Growth

I am reading the saga of Emily, a 19-year-old who attends Harvard. Emily is legally blind, her left side is paralyzed. She walks with a cane. When she taps her way through Harvard Yard, she sees the brick buildings and leafy trees as shadows, as smudged echoes of crimson and green.

Emily is majoring in math and uses a special software program that barks out problems and repeats the scratchings her professor has made while Emily sits in a lecture hall listening but not seeing.

I am reading about Emily, who suffered the first of two malignant brain tumors when she was a small girl, because inevitably I am drawn to the subject of brain tumors. Or perhaps it is the subject that seeks me out. I will be thumbing through a magazine or talking with an acquaintance and suddenly a story of a child or a husband or a friend who was felled by a brain tumor will surface, disturbing, unbidden, like the glowering red tides that bleed into the Pacific. In the past three months I have encountered half a dozen stories about people whose lives and whose families were upended by tumors. Just like mine.

When my mother was 25 she developed a brain tumor. Back then, any kind of tumor originating in the brain was decidedly serious. Nearly 60% of patients died on the operating table. If they didn’t die, they were often left with what were called “deficits”--blindness, memory loss, paralysis.

My mother, who at the time had a young son, was lucky. She did not die. She did not suffer significant changes in her personality or intellect or motor skills. My father, like his father before him, was a doctor, a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma’s medical school. I am told that he arranged for my mother to receive the best possible care. I say “told” because like so many things about my mother’s illness there is no record of this.

After my mother recovered, my father brought her home to San Diego, to their apartment in a tranquil neighborhood of Spanish-style bungalows and eucalyptus trees near Balboa Park. Over the next several years my father’s practice took off, and my mother had two more sons. Shortly after my youngest brother was born, she had another pregnancy. Shortly after that, the tumor recurred. Weeks after I was born, my mother was rushed to the hospital to undergo surgery to remove a tumor the size of a baseball from her brain.

This time she was not so lucky.

This time, according to the renowned neurologist who treated my mother when I was a child, she had a lobotomy.

This is a fact I did not learn until well into my late 20s. Or perhaps it was my early 30s? Time and details have a way of collapsing and getting confused when it comes to my mother. This is the reason I read stories about brain tumor victims, why I have become a student of the brain in the way others are disciples of string theory, trying to discern order and light from the impenetrable dark. Trying to understand what happened to my mother.

Trying to understand what happened to me.

Because my story begins in San Diego, a town that today only slightly resembles the place in which I grew up, this is also a California story. That I use the word “town” to describe a metropolis that is now America’s seventh-largest city should give you a sense of what it was like then. Of how I remember it. I left San Diego for Berkeley in 1973, glad to be rid of its old-boy Republican politics, its small-town boosterism, its rabid sports culture. San Diego was backward. San Diego was provincial. San Diego was C. Arnholt Smith and the Chargers and the Kona Kai Club, where John Wayne docked his yacht in the same oily waters of the bay where my friends and I swam.

We did not belong to the Kona Kai Club, even though it was just down the hill from us in Point Loma and most of my friends belonged there, a fact that rankled me no end as a 10-year-old. My father was instead a member of the exclusive La Jolla Country Club, a club that did not allow Jews, where he played on the same course as champion golfer Gene Littler.

Like so many who came to California in the 1940s, my parents moved to San Diego because of its fabled beauty and Mediterranean climate and promise of opportunity. By then, my grandparents had pulled up stakes and settled in Vista. My grandfather had been chief of the state mental hospital in Norman, Okla. When he retired, the first thing he did was buy a small adobe ranch and several acres of land in the fertile San Diego countryside and drag my grandmother, a refined professor of English, there.

Today the ranch is gone, the land overrun with cookie-cutter tract houses and strip malls and occupied by bikers and evangelical Christians. But in those years it was gloriously unspoiled, a paradise of rolling green hills and horse pastures and flowering fruit trees a few miles inland from Moonlight State Beach. My grandfather planted orderly rows of tomatoes and orange and avocado trees, and a few yards from the house built a chicken coop. One of my most vivid memories as a girl is of standing in the coop, a shaft of sunlight spilling across the blood-splattered ground, while my grandfather whacked off the head of a chicken with an ax. “I am never going back to Oklahoma,” he declared. It was a vow my recalcitrant grandfather kept for nearly three decades.

