lead for my own reasons.
    When the summer was over, I went back to school, and we had to get nurses during the day. That was something of a relief to me, but by this stage of my mother’s illness her hearing was even worse, and she decided I was the only person whose lips she could read. So I was the one who could be her go-between. I remember her saying, “Only Christine can tell me. I can only hear Christine.” It’s true that she could read my lips more easily than anyone else’s. Sometimes people tell me that when I talk, I move my jaw and mouth in an exaggerated way. I think it came from those years of talking with my mother so she could read my lips and understand what I was saying.
    Those last months of being my mother’s go-between were a nightmare. When there was a medical decision for her to make or unfortunate news to be delivered, I more often than not had to be the one to talk with her. She was back and forth between home and the hospital and basically bedridden at this point because the cancer had spread to her bones and so her hips were mostly hollow. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to get up, and I was the one who had to explain that her bones were too weak to support her and that if she put any weight on her hips, they’d crumble. There was nothing but bad news, so I had to tell my mother, in slow increments, information that ultimately made her realize that she was dying. By that stage, the doctors had nothing else they could do and my mother was waiting for a miracle.
    All she had left was prayer. She had an altar set up on her bedroom dresser, with lots of relics and religious statues. All the statues represented women, and the relics came from women. Elizabeth Ann Seton was her favorite saint. It wasn’t lost on me that every entity my mother prayed to was a woman. She believed in women to bring her miraculous intervention. She would say the rosary. And when she couldn’t take the time to say a whole rosary, she’d say prayers. I found her faith hard to accept. As I witnessed her painful decline, I didn’t think we would get a miracle.
    M y mother had survived for so long that when the end came, in late December, we were caught off guard. She hadn’t been doing well, but she hadn’t been doing well for a long time, so we convinced ourselves she had at least a few more months. Now of course I know, but I couldn’t have then, that when I left for the stable for two hours on the afternoon of December 21, she had only hours to live.
    When I got home she was barely conscious. She couldn’t talk. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see us. And her breathing was labored. The nurse who was there recommended we get her to the hospital, and my father and I agreed. We debated calling 911 or calling a private ambulance: a call to 911 would mean she’d get taken to the local hospital, which we knew she didn’t like. So we called for a private ambulance to take her to North Shore.
    I was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the ambulance to get there when I heard through the closed louvered doors to the playroom, “Oh no!” I don’t know who said it—my father, Aunt Julia, or the nurse—but I ran up to my room crying. I came out a few minutes later to go to the bathroom and saw my father at the bottom of the stairs looking up at me. I guess he’d been on his way up to tell me. I noticed he was wearing a red plaid shirt and an Irish sweater, which was odd for two reasons. First, my mother had bought matching red plaid shirts for herself and my father, and he was wearing the shirt, which he never wore. Second, it wasn’t at all cold in the house, so I didn’t know why he was wearing a sweater.
    My father had tears coming down his face, and I asked him a question that really didn’t need an answer. I said, “Is Mommy dead?” And he said, “Yes.” I didn’t wait for him to come up the stairs—I just headed to the bathroom. When I got back to my room, I called