Pubdate: Sat, 10 Dec 2011
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2011 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Note: Marie Myung-Ok Lee, the author of the novel "Somebody's 
Daughter," teaches writing at Brown University.

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW'S ONE HIGH DAY

WHEN my mother-in-law was in the final, harrowing throes of 
pancreatic cancer, she had only one good day, and that was the day 
she smoked pot.

So I was heartened when, at the end of last month, the governors of 
Washington and Rhode Island petitioned the Obama administration to 
classify marijuana as a drug that could be prescribed and distributed 
for medical use. While medical marijuana is legal in 16 states, it is 
still outlawed under federal law.

My husband and I often thought of recommending marijuana to his 
mother. She was always nauseated from the chemotherapy drugs and 
could barely eat for weeks. She existed in a Percocet and morphine 
haze, constantly fretting that the sedation kept her from saying all 
the things she wanted to say to us, but unable to face the pain 
without it. And this was a woman who had such a high tolerance for 
pain, coupled with a distaste for drugs, that she insisted her 
dentist not use Novocain and gave birth to her two children without 
anesthesia. But despite marijuana's power to relieve pain and nausea 
without loss of consciousness, we were afraid she would find even the 
suggestion of it scandalous. This was 1997, and my mother-in-law was 
a very proper, law-abiding woman, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College in 
the 1950s. She'd never even smoked a cigarette.

But then an older family friend who worked in an AIDS hospice came 
bearing what he said was very good quality marijuana. To our 
surprise, she said she'd consider it. My husband and I - though we 
knew nothing about marijuana paraphernalia - were dispatched to find 
a bong, as the friend suggested water-processing might make the 
smoking easier for her. We found ourselves in a head shop in one of 
the seedier neighborhoods in New Haven, where my husband went to 
graduate school, listening attentively to the clerk as he went over 
the finer points of bong taxonomy, finally just choosing one in her 
favorite color, lilac.

She had us take her out on the flagstone patio because she refused to 
smoke in her meticulously kept-up house. Then she looked about 
nervously, as if expecting the police to jump out of the bushes. She 
found it awkward and strange to smoke a bong, but after a few tries 
managed to get in two and a half hits.

And then she said she wanted to go out to eat.

For the past month, we'd been trying to get her to eat anything: 
fresh-squeezed carrot juice made in a special juicer, Korean rice 
gruel that I simmered for hours, soups, oatmeal, endless cans of 
Ensure. Sometimes she'd request some particular dish and we'd eagerly 
procure it, only to have her refuse it or fall back asleep before 
taking a bite. But this time she sat down at her favorite restaurant 
and ordered a gorgeous meal: whitefish poached with lemon, hot 
buttered rolls, salad - and ate every bite.

Then she wanted to go to Kimball's, a local ice cream place famous 
for cones topped with softball-size scoops. The family had been 
regular customers starting all the way back when my husband and his 
brother were children, but they hadn't been there since her illness. 
My husband and I shared a small cone, which we could not finish, and 
looked on in awe as my mother-in-law ordered a large and, queenishly 
spurning any requests for a taste, polished the whole thing off - 
cone and all - and declared herself satisfied.

We were of course raring to make the magic happen again, but it never 
did. The pot just frightened her too much. She was scared her friend 
would be arrested for interstate drug trafficking, that my husband 
and I would be mugged in New Haven; she was afraid she'd become 
addicted or (a la "Reefer Madness") go insane. It was difficult 
watching her reject something that had so clearly alleviated her 
nausea and pain and - let's admit it - lightened her mood in the face 
of the terrible fact that cancer had invaded nearly every essential 
organ. And it was even worse to watch her pumped, instead, full of 
narcotics that made her feel horrible. The Percocet gave her a 
painfully dry mouth, but even ice chips made her heave. We were 
reduced to swabbing her lips with little sponges dipped in water, and 
waiting out her agony.

My husband and I have dredged up the memory of that one good day many 
times since, how she smiled and joked, for the last time seeming a 
little like her old self.

After the funeral, saying goodbye to all the family and friends, 
supervising the removal of the hospital bed, bedpans and related 
paraphernalia, one of the last things my husband and I did, under the 
watchful eyes of the hospice nurse, was destroy her remaining 
Percocets. We opened the multiple bottles and knelt in front of the 
toilet to perform this secular water rite, wishing there had been 
other days, other ways, a softer way for her to leave us.
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