In 1984, I came to fully understand a terrible word: cancer.

My mother, Darleen, and I had been apart for several years. When I was six, she’d run off on my stepfather, abandoning my older sister Debbie and me with him as she went off to have fun and shirk her responsibilities. She did it again later on, and I remember when she left.

“Where are you going, Mama?” I asked.

“To the store,” she replied.

“Will you get me a Hershey bar?”

She promised she would. I can still see that moment as clear as if it happened yesterday: We were in the kitchen of our apartment, and she bent over with puckered lips bright with red lipstick, giving me a kiss. Then she headed out the door with her purse in hand. She didn’t return for six months, having run off to Florida, once again leaving us with our stepfather. The day she returned, she had the Hershey bar.

My father got custody of us soon after, and we moved in with him and his wife, her daughter, and their daughter. It wasn’t a perfect life; my father was a grumpy Irishman, and my stepmother mostly didn’t like Debbie and me. Life was mostly miserable, with a stepmother who favored her daughter, who could do no wrong; a shared youngest child who got all the attention; and my sister and I trapped in a family that felt at the least loveless and at most hateful. And all the while, I rarely thought about what my real mother had done, or where she was or what she was doing. Not consciously, anyway; but not far beneath the surface, I stewed in feelings of rejection and abandonment, always wondering why I’d been cast aside so carelessly and left in a family that seemed to be doing the same thing to me every day.

I began seeing my mother after about seven years. It was awkward in one sense, because I always wanted to ask her why she abandoned us—no, that isn’t right. It wasn’t important to me why she had, just that she could admit that it was a stupid move. From the start of those visits, I had no doubt my mother loved me. I still wanted answers.

The visits were good, even as my relationship with my father and stepmother deteriorated. I think it changed for good the day my stepmother smacked me across the face, and I, now much larger than her, finally slapped her back. It went downhill from there, and soon I relocated to my mother’s house about a half-hour away. I was fourteen, and not even a month into my freshman year of high school.

It was like a new beginning, but there was always that old business. I knew that I had to eventually talk to my mother about what she’d done. I just never knew how to bring it up. The time would come, I knew. I was young. I had decades ahead of me to have that talk.

It was later that freshman year, in 1984, that everything changed. I remember when she visited the town doctor to figure out what the firm mass was under her right front shoulder. It was putting pressure on her from behind her breast, and the doctor sent her for tests. She’d had it for many years, she told me—ever since she’d taken a fall while pregnant with me and suffered a serious bruise there that firmed up and, over time, got larger. I’d eventually deal with some guilt over that, even though I knew intellectually that it wasn’t my fault. Right then, however, I had to focus my concerns on what mattered.

That mass turned out to be a malignant tumor the size of a softball, and it had to be removed, along with her right breast. I was in cooking class that spring day when the guidance-office secretary came to tell me that my mother was out of surgery, and everything was all right. Later, it would become terribly obvious that, despite the secretary’s report, everything was not all right at all.

It wasn’t like Mom was going to die—surely not, because when you’re fourteen, your parents don’t die from cancer or anything else. It just wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Despite that teenage world view, that intellectual part of me managed to override the emotional part enough to instill in me an urgent desire to get that overdue talk out of the way—just in case. That summer, we finally had that talk. I don’t remember why we had it, but I remember how we were seated at the kitchen table. I remember that it was a sunny day, and I remember somehow slipping into the subject. It was like the day she left, and that memory of her red-lipsticked face puckering up to kiss me good-bye as she claimed to be heading for the store: burned in my brain forever.

I remember asking her why she left us like she had.

“David, I was so messed up,” she said. Her face was guilty and tired and ashamed, but she looked me in the eye and broke it all down. She made no excuses; she just offered explanations, however weak and unfortunate they were. She owned up to making so many mistakes in her life. The talk was longer than that, but it was good. We cleared the air. She took complete responsibility. She showed sincere regret. And she promised she’d never abandon me again.

But she would, through no fault of her own. But not before I would abandon her.

Whatever microscopic bit the surgeon had missed when he excised the tumor began spreading through her body like wildfire, and before we knew it, her life was spent in and out of the hospital. She’d go for radiation treatments regularly, and every two weeks she’d have chemotherapy. The chemo made her horribly sick; she’d spend ten days after each session vomiting black bile and pulling her hair out in clumps. She’d just get to the point where she could keep ood down and it would be time for another treatment. Inevitably, she started landing in the hospital for extended stays as she got worse, then got better, and the cycle would repeat. It was an absolutely vicious thing for a human being to endure.

We didn’t have much of a support system. Mom, her boyfriend Ted, and I all lived in an apartment; my sister, Debbie, lived in Massachusetts, and came to Maine whenever she could. I was a kid who didn’t know how to deal with my feelings, but I sure knew how to bottle them up.

Mom had a friend, Agnes, who lived in our building. Agnes was going through her own cancer battle. Agnes was an older woman, in her sixties, and she had no family or other friends. Mom spent time with Agnes whenever she could, and was a phone friend when Agnes was in the hospital. I remembered thinking how wrong it was for this woman to not have anyone else except another cancer patient to lean on. I was fifteen when Agnes met the end of her life in agony and misery, in a hospital all alone, without even my mother to be there with her. It was overwhelmingly sad when I thought about it, and I tried so very hard not to think about it.

