The Cost of Loving Me ~ Guest Writer Lisa Tannert

Lisa, contemplating and communing with her best friend, her mother.

The Cost of Loving Me

By Lisa Tannert

“If you die, I’ll drink again.”

It was just a thought, and not even true, but I knew the power those words held.

I sat beside my mother’s hospital bed. She was unrecognizable after a brutal year—she had

endured heavy doses of chemo and an autologous bone marrow transplant meant to prevent her

T-cell lymphoma from returning. She was cancer-free, but the chemo had irreparably damaged

her heart. Her dark hair had grown back gray, and she was bone-thin except for her stomach,

where a feeding tube was attached. Her midsection now resembled a sandbag, and I knew she’d

never walk again.

Saying the words would have been unthinkably cruel. Mom was suffering. I had to let her go, as

she had finally let me go. But the words still sprang to mind because I knew she’d stay if she

believed I needed her. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. She was my best friend.

The words floated around the room like red gift-shop balloons, bright spots of hope tethered to

my need and Mom’s fear. She and I were co-dependent long before either of us had language for

it. I gave her purpose. She kept me from changing. To this day, many years later, I sometimes

wonder whether she’d still be here if I’d said them. Had she honestly conceded her

powerlessness over me—and my addiction? Or did she consider my sobriety her crowning

achievement?

After Mom died, her cousin, the minister who had officiated her services, told me not to blame

myself—something that would never have occurred to me. I had always blamed Mom for my

problems. Was I the cause of hers? Had the mental anxiety and torment that coursed through her

life, courtesy of me, manifested physically in a cancer that swept through her body? I knew, as

suddenly as a balloon popping, that the endless worry, the grinding vigilance of loving an addict

she couldn’t save, and the long-term emotional overload of carrying my pain had taken their toll.

She’d absorbed grief, fear, resentment, and sorrow that weren’t hers to bear, depleting her life

force—not because she wanted control, as I had thought, but because she wanted to keep me alive.

Somewhere in that long devotion, her body had learned what her spirit could not yet say: that

love without limits erodes the self, and that survival cannot forever be a shared occupation. Her

lymphoma symbolized the cost of never standing down, of a nervous system that never stopped

scanning for danger. She absorbed consequences, anticipated disasters, and cushioned impact,

mistaking