Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (43 page)

42

MOLLY ATTENDED HER LAST CWA CONFERENCE IN
2005.

As she became increasingly frail she nonetheless remained determined to do as many of the things she had been deferring for when she had more time as she could—and, of course, to do them on her terms.

She could be remarkably intransigent once she resolved to do—or not do—something. Two trips in particular loomed large. She very much wanted to return to France. The other wish was to take a ten-day Colorado River rafting trip through the Grand Canyon.

A little more than a year after 9/11 Molly went back to Paris for Thanksgiving. It was her position that 2002 was the safest time to travel. It broke my heart to decline her invitation to join her and friends from New York, Austin, and New Orleans, but by then my ninety-seven-year-old mother's health was steadily deteriorating and I could not be away.

The Thanksgiving crew was joined by Nicole Concordet, Molly's godchild and daughter of Molly's former classmate Susan. Susan married French architect Jean Concordet and has remained in France for more than twenty-five years. She couldn't participate in the party because she had to tend to Jean, who was dying of cancer.

Molly was once again in the city she so loved. On this trip she regaled the assembled crew with what has to be one of the funniest post-mastectomy stories ever. In it she described her 2001 quest to buy a prosthetic breast, since the only one she had was in her luggage, which had failed to arrive with her (a note: always take a change of underwear in your carry-on, even if it has to get stuffed in the bottom of a big purse).

She had me peeing my pants laughing when she recounted her efforts to buy a replacement for her prosthesis. At first she decided to just do without until her luggage arrived, but Susan assured her that in France no one would understand a woman whose breasts weren't properly balanced and insisted that she buy a replacement forthwith.

Susan located a store where this particular item could be found and Molly set out. But her familiarity with the language had not kept pace with the evolution of vernacular French, and the clerk, completely misunderstanding her needs, presented a padded bra. Not quite. Molly tried again, stumbling for the words, gesturing, pointing dramatically at her flat chest, thereby creating an “aha” moment for the slightly frazzled saleswoman, who rushed back to the storeroom and returned with nipples and a baby bottle. By now both were just about wired for sound.

At last Molly summoned up something that sounded enough like “reconstruction
anatomique; prothèse
” to drive her message home. “Eh bien,” the clerk said with a smile. And several francs later, off Molly went with her new breast-in-a-bra. Of course by the time she returned to the Ile St.-Louis flat where she was staying, her luggage had arrived.

43

IT IS SAID THAT IF YOU PAY ATTENTION
you can learn from your children. Since I had only one, I learned to listen perhaps more carefully than others. As a result, I'm incredibly indebted to my daughter and chief cheerleader, who wept with me and thousands of others as they learned of Molly's way-too-early god-awful death.

The news took me back to the weekend I visited in 1999. Molly had been fighting what she diagnosed as a rotten sinus infection, but it was clear from a wickedly relentless cough that whatever was plaguing her had gone to her chest. I suspected a really bad case of bronchitis.

Unable to get her to see a doctor, Hope Reyna made a stealth call. I was living in Dallas at the time. Hope suggested that I do one of my spontaneous weekend drop-ins and try to persuade Molly to stop treating herself. She was a heavy smoker, and there was no way that cough was doing her lungs any good.

The problem: as those who knew her realize, Molly didn't do anything unless she wanted to. Nagging could never work, and she would have been royally pissed had she sensed a conspiracy brewing behind her back. As a charter member of the nothing-ventured-nothing-gained society, I hopped in my little Nissan and made the three-and-a-half-hour drive south to the People's Republic of Austin.

When I arrived she sat slumped at one end of the leather sofa in her living room, shades uncharacteristically drawn, room darkened. The coughing was awful. She looked up long enough to say I should have called first, something she'd never suggested before, and that she didn't want anyone in the house,
that she just wanted to be alone—also something that in all the years we had known one another she had never said to me.