I couldn’t, though, because Agnes was just the prologue of what was to come. Mom was in and out of the hospital as she worsened. I attended vocational school in Bangor in the afternoon of my junior year, when Mom was in the hospital a lot more. I’d often visit her after school, on days when I didn’t have to work at my job downtown. It was hard to deal with seeing her that sick. The only support person we had was an occasional social worker. It wasn’t enough.

My dad and I had never been close. Like fathers and sons often do, we’d had our rough patches—and they’d get rougher over the next couple of years before they got better. But when I visited him one day when Mom was in the hospital and not doing well, he took me aside for a father-son talk. I’d never seen my old man cry until that day. He looked me in the eye as he fought back his tears and told me how I couldn’t waste any time—that if I didn’t do and say all I had to, I’d end up saying “I wish, I wish” for the rest of my life. But I knew I had nothing to say “I wish” for; I’d had the all-important conversation. My mother and I had squared up.

I guess I was only seeing it from my perspective. I felt better about my mother and me. But did she? Did she wonder if I still harbored resentment towards her? I didn’t, but what if she wasn’t sure? That question never crossed my mind when it should have.

Mom finally made the decision to stop the treatments. She knew she’d have less time to live, but she was tired of having treatments that made her so sick. The cure was worse than the disease, as they say. But this was no cure; it was merely prolonging the inevitable. She didn’t want to do that anymore.

I was sixteen when she went back into the hospital again, and I visited her after school one day—I walked there from vocational school, in fact, where I spent my high-school afternoons working on computers. She was in bad shape, asleep and on pain meds, her face gray and tired, he breathing shallow and slight. The social worker was there.

“She looks so peaceful,” I said.

“I’m sure she’d love to see you,” the social worker said. “We can wake her.”

“No—let her sleep,” I said, and it bugged me that I did. I’d walked there. I’d be walking several miles home that evening. I knew she would want me to wake her. I just didn’t. I told myself she was tired and weak and needed the rest. I’d come back I the morning, I told the social worker. Maybe that evening. There would always be another day. I’d be there for her then.

I wish I’d woken her. I wish I’d sat there and held her hand. I wish she hadn’t been all alone, like Agnes, with nobody to comfort and love her. But she wasn’t like Agnes; she had family and friends. But nobody was there that night. Ted was working, and would be back late and not get to the hospital that night. Debbie had gone home to Massachusetts less than a week before. I was it. And I wasn’t there.

I was staying with my friend Maggie, who was sort of a foster mother. I remember being on the phone with my best friend, Dave, when Maggie was heading to the hospital to see my mother. She kept trying to get me off the phone to go with her, but I kept stalling. I was afraid to go see my mother—afraid to sit there with her when she was awake and in pain and so miserable. I kept stalling until Maggie finally had enough.

“So are you coming with me, or do you just not give a shit?” she said.

It was tough love. It should have worked. It didn’t. I sassed back, made excuses, and let her leave without me. As soon as she was gone, I said to Dave on the phone, “I don’t know why I didn’t go with her. I just have a terrible feeling my mother’s going to die tonight.”

I didn’t even know where that came from, why I’d said it. I didn’t really believe it. I just felt guilty about standing up my very sick mother. But it was okay; I’d go see her the next day, and the next day. And the next.

When the phone rang at one-fifteen in the morning, I came awake and leaped off the couch. Somehow I knew before I answered. It was Mom’s doctor, and he told me my mother had passed away. I dropped the phone in shock.

I came apart after. Soon, Maggie’s boyfriend Al, a nurse, came over and took me for a ride. He asked me where I wanted to go, and I said, “To the hospital.”

He was quiet as we drove through the night. “Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. My mother had died alone, and I should have been there. I had to go to see her one last time. It was my only shot at redemption.

But there could be none. I stood there in her room, looking at her lifeless body, hoping against hope that her chest would rise and fall. Al placed comforting hands on my shoulders as I cried there, a sixteen-year-old kid who had no idea what to do or how to feel. All I could think of was that I hadn’t been there for her. She’d lived a messed-up life. She’d made mistakes and tried to atone for them. And she was alone when she died, with the son she might have thought never forgave her. Maybe she thought I’d abandoned her, as she had abandoned me. Maybe she thought I was hateful or vengeful or without love for her. Maybe she thought I didn’t really love her. After all, a son who loves his mother would have been there for her when he had that gut feeling that that night would be her last.

My father tried to tell me. Don’t be left saying “I wish, I wish,” he told me. We say “I wish” because we didn’t do what we should have, and it’s too late.

Sometimes I can’t escape the memory of that night, and the regret and sorrow and agony flows in and makes me blubber like a scared little boy. That’s something nobody should ever have to endure. I’ll spend the rest of my life imagining my mother’s pain and suffering as she died all alone, and wonder what she thought and what she felt.

I wish, I wish…

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.