My parents were happy in California. Or perhaps I just need to believe they were, before my mother got sick. My father spent his days in surgery while my mother kept house. Before her own surgeries, I am told that my mother was sweet, that she played the piano beautifully. When my mother began having headaches so blindingly severe she could not get out of bed, it was my father who suspected a brain tumor. His cool-headed appraisal probably saved her.

A month after my mother’s first brain operation on July 5, 1945, my grandfather wrote to her from the ranch in Vista: You can surmise how very happy we are to know that you are doing so nicely--that you are going to be as well as ever and back with us in the not too distant future.

Eight years passed before the tumor grew back. No one knew why it did.

Almost half a century later they still don’t know what causes brain tumors or why they recur. Another sobering fact I have learned is that there are more than 120 kinds of tumors. Until you open the skull, and biopsy the tumor, it’s unclear which kind you’ve got. Some, such as noninfiltrating astrocytoma, are better than others; they grow slowly, are self-contained and easier to remove. Others, such as glioblastoma, are considerably worse; they grow rapidly, thread their way like tiny tentacles into brain tissue, are inoperable.

When I think of my mother, who was pregnant with me and had three small boys, I cannot begin to fathom her terror. One of the dangers of brain surgery is hemorrhage. Another is swelling. Because the brain sits inside the bony shell of the skull, there isn’t room to expand. This is why, if a tumor develops, the skull must be opened to relieve the pressure, the invader removed. If not, death will occur.

This is what my mother confronted. Long before that, though, her doctors confronted her with another unimaginable dilemma. “It sticks in my mind that they wanted to take the baby,” Dorothy Lyle, my mother’s cousin, told me a decade or so ago. “And she said, ‘No, absolutely not. I’m not going to do that.’”

This was the first I knew of this.

I am still trying to process it, the idea that I might not have been born. The idea that having me changed everything for my mother. My father never told me anything about her tumors or why she was unable to care for me. This is another thing I find impossible to fathom. Why didn’t he? Was the pain just too great for him to face? Did he look at me, his only daughter, and see my mother?

When I was a child my mother saw a renowned neurologist, David Freeman. He died a few years ago, but in July 1995 I managed to find a phone number for him. When I called his home in the upscale community of Rancho Santa Fe, I got his answering machine. I left a message saying I was looking into my mother’s medical history, but I was not exactly hopeful. Getting any information about my mother had been a struggle. People either had died or they didn’t remember or they wanted to forget. So I was surprised when a day or two later he called.

He no longer had my mother’s medical records, but he could remember specific details of her operation in December 1953. The tumor was benign, a frontal lobe meningioma, a kind typically easy to extract. “My recollection is that, at first, the surgery was removing the whole damn thing,” Dr. Freeman said. “Then they got in trouble post-op. They had to take out the forehead bone. That was because of the brain swelling after surgery. They took out the whole damn forehead.”

When it was over they sealed up my mother’s skull with a metal plate.

When it was over she was obliterated.

When it was over my mother had grand mal epilepsy. Her short-term memory was gone and her sense of smell evaporated. She was angry and erratic and vague. She was not, as they say, “all there.”

She was 33 years old.

When I was a year old my father hired a Canadian emigre to live with us. Her name was Freddie and she had snow-white hair and a kind face. She stayed until I was 17. Freddie was a churchgoing woman, and she often liked to say how she came to our family on “a mission from God.”

I think she was right.

In those years we lived in Point Loma--or simply the point, as it was called, the ruggedly beautiful peninsula that explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo discovered in 1542 when he sailed into San Diego Bay. At the end of the peninsula was the Old Point Loma Lighthouse. As a girl I would pedal out to the lighthouse, past the perfectly aligned white gravestones of Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery, and stand at the cliff’s edge with my friends looking down into the dark, furious waves. When my mother died suddenly in September 1987, my brothers and I scattered her ashes in the waters not far from there.

For years I could not visit San Diego without crying. I’d be driving south on the 5, going to see my mother or spend Christmas or introduce a new boyfriend. It would always unfold the same. Just past the twin domes of San Onofre, I’d reach the stretch where the land opens up, where there’s nothing but ocean and sky until the drab barracks of Camp Pendleton, and suddenly my eyes would mist over. For a time San Diego was so wound up with loss and longing, with pain and grief, I could not see it clearly.

But I can see now how idyllic it was. Had I grown up somewhere less wild and romantic, a place where there was no Sunset Cliffs or Torrey Pines or Cabrillo National Monument, it could have been worse--things with my mother being what they were.

