It was a dreary Thursday and Bette was frustrated. Her legs were swelling and she hadn’t been out of the house in two weeks. “I’m sick of lying around. I need to do something. Let’s play Scrabble.”
Scrabble in our family is more than a pastime. It’s a social ritual, an escape, and sometimes a ruthless, competitive sport.
So I set up the Scrabble game, trying to position the board on an ottoman in front of Bette’s chair as she was too weak to sit at a table. The first bad sign started before the game began — Bette kept dropping the tiles on the floor, not being able to place them on the tray. I helped her get them settled. She had drawn an “E” and I an “M” so she went first.
It took her a long time to make a word. “What’s wrong with my brain,” she kept saying in frustration.
“Maybe we shouldn’t play today. It’s afternoon and you’re usually really tired around this time. Why push it,” I offered.
“No, I am going to do this. I need to do this,” Bette stated.
After about 10 minutes, she made her word: RRRTOE.
“Um, Mom, what’s that word?”
“It’s reroute. Isn’t it? Oh what’s happening to me?”
Bette started to get a bit agitated and frightened. The cancer in her brain was going haywire in new ways.
I put the game away, got her some anti-anxiety medicine and we sat quietly. No spoken words would help. We both knew this was bad, a new symptom messing with her mind. After a few minutes I turned on “Oprah,” which was part of the afternoon routine. We didn’t watch the program as much as let it calm down the unsettling recognition that terminal cancer wreaks havoc. It’s both unpredictable and unkind.
That night I lay in bed thinking about REROUTE, the word Bette had wanted to make. Her life was being rerouted and she didn’t like where it was going. In her weak state she couldn’t scream, pound a wall or run out of the house to take out her anger on the world and this terminal illness.
But she could mangle the word that was scrabbling her life.
