32. Lance
Lance
The flight from San Diego to Seattle is two hours and twenty minutes.
I travel a few days after Marcus left San Diego, after I managed to request an emergency leave from work.
I spend the first hour staring at the window with eyes not really seeing anything.
The rest of the way, I spend reading my mother’s latest lab results on my phone, the ones Marcus forwarded without any other messages accompanying.
Just his way of saying he didn’t know what to do with them either.
I land at Sea-Tac at eleven forty-three. I have one bag and no plan beyond getting to the house.
I take the train to my mother’s house on a Thursday.
Marcus offered to drive me, but I told him I’d rather go alone.
I needed the time to stare out the window at the city I grew up in and figure out how the hell I was going to explain being gone this long without sounding like a complete asshole.
The truth wasn’t exactly winning any awards either.
The whole ride I tried to produce something decent to say to her. By the time the train pulled in, I still had nothing.
The house looks exactly the same from the outside.
Same iron gate and stone path, same maples that have gotten entirely too big for their own good.
Pale stone facade, three stories, tall black-framed windows.
That wide front door with the brass hardware that always gleams like it’s been polished by someone with too much time on their hands.
I linger at the gate, remembering all the times I stormed out swearing I wouldn’t be back for a while. I did come home for the holidays when I could swing the time off, but even those visits got fewer and farther between until the gaps felt like years.
Turns out it took my mother getting diagnosed with Lynch syndrome and gastric cancer to finally drag me back home. Nice one, Universe. I’ll be carrying what that says about me for the rest of my life.
Patrice answers the door, still impeccably poised in her fifties.
She’s been my parents’ chief of staff longer than I can remember, and nothing in this house happens without her seal of approval.
A real smile breaks across my face. She returns it, before taking my coat. “Your mother is in the sitting room.”
The house feels different. Sure, it still smells like old wood and fancy candles, but there’s a faint clinical undertone now.
Halfway down the hall I spot the large weekly pill organizer, a blood pressure cuff, and a pulse oximeter.
In the corner of one room, a hospital-grade IV pole stands folded and ready.
Somebody has actually set this all up. Relief washes over me first, followed immediately by the sharp sting of guilt that it wasn’t me, the actual nurse in the family, who did this for my own mother.
The sitting room has been rearranged. I notice the changes instantly, old instincts kicking in.
The main chair is closer to the window now for better light.
There’s a small rolling table positioned perfectly for meals or meds.
A woman in teal scrubs looks up, gives me a quick professional nod, and slips out without a word—the smooth exit of a home care nurse who knows exactly when she’s not needed.
I’m glad my mother has good people around her. Even if it should have been me.
In the chair by the window sits Eleanor Bradford, sixty-eight years old and she has spent the last thirty-five of those years being the most composed person in any room she walks into. In all that time, I’ve never once seen her look anything other than exactly how she intended.
The weight loss strikes me first. It’s not the gaunt, skeletal look of end-stage disease, but it’s enough to show weeks of nausea and her body rerouting every bit of energy it has left.
Her face is sharper now, cheekbones more prominent, skin carrying that fragile, almost translucent quality I see at work and absolutely hate seeing on my own mother.
Her silver hair is still tidy, but it’s grown out at the ends and noticeably thinner from the chemo.
She’s wrapped in a dark green cashmere cardigan despite the warmth of the room, like even the softest fabric is barely enough these days.
Her hands rest elegantly in her lap as I cross the room. Her eyes, at least, are exactly the same—sharp and unflinching.
“You’re doing the assessment,” she remarks.
“I’m saying hello,” I reply. I lean down, take her hand, and kiss her cheek. She holds on a second longer than usual, and I feel how fragile she is.
I lower myself into the chair opposite hers. The room holds its breath between us.
“How are you, Mom?”
She smiles, softening the usual seriousness in her face, warmer than I’ve seen in a long time despite everything. “I’m good. Cynthia, my day nurse, keeps my medication schedule perfectly on track.”
