Sy Saliba talks to his daughter, Yvette, about her mother, Pat, who passed away from multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in 2005.
Originally aired May 14, 2010 on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Transcript
Sy Saliba SS: We got married in, um, 68. We were poor as church mice. We celebrated our anniversary—our first month I took her to, um, a Shuler’s steakhouse, which was kind of like the ultimate eating place. We spent the, all of $12—that was our entire month’s grocery bill in those days and we spent it all on that evening. And I mean she fretted with me all the way home how wanton and extravagant we were to do that.
Yvette Saliba (YS): Did you ever question your decision to marry mom?
SS: No. It was kind of like our spirits merged and we were kind of like soul mates and we kind of became one.
YS: So what went through your mind then when she became sick?
SS: It was like we were in two canoes on a stream and all of a sudden there was a split—a fork in the stream—and she took one line and I took the other and for a long time we would paddle together, you know? We could hold hands. Gradually the streams kind of moved away and we could no longer hold hands but we could look at each other and talk to each other. And then we got further and further away until we just lost each other.
YS: As a daughter, watching her go through that…she still maintained a sense of optimism. Was that something I guess she…put on for her children?
SS: It was who she was. She’d find her little oasis, little things that she could look forward to, trips or moments that she could plan to go through the chemotherapy or to go through the bone marrow transplant.
YS: I remember when they told us that there was nothing else they could do, we were in the hospital and I just remember coming back in the room and just seeing you with mum and neither of your were saying anything but you were just looking at each other for a very long time. And I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if he told her, I wonder if he told her that that was it.’
SS: You know, I don’t remember the sequence but what I do remember is we never talked about what would happen. She was concerned about what would happen to me after she died—how I would manage, how I would survive—and she was concerned that I would always remember her and not forget and she said that to me. And it’s hard to forget her because she sculpted a life in you. You are her handiwork and um, whenever I look at you I remember your mother.