A Care Package for Easter

A slip in my dorm mailbox indicated that I had a package, so I walked out to the front desk. No friends had told me to expect mail. I was wondering what it could be when the guy behind the counter handed me a large box wrapped in shiny purple paper. Its size was surprising, but the labels stunned me. My mother had spent much of the past month in the hospital. Her perfect handwriting was the last I expected.

Mom's breast cancer was diagnosed late in the spring of 1996. She didn't tell me until the end of the school year, my junior year in high school, because she didn't want to distract me before finals. That's how she thought. She started chemotherapy that summer and had a mastectomy in December. Next came radiation treatment. And radiation burn. In early 1997 it seemed as though the treatment could be as bad as the disease.

Then came the turnaround. I can't pinpoint a date, but it was probably March. She was still weak, still resting a lot, but she was reemerging from the sickness. Post-chemo, her memory came back. She started enjoying books again. She cooked. She became not only her old self but better. She was like a walking ad for "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff." We talked a lot. It made for a nice spring.

I went to college that August. Mom was fine then. In November she turned 47. A couple of weeks later she mentioned that her back hurt. This came up a few times, and when I was home at Christmas I drove her to the doctor.

Part of me wonders if I would have seen it coming if I hadn't gone away to school. I talked to her on the phone several times a week, and I wrote, but I didn't see her, and she was so good at sheltering me, so practiced at keeping from me things she didn't want me to know.

The tumors were on her spine. I remember fumbling with the word "metastasized," taking her to more doctor's appointments and picking up prescriptions. Radiation treatments were scheduled. I worried, but she insisted that I go back to school, that she would be fine.

I believed her, possibly out of habit, even when she sounded weak.

And this time she sounded very different. I bought the explanation that this was a different type of cancer, requiring more aggressive treatment, and she'd been through so much in the past year. In February, I think it was, fluid crept into her lungs. She sounded so much older when she coughed. She checked into the hospital, where they gave her pills for the fluid, and she was discharged after a few days.

In March the fluid returned, and she went back to the hospital. This time the pills didn't work as well, and she stayed longer. I talked to her every few days, and last I had heard she was slowly improving.

So the big purple box seemed logistically impossible.

When I got to my room I set the box on my bed. I cut off the part of the purple paper with my address for my scrapbook. Pulling back one flap of the box, I saw a white handle. The basket I lifted out was rectangular, eight or nine inches wide, and maybe 18 inches long. Some of the flowers spray-painted on the side were purple, my favorite color. The bottom was stuffed -- stuffed -- with green plastic grass, which was itself littered with Hershey's kisses and Miniatures, wrapped in Easter pastels.

This meant that Mom either forgot or didn't care that I had given up candy as a new year's resolution.

I started eating as I felt through the grass. There were two picture frames. A sky-blue square frame with white magnolia-like flowers along the top and an adorable bee on the side won my heart instantly. The other was a traditional rectangle with roses on each side and green and gold trim. "Eh," I thought, and kept digging.

There were green satin pajamas with purple roses and a short-sleeve cream top. Not long before, I had signed up for yoga classes and bought a pair of olive pants with a beige stripe down the side. "They're really cute," I had told Mom. "But I don't know what to wear them with." She asked exactly what color the stripe was and said that maybe we could find something when I went home.

The shirt and the pajamas fit perfectly. Actually, they still do. I wear them infrequently so as not to wear them out.

Mom died April 22, 1998, about two weeks after Easter. The basket she sent is in my room at my father's home. The green frame, which I have since grown attached to, holds a picture of me and a friend. The blue square frame is in my living room, holding a picture of her.

The writer is assistant editor of The Post's editorial page.