How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

The chapter opens with Matt recovering at home following his surgery. Jong-Fast was anxiously awaiting pathology results that would determine his future treatment options and life trajectory. The chapter establishes how medical uncertainty transformed their existence into a series of statistical calculations about survival rates and life expectancy milestones.

When the pathology results arrived, Matt received a diagnosis of neuroendocrine cancer, which paradoxically represented both good and bad news. While this cancer type had better treatment prospects than other pancreatic cancers, the disease had spread to his lymph nodes, creating a 40-50% chance of recurrence. Jong-Fast reflects on how their lives began to revolve around percentages and mathematical probabilities regarding Matt’s presence at future family events.

The diagnosis triggered Jong-Fast’s deep-seated abandonment fears, rooted in her childhood experiences with unreliable parents. She had married Matt precisely because of his dependability and practical nature, never anticipating that cancer could threaten this security. The author traces Matt’s family history of cancer deaths, particularly among relatives who died in their fifties, which intensified her anxiety about becoming a widow.

Jong-Fast examines her relationship with privacy and boundaries, contrasting her approach with her mother’s invasive tendencies. She describes how her mother published a children’s book about Jong-Fast’s experience with her parents’ divorce, complete with inappropriate illustrations and racial stereotypes. This book, titled Megan’s Book of Divorce, was even adapted into a television pilot, demonstrating her mother’s willingness to exploit personal family situations for commercial purposes.

The narrative shifts between Matt’s ongoing medical complications and the deteriorating condition of Jong-Fast’s mother and stepfather. Between Erica’s dementia and Ken’s Parkinson’s disease, both elderly parents were suffering from progressive diseases but refused to acknowledge their conditions. Jong-Fast describes the challenging process of finding appropriate care facilities while managing the enormous financial burden of eldercare.

The chapter concludes with Jong-Fast’s recollection of her decision to enter rehab for alcohol addiction at age 19. She describes her final drinking episode and the conversation with her mother about seeking treatment. Despite her mother’s dismissive attitude, Jong-Fast successfully completed rehabilitation in Minnesota and has maintained her sobriety since 1997.

In this chapter, Jong-Fast describes the difficult process of placing her mother and stepfather in an expensive nursing facility as their diseases progressed. She characterizes herself as feeling like a child overwhelmed by adult responsibilities, meeting with various professionals while struggling to make decisions about her parents’ care. The author acknowledges her inability to directly name harsh realities, comparing her avoidance of saying “nursing home” to her difficulty saying “cancer” during her husband’s illness.

Jong-Fast presents her mother as a complex figure—someone she deeply loves but recognizes as deeply flawed. She describes her mother’s history of infidelity and alcohol addiction, suggesting these behaviors stemmed from childhood trauma that caused emotional dissociation. The author traces a pattern of dysfunction through generations, describing her grandmother, who had an alcohol addiction, as volatile and prone to public outbursts. This family history of mental illness and substance misuse created a cycle that affected Jong-Fast’s mother’s ability to maintain relationships and stay present in her own life.

The chapter explores the author’s conflicted feelings about her decision to place her parents in a facility. She admits to feeling like a bad daughter for not personally caring for them, but she also acknowledges that they were difficult parents who failed to provide adequate care during her childhood. Jong-Fast reveals that her father told her that even when she was a child, her mother could not manage to spend more than an hour with her, requiring the nanny’s intervention to encourage basic maternal interaction.

A significant portion of the chapter focuses on Jong-Fast’s mother’s literary career and its decline following a devastating lawsuit against Columbia Pictures over the film rights for Fear of Flying. The author’s friend Kathy, who is developing a movie about this legal battle, provides an outsider’s perspective that the lawsuit’s failure destroyed Erica’s career prospects in Hollywood’s unforgiving industry.

Jong-Fast reflects on her own sobriety and fame, contrasting her willingness to openly discuss her recovery with her mother’s excuse that she was too famous to get sober and consistently attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The chapter concludes with the author dealing with practical matters like selling her parents’ valuable book collection while simultaneously receiving devastating news about her husband’s cancer progression.

Jong-Fast confronts the harsh reality of her parents’ financial irresponsibility while simultaneously dealing with multiple family health crises. The author discovered that her mother and stepfather had been living far beyond their means, spending extravagantly on luxury items like sailboats, private planes, and expensive cars while failing to secure their financial future. Despite appearing wealthy throughout Jong-Fast’s childhood, her parents depleted their resources and accumulated debt, leaving Jong-Fast to handle the estate’s liquidation and dismiss household staff.

The chapter reveals Jong-Fast’s transformation into the family’s most responsible member. She describes inheriting the burden of managing her parents’ affairs, including selling their possessions through auction houses like Sotheby’s and later Doyle, when the former deemed her mother’s belongings insufficiently valuable.

Multiple devastating health diagnoses created overlapping crises. Jong-Fast’s beloved godmother, Gerri, called to announce that she had blood cancer, delivering the news while Erica sat nearby in a state of confusion, unable to process the information. Meanwhile, Jong-Fast’s husband Matt had received his own cancer diagnosis and faced an uncertain prognosis, requiring meetings with oncologists. The author began questioning whether she somehow attracted tragedy, wondering if she served as a harbinger of misfortune for those around her.

Despite these circumstances, Jong-Fast attempted to maintain normalcy by planning a family spring break trip to Los Angeles. However, the vacation became another source of stress when Matt’s condition worsened, and he required immediate medical intervention. Jong-Fast found herself torn between staying with her husband and continuing the planned trip with their children.

The chapter includes a detailed flashback to a previous Los Angeles visit that illustrates her mother’s alcohol addiction. During that earlier trip, her mother became intoxicated at a business dinner, suffered a fall, and later passed out while babysitting Jong-Fast’s children by the hotel pool. This incident forced Jong-Fast to confront the ongoing danger her mother’s drinking posed to the family and reinforced her decision to limit her children’s exposure to their grandmother’s behavior.

Jong-Fast reflects on her current membership in what she calls the “Wives of Cancer-Husbands Club” (135), a designation she reluctantly accepts. Through conversations with her friend Dana, who lost her husband Chuck to cancer, Jong-Fast glimpsed a potential future she desperately wanted to avoid. The chapter concludes with Jong-Fast’s internal struggle between accepting her new reality and clinging to hopes of a normal family life, highlighting the psychological toll of watching multiple loved ones face serious illnesses simultaneously.