CANCER ISN'T GRACEFUL

When I would tell people that my mother was undergoing treatment for cancer, I frequently got the impression that the listener was flashing to a paler-than-normal Meryl Streep baking cookies and lovingly throwing a costume party to cheer up her grieving family.

I, too, would run a fast slideshow of cultural highlights from an entertainment industry that has done much to promulgate the Graceful Flight Through Cancer myth. Who wouldn't want to curl up in bed next to a napping Diane Keaton, facing down death with her elegant Navajo jewelry and crisp white blouses intact?

Films tend to skip any depiction of the horrific drawn-out hospital stay, except to pan past the beatific patient, lovingly managing her children's fears. The unattainable cultural standard of the Ideal Cancer Patient has left my generation mystified to find our ill mothers behaving more like Pacino's Roy Cohn in "Angels in America" than a wan Deborah Winger.

Mystified and isolated. My sister and I had each other to mutually bear witness, but friends of mine who are only children took years to confess that the illness had flipped some switch in their parent's brain, unleashing torrents of abuse they felt they had no right to staunch, let alone admit to. Once I started digging, stories poured in from women my age across the country who were desperate for someone they could talk to without sounding "horrible."

After listening to these echoing experiences I started to theorize about what could be causing this en masse personality flip. The unfortunate fact is that the terror and suffering induced by cancer and its treatments reduces its host to an utterly dependant state. A state not unlike infancy, where one's very survival is at the mercy of others.

And here's the thing my friends and I have realized in the last ten years about bringing adults of the Baby Boom generation back to their infancy – it didn't have all that much to recommend it the first time around.

We remembered that our parents were children when alcoholism was called "having a drink with dinner," beatings were on par with time-outs, and everybody had a "dirty uncle." Female hysteria was a legitimate medical diagnosis, lynchings were a legitimate stand-in for due process, and sexual preferences weren't legitimate. Our parents' parents' parenting was as much informed by the Great Depression and World War II as ours is by Whole Foods and PBS.

So it isn't surprising that stripping an adult of all the power they've put between themselves and the horror-show that was their childhoods brings out a latent rage that could cow The Hulk. Two downsides to this rage: one is that the person they are really angry at, the one who, say, forgot to feed them (yes, you read that right) is now long dead. And the other is that it makes it really challenging to connect with them at a time when you want to be sharing all the big un-expressables: your love, your gratitude, your memories.

So I have compiled this list, with many people's input, a little Guide to Surviving the Surviving, for those of you whose mother might go the Roy Cohn route. You are not alone.

1. She is talking at you, but she is not talking to you. You didn't make her go to school every day in a sweater that said Mary on it, even though that isn't her name. Go kick the vending machine and then let it go. You did plump her pillow, bring all her New Yorkers, trim the cat's claws, brush her teeth. You are taking care of her, her house, her business, and probably her husband. She just can't hold it in her head. Stop expecting her to. It will only make you crazy. And the Crazy Train is full because…

2. Morphine is evil. In hospitals they call it the Mean Drug. Don't visit when they're on the morphine. It's not worth it. They will choose this moment to share that you were an unplanned pregnancy that cut all their hopes and dreams short, and the next day won't even remember you visited. You get all the trauma and none of the credit. A byproduct of the inalienable fact that…

3. She wants to be the baby – let her. Dig deep and cull every maternal molecule in your body; you will need them. She may look like Bette Davis, but pretend she's Shirley Temple. Fuss over her like a toddler, with no expectations of acknowledgement or gratitude. The contented expression on her face as she sucks down her juice box is thanks enough. But just in case…