"The Waiting Room," continued

You can read more of the prologue to my book, The Waiting Room on Family Wisdom.

My Book: "The Waiting Room"

My book is now up on Amazon.  It's a memoir of the 18 months I spent with my parents when they were suffering from incurable and devastating diseases.  It's sad, but I believe the story, and especially the ending, will inspire you. The story begins forty years earlier.  Here's a sample:

There was something about mid-afternoon—the way the sun reflected off the Spanish Colonial architecture, the view of the Pacific on a smogless day, or the chapel bells ringing on the hour—that always lifted my spirits.  Classes had ended for the day and I was free to read a novel in the shade of a live oak, meander across the elegant campus, or gaze at the forested canyons below. Each time I strolled through the arched colonnades on my way to the library, I celebrated my good fortune.  There I was, the first in my family to attend college, and not just any college, but a magnificent cocoon high in the Santa Monica Mountains, far from the turmoil that touched so many college campuses in 1965.  I was just eighteen, an idealistic and naïve young woman who still believed in dreams, miracles, and happily ever after.  That anything could go wrong was beyond my imagination.

Then on Thursday, just before dinner, Mom called. 

"Come home this weekend," she said soberly.  "We need to talk."

"About what?" 

"Not over the phone," she said. 

A stream of possibilities flowed through my mind—none of them good. I wondered if Dad had lost his job and I'd have to leave school. My scholarship only covered tuition, and without Dad's income, we could never afford room and board.

"Can you at least give me a hint?" I said.

"It's about Terry," she replied.  "Will you be able to find a ride?"

When I told her I could, she abruptly ended the call, leaving me to wonder what had happened in the weeks I'd been away—she hadn't said anything about my younger brother in her weekly letters—but before I could think more about it, my friends breezed by on their way to the cafeteria and asked me to join them. 

Fortunately, my roommate was planning her own trip home for the weekend and agreed to give me a lift, so after Friday morning classes I threw my books and overnight bag into the backseat of her Volkswagen Beetle, and we joined the rush hour traffic leaving Los Angeles for Orange County.  I walked in the door around five-thirty, parked myself on the turquoise sofa in front of the television, and waited for Mom to come home from work.  One hour later, she sat across from me, underneath the white balloon lamp that cast eerie shadows on her face, causing her to look much older than her thirty-nine years. She stared at the floor for a moment, and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes.

"Your brother's sick," she said.

"What do you mean?" I said. 

She put her head down again but didn't speak.

"I'm sure he'll be all right," I said a little too hastily.

"No he won’t," she replied. Then she took a breath and said, "He has cancer."

Like a rogue wave catching me off guard, her words sent me reeling.  I shook my head, certain I had misunderstood.

"What did you say?"

"Terry has cancer. There's a lump on his neck, and the doctor did a biopsy. We got the results yesterday.  He has cancer of the lymph system," she said, speaking slowly and dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief she always kept tucked in the sleeve of her sweater.    

"No, Mom," I said, rushing in with the infinite wisdom of an eighteen year old. "He’s just sixteen.  You need to talk to a different doctor."

"The doctor is certain," she said.  "Terry has cancer.  And there’s no cure."

The wave was pulling me under, stealing air from my lungs and immersing me in darkness, but I struggled to the surface, desperate to get my bearings and stand on solid ground.

Terry had been tired lately, Mom said.  He'd had some fevers and nose bleeds.  Then he found the lump on his neck—the most ominous sign of all—and the diagnosis was now certain: my brother had Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph system. I didn’t even know what the lymph system was.

"There has to be some kind of treatment," I said. 

"We’re going to Long Beach next week to see a specialist. Maybe," she said, "he can give us some time."

"How much time?"

"If we're lucky, we might have a few years."

This couldn’t be happening.  I closed my eyes, shook my head, and willed time to go backward, back to the ride home with my roommate when we talked about our boyfriends, back to this morning when my biggest concern was passing my weekly French quiz. Time wouldn’t cooperate.

My mother composed herself and stood up.  Barely five foot two, she seemed suddenly smaller, struggling to manage the tragic burden that had just fallen on her.   She didn’t hug me, or look to me for comfort, or acknowledge her pain, though I knew it was there, ripping her to pieces. Instead, she walked slowly into the kitchen to start dinner, keeping herself busy as she always did whenever painful emotions threatened to engulf her, then returned to add one more thing.

"Terry’s out with his friends," she said.  "He doesn’t know the results of the biopsy yet.  He has no idea…"  She stood silently for half a minute, choking back tears.  "So I want you to control your feelings when he comes home."

Solving the mystery of Latin records

The parish records (births, marriages, christenings) for my husband's family in Croatia are mostly written in Latin, though some are written in Italian and a few in Croatian.  Having taken four years of Latin in high school and two years in college, I can read some of the entries.  However, my skills are rusty and I had forgotten how the endings of names can differ depending on the relationship of one person to another, and this had me confused regarding the names of my husband's ancestors. It was another mystery to be solved.

For example, many men in my husband's family are named "Anton" which is the Croatian form of Anthony. Anthony is also my husband's name and he is named after his grandfather Anton.  In the records of his ancestors, however, the name is often written "Antonius," the Latin form.  Occasionally the name was written in the Italian version, "Antonio."  This was because the island of Brac, his ancestral homeland, was frequently under the rule of Venice, and some of the priests were Italian. However, at times, the name is written "Antoni" or even "Antonii" which puzzled me. 

Then I found a website that reminded me of why the name might be spelled with one or two i's at the end.  This ending signifies that the individual is the father of a previously named individual.  So if I were to write my husband's name in Latin, it would simply be "Antonius."  If I were to write in Latin about "Matthew, son of Anthony," it would read "Mattheus filius Antoni (or Antonii)." Since christening records and marriage records list the parents of the child to be christened or the individuals to be married, it would be common to see the father's name ending in i or ii. 

So now when I see Antonii or Antoni, I realize my researcher was simply copying records exactly as the names were written in Latin, and probably didn't realize the endings represented a relationship between two individuals in the record. The actual name of the individual would be Antonius in Latin, and Anton in Croatian.

Mystery solved!