“Cynthia’s right to be strict,” I say, glancing toward the hallway. “Did Marcus set all this up? The staff and equipment?”
“Most of it. Patrice still runs the house like a general. There’s another nurse, Rosa, who does overnights three nights a week, and the physiotherapist comes on Tuesdays.
” She lists it all out like she’s giving a corporate briefing instead of talking about her own cancer.
“Your brother’s been here every Sunday since September.
I didn’t ask him to come, and I haven’t discouraged it. ”
“He didn’t mention that to me.”
“No,” she says simply. “He wouldn’t.”
Of course he wouldn’t. Marcus has clearly been holding this whole family together while I was off in San Diego pretending distance was the same thing as independence.
We talk for a while about her treatment, the latest tweaks to her chemo regimen, and all the clinical details that give us something safe and solid to hold onto.
I pour her a cup of tea from the pot on the side table and hand it over. She then decides to dive straight into the heavy stuff.
“Lance,” she begins, chin slightly up, her eyes on me. “I’m sorry you felt the need to leave home.”
I pause. My mother rarely apologizes, and she almost never catches me off guard. Today she’s doing both.
“Mom, that was a long time ago,” I say, aiming for casual.
“I’m not making excuses for how things went,” she continues, setting her tea down. “I may not have realized how hard I was being on you for so long. When you left and started building a life without us, I thought it was better to let it be. That doesn’t mean I missed you any less.”
I shift forward on the edge of my seat, staring at the floor. “I should’ve been around more, not just for a few days at Christmas.”
“For me, that’s probably more than we deserve.”
“I kept my visits short and left before anything real could get said.” I meet her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” she replies fast. “I didn’t make it easy for you to come back. I understand that now.” She smooths an invisible wrinkle on the arm of her chair. “I’ve rehearsed this conversation for years. Now that you’re actually here, I realize I’m less prepared than I thought.”
“That’s new.” I crack a small smile. “You, not being prepared.”
“It is,” she agrees, with that dry edge that’s all hers, the one I’ve been stealing for my own sarcasm.
My mind goes back to how all of this began. “Remember the last time I saw Aunt Matilda?”
She nods, probably recalling her sister’s final days and the little time she got to spend with her before she died. Life had been too busy, even with family facing a terminal illness.
Aunt Matilda was my mother’s older sister and only sibling, a lawyer specializing in healthcare law who eventually founded Hearthside Home, a palliative care hospice in the Eastside suburbs outside Seattle.
The family thought it was deeply eccentric, which, in Bradford language, translates roughly to ‘We don’t understand it, therefore it concerns us. ’ She was always my favorite aunt.
She never married, never had kids, and always said she already had more than enough family in her staff and patients. She said it like she meant it, and it never sounded sad coming from her.
She was one of the few adults in my life who actually laughed at my jokes like they were funny. She’d call just to see how things were going at home and at school. She listened to me like I was a real person, not just a rough draft of whatever my parents had already decided I should become.
When she got seriously ill, she was admitted to her own hospice and cared for by the team she had built.
She spent her final months in the place she had spent her life trying to make bearable for other people.
I’ve thought about the irony of that for years and still haven’t decided if it was cruel or kind.
“When Marcus and I went to visit her,” I say, keeping my voice steady, “there was a nurse, a guy in his early fifties, sitting with her and holding her hand. The second she saw us, she lit up. She told us her day nurse had refused to go home after his shift because he didn’t want her to be alone before we got there. ”
A branch scrapes lightly against the window outside.
“He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He just said he wanted to stay, and he would have, except she was kicking him out now that her nephews had finally shown up.”
I let out a small breath.
“He got a few more jokes out of her before he left, then checked everything, handed off to the next nurse, and made sure she was settled. You could just tell he cared.”
Mom stays still, listening closely. She watches me, her expression softer now, a little tired around the eyes.
“I didn’t really understand what I was feeling back then,” I continue. “I just knew something had shifted inside me. It took until my second year of nursing school for me to put it together. I’d been trying to be that guy ever since.”
I pause for a while, letting that sink in for us both.