From the top of our street you could see not only the exotic Star of India and the giant aircraft carriers but also the graceful Coronado Bridge and the mythical hills of Tijuana 20 miles away. Although we lived in one of San Diego’s most affluent areas, the ranch houses on our block were understated. Orange and pepper trees grew in the backyards, bougainvillea trailed over the fences. I went to Cabrillo Elementary, and to get to school I walked through a canyon of wheat-colored grass where there were rattlesnakes and tarantulas. I recall being about 6 when I was warned not to move if I heard a rattle. I also recall walking along the dirt trail and holding hands with a boy named Winty Waterman. Winty later went to Stanford and changed his name to Michael, and the canyon is covered now with Spanish-style houses, but for a while it was lovely.

In those years my father ran with a crowd of amiable sportswriters who had come to San Diego from Oklahoma and Texas, men such as Jack Murphy, the folksy sports columnist for the San Diego Union, and Gene Gregston, the columnist for the Evening Tribune, the city’s now-shuttered afternoon paper. It was Murphy who brought the Chargers to town in the mid-1960s, who got the ball rolling to build a sports stadium in Mission Valley. My father was Murphy’s family doctor and traveled with him when he covered golf tournaments. They exchanged gifts at Christmas and on their birthdays. My oldest brother still has one of the gifts, a set of books from Sports Illustrated on Great Stories from the World of Sport. “To my great and good friend, Tom Gable,” reads the inscription. “I hope these books will give you much pleasure. Merry Christmas, 1960. Jack.”

My father’s world was a distinctly male one, from which I was largely excluded. But I vaguely remember being at a cocktail party at Jack Murphy’s house, a memory that has mainly to do with women in pretty dresses and men with drinks in their hands.

I do not think my mother was there, but, then, she wouldn’t have been.

Another dominant feature of San Diego was the military. Many of my friends’ fathers worked in defense or in aerospace in the huge buildings down by old Lindbergh Field. I happened to go to school with one of the Lindbergh granddaughters, a freckled girl a year younger than I. I also went to school with a silly boy whose father had been mayor, and darkly handsome Portuguese boys whose fathers were tuna fishermen. My brothers and their friends, diehard surfers, called them “tuna chokers.” My friends and I reserved our contempt for the military, for the pale-skinned young sailors who trolled Ocean Beach. No matter that we bought our white cotton bell-bottoms at the military surplus store on Rosecrans across from the Navy base. “Swabbies!” we’d hiss whenever sailors came in range of our towels.

By then I was not home much. By then my mother was hitting the Admiral Kidd Club on Harbor Island or the Bali Hai down on Shelter Island to drink and meet men. My father wasn’t around much either. He was usually in Vegas or Borrego or Palm Springs; I never knew. By then I was drinking too much cheap red wine and staying up all night at slumber parties, and all I wanted was escape.

I did escape. I went off to Berkeley, which proved to be one of those instinctive decisions you reflect on and think, How did I know? That first winter was La Nina and it rained nearly every day, and I did not have a good coat, being from the tropics. I froze. That winter I lived in a worn colonial-style house on Hearst Avenue with three guys who were engineering majors. I was so determined to do well, to prove that I was “Berkeley material,” that I took 17 units that quarter and nearly failed Linguistics. But I was happy. In the bitterly cold evenings I’d walk to the top of Scenic and stand there for a while, gazing out at the legendary San Francisco skyline. I remember one such evening. It was dusk, and the sky was a ribbon of orange and pink and mauve, and I stayed there watching until the sun slipped below Golden Gate Bridge, my heart swelling with gratitude. That was the evening I realized I was finally home.

Every so often my mother would call. By then she and my father were divorced, and she had sold our million-dollar house for the equivalent of spare change. “What ya’ doin’?” she would chirp into the phone when I picked up the receiver. I was always resentful of these calls. Resentful not because they came at an insane hour, at 2 or 3 a.m., but because they came at all. At that point I was still trying to cut the cord. It took me a while to see that I could not.

I haven’t lived in Berkeley for many years, but someday I would like to again. My son would prefer to move to San Diego, where some of his cousins now live. Somewhere like Oceanside or Carlsbad, where the beach goes for miles and the surf is always roaring with a mild offshore wind. Somewhere like Point Loma, where my brother lives in a beautiful house with a sweeping view of the bay and Sunset Cliffs is only a short hike away.

To my son, Point Loma looks like paradise.