Employing the time-honored technique of 20/20 hindsight, I suspect she knew she had something serious but didn't want the doctor to confirm her suspicions. So I went to Malcolm Greenstein's house, dropped my bag, and headed for the grocery store to buy ingredients for chicken soup.

Surely
my
chicken soup would help her turn the corner.

Surely.

While shopping I also bought a mess of those two-cup microwavable plastic containers, the better to freeze manageable portions. That way she'd have a bit available until whenever whatever she had was vanquished.

But there was no casting out this demon.

When she finally saw a physician, the news was as bad as it gets: a highly aggressive stage 3 inflammatory carcinoma of the left breast. After the initial diagnosis, there followed the appropriate gnashing of teeth, cursing the gods, shedding of tears, and hoping for the best. Although a number of engagements had to be canceled, Molly, being Molly, endured surgery and treatment and steered her life back to relative normalcy within a year, eventually returning to writing, traveling, and speaking. We thought she'd wrestled that booger into submission.

So we thought. But damned if it didn't return in 2003. And because she figured she was a better judge of her limitations than her doctors were, she decided to go fishing. Fishing led to swimming. Swimming led to torn stitches and an infection around her implants, thereby requiring more surgery to, at her instruction, remove them altogether.

Mol had already opted to, as she so delicately put it, “lop off the other tit” to maintain better equilibrium. “Who wants to be lopsided?” she asked in a moment of rhetorical whimsy. “Not me. Make that ‘not I.' I'm a Published Arthur. I should know grammar better.”

The third recurrence, in 2005, was anything but a charm. It took two years to take her out, though, and she went fighting to the end, finally dispensing altogether with the very expensive wig occasionally worn at curiously odd angles.

In the end, Molly got both wishes. She saw Paris one last time and she did the Colorado River Grand Canyon tour in 2006. For that grand event she gathered friends of long standing, many of whom had shared river adventures with
her for twenty-five years—from five-day floats on the Rio Grande to lesser sojourns on the San Gabriel. These were not just river floats; they were historical reviews as well.

Participants would make a point of identifying the place near where Cortés landed in the sixteenth century and began his conquest of Mexico, or where Pancho Villa made his last raid into the United States. River rats could regale you with unanticipated adventures—like the night the camp was awakened by a herd of wild burros thundering through, near enough to the campsite to get everyone's undivided attention.

If only Molly were here now, she could tell the story of how she, highly accomplished at the oars, once volunteered to take Frank Cooksey, Austin's mayor at the time, on a canoe ride through the Barton Creek watershed to make the point that the watershed was worth preserving. The water was unusually high and in an unfortunate miscalculation, a low-hanging branch promptly knocked the mayor unconscious.

She could tell you about far-flung adventures through Santa Elena Canyon, where you could decamp and watch a full moon rise over the canyon's sheer walls, with only the sounds of rushing water, coyote howls, and tops popping off longnecks to disrupt the quiet.

I couldn't afford the Grand Canyon trip—the only camping expedition I really wanted to go on. I knew it would be Molly's last. She knew it too. There was much concern over her even considering such a strenuous adventure. Her health had become increasingly fragile.

Once again, I was asked if I thought I could dissuade her. No way, I insisted. It meant too much to her. I figured if they had a Make-A-Wish program for children, adults should be able to create their own. This was Molly's Make-A-Wish river trip.

Votes among her friends were all over the place. Some said yes, some said no. Molly's rejoinder was, “What's it gonna do, kill me?”

Here's how Dave Richards remembers it.

“I got a call from Molly. She had been in the hospital around the first of the year. We had talked off and on about doing a trip through the Grand Canyon—in fact, she had previously applied for and received a permit to raft it. She'd bought about eight cases of beer and eight quarts of brandy, but for some reason never pulled it off.

“Anyway, she was determined to make it this time. She called Fran Ulmer, who had been on another rafting trip with her, and some other folks and Sandy and me. When she said, ‘If I'm still alive, will you promise to go?' I said, ‘Of course.' I saw Molly shortly after that conversation and began to debate whether it was realistic for us to plan this trip.