The Get Well Card That Arrived on My First Day of Chemo Was Signed by Two People Who Have Been Gone for Years

They put the port in my chest at 8:15 this morning, and by 3:40 this afternoon the first bag of chemo was dripping into me through a tube no thicker than a coffee stirrer. I’m 64 years old. I have raised two kids, buried both my parents, and taught Sunday school at Pleasant Ridge Baptist for 22 years, and I have never been as scared as I was watching that first drop go in.

My husband Russell held my hand the whole time. He’s not a talker. He just kept rubbing his thumb over my knuckles like he was trying to polish them.

Around 6:30, after Russell went down to move the truck, a nurse named Delphine came in holding a plain white envelope. She said a woman left it at the front desk, wouldn’t give her name, and asked that it go to “Marla Jean in 7-North” and nobody else.

Nobody has called me Marla Jean since 2011.

Inside was a homemade card. Construction paper, folded in half, soft as cloth from being handled. A crayon heart. Four stick people holding hands. And at the bottom, in neat schoolteacher cursive: Love, Mom & Dad.

My daddy has been in the ground at Rosine Cemetery since 2003. My mother joined him fifteen years ago this December.

And I knew that card. I knew it the way you know your own front door. Fifty-three years ago I was eleven and in the hospital with pneumonia, and my little sister sat at our kitchen table and drew our family in crayon while Mama wrote the words underneath. I remember being mad because she gave herself yellow hair, and she has never had yellow hair a day in her life.

I had no idea that card still existed.

Then I looked at the left side. Someone had written a note there in blue ink, the letters slanted hard to the right like they were leaning into a wind.

I only know one person who writes like that.

My sister Lorna. The sister who hasn’t spoken a single word to me in fifteen years. The sister who, the last time I saw her, told me in front of half our church that she hoped I’d have to live with what I did for the rest of my life.

I read the note three times before the words would hold still.

“Brenda Coomes told me you were on the prayer list. Mama gave me this card the week before she passed and said to give it back to you on the day you needed it most. She told me something else too. I’ve been angry at the wrong thing for fifteen years. I’m in the parking garage, level 3. I’ve been here since six this morning. L.”

Since six. She’d been sitting in a parking garage longer than I’d been sitting in this bed.

I need to tell you what I did, or none of this makes sense.

In December of 2011, Mama was dying in the back bedroom of the farmhouse outside Hartford. I’d been taking care of her for fourteen months. Lorna lived in Tulsa with her husband and three boys and came home twice that year. I was tired and bitter, and I kept a list in my head of every Thanksgiving she missed.

On the last night, Mama woke up around midnight and said, “Call your sister.” I said, “I will, Mama. First thing in the morning.” Then I sat in the recliner and I didn’t call. I told myself it was late, that Lorna would just cry and upset her. The honest truth is that part of me wanted to be the only one there. The good daughter, start to finish.

Mama died at 4:50 that morning.

When Lorna got in the next afternoon, I told her I’d called and nobody picked up. Her husband Curtis checked her phone right there in the kitchen. No missed call. Not one.

She saved what she had to say for the funeral dinner in the fellowship hall, somewhere between the ham biscuits and the banana pudding. Then she drove back to Oklahoma, and that was that. Fifteen Christmases. My grandbaby’s baptism. I sent her birthday cards for years. They came back unopened.

So when Delphine asked if I wanted her to go find the lady in the garage, I couldn’t answer. I just nodded.

Russell got back first. He saw my face, saw the card, and said, “Well. Lord have mercy.” Then he went and stood by the window like he was guarding something.

Twenty minutes later Lorna walked in. She’s 59 now, gray hair cut short, wearing a Tulsa Drillers sweatshirt and holding a gas station coffee she’d clearly forgotten about hours ago. She stopped at the foot of my bed and looked at the IV pole like it might bite her.

“You look like Mama,” she said.

“You look like you slept in a Buick.”

“Chevy,” she said. Then she laughed, and so did I, and that’s how fifteen years started to come apart. Over a car joke.

She pulled the chair close and told me the rest.

The week before Mama died, while I was at the pharmacy, Mama had the hospice nurse dial Lorna’s number. They talked for almost an hour. Mama told her she was ready, told her the button jar was for the boys, told her the card was tucked in the back of her Bible.

And then Mama said, “Your sister is going to do something she’ll be ashamed of. She’s worn to the bone and she doesn’t know how jealous she is. When she does it, you forgive her. And when she needs you, give her that card back.”

“She knew?” I asked. “She knew I wouldn’t call?”

“She knew you,” Lorna said. “That’s worse.”

Here’s the part I can’t get over. Mama had already said goodbye to Lorna. The goodbye I believed I’d stolen, the one I carried around like a stone for fifteen years, I never stole at all. My mother made sure of that from her own deathbed, without saying a word to me, because she knew exactly who her girls were.

Lorna knew it too. She stayed angry anyway, because of the lie, and because, she admitted, being mad at me was easier than missing Mama.

“I almost didn’t come up,” she said. “Then I thought, she’s up there letting them put poison in her on purpose so she can live, and I’m down here scared of a conversation.”

I asked her about the yellow hair. She said she was six and wanted to look pretty for my get well card. We both cried at that, the ugly kind. Delphine came in to check my vitals and backed right out again.

Before Lorna left tonight, she grabbed a sticky note off the nurse’s cart, wrote GOAL: GO HOME, and stuck it on my pillow, right above the one on my whiteboard. “That one’s the hospital’s,” she said. “This one’s mine. When you’re done with this, you’re coming to Tulsa for Thanksgiving. You’ve missed fifteen. I’ve been counting.”

So I guess we both kept lists.

Russell took this picture right after. I’m holding the card, and I’m wearing Mama’s little cross, which I haven’t taken off since the diagnosis. That’s Biscuit on the nightstand, who is surely chewing Russell’s recliner as we speak. The water bottle covered in stickers is from my granddaughter Ellie, who says I have to drink all of it or the stickers will get sad.

I have a long road ahead. The doctors aren’t promising anything, and I’m not asking them to. But tonight I’m not scared the way I was at 3:40 this afternoon.

My mother has been gone fifteen years, and she still found a way to get a card to me right when I needed it.

Lorna’s driving back up Saturday. She says she’s bringing banana pudding, chemo or not, and I’d better be hungry.