MARGARET BENSHOOF-HOLLER

Mother's life and death: A Wyoming mystery

THE HOOT of an owl alerted my sister that death might be imminent in our family. If you believe in superstition, the sound of the death bird means someone is going to die.

It hooted outside my sister's window near Meteetsee, Wyo., the night before my mother had a cancerous lobe removed from her lung. Doctors also removed 10 malignant lymph nodes.

My mother never smoked a cigarette in her life. But both of her husbands were heavy smokers, and she lived for more than 60 years with second-hand smoke.

My sisters, my brother and I are at a greater risk than many for developing lung cancer, they say, because we grew up breathing smoke-filled air.

"What about genetics? Couldn't that also contributed to my mother's cancer?" I asked my accupuncturist in San Francisco.

"Nobody has fully proved that cancer is genetic," she told me. "If one lives in a house with a person who worries or carries anger, one can develop the same patterns," she said. "Incessant worrying can cause cancer. In that way, it's a product of the environment."

On my next visit to my mother's house, I arrived with a notebook in hand. I already knew my mother was a worrier, and I began to document what other patterns I might have missed.

"People here don't want to change," a woman in a cowboy hat at the airport in Cody told me while I waited for my luggage.

My mother was no exception.

Things were just so in her kitchen. Everything was spotlessly clean. She still used the same cake pan that she used 40 years ago. It was like new, its bottom unblackened.

I told her on that visit, "You should put a 100-watt bulb in your lamp socket so you can read. What you have is not good for your eyes."

She answered, "I'm not going to go changing my bulbs because somebody comes to my house and tells me I should."

My mother did things one way. I did them another.

I could tell something was eating her on that visit the same way I used to feel eaten up when I had to stifle who I was while growing up in Wyoming.

"Almost everyone I talk to now has cancer," my mother told me the morning after I arrived.

My sister heard Paul Harvey say on the radio that the Big Horn Basin, where Cody lies in northwestern Wyoming, has a higher incidence of cancer per capita than any place in the country.

When they move to Wyoming from states like California, most people think it's a quiet place to get away from the city life and pollution. But my brother-in-law heard on the History Channel that if you grew up in northwestern Wyoming in the '50s or '60s and now find yourself with pancreatic cancer, it could be because of the government's atomic bomb testing in Nevada.

When she was diagnosed with cancer, my mother rode in a 15-person van 100 miles every day to Billings, Mont., to get radiation treatment. So did two men. That was before they built the radiation center in Cody.

"What kind of cancer to the men you ride with have?" I asked my mother.

"I don't know. One of them told me his life history. But we don't talk about cancer," she said.

My mother didn't talk about her cancer just as she never talked about sex when I came of age in the '60s.

After I started my first period, the book, "For Girls Only," appeared on my pillow along with a sanitary belt and a box of Kotex. They raised more questions than they provided answers.

Mother left my father after putting up with years of physical abuse, according to her divorce certificate. She never talked about that sort of thing.

The gap between her world and mine was wide. She didn't want her world to change. I set out to change the way I talked and thought each time I got on a plane to head to exotic places like Jakarta, Madrid, Malmo.

Cancer narrowed the gap between my mother and me.

I listened to her cough on that visit and the many that followed. I thought about how cigarette smoke might have killed her. I took note of how her house's central heating and lack of circulating air made me want to open windows. I noticed when she smiled and laughed. I saw her eyes begin to cloud with worry.

Now that she's gone, I cook in her 60-year old cast-iron pots with unblackened bottoms. I serve food on her white-flowered china. It no longer matters much whether genes or the environment are the reason why she's gone.

More important to me now is that I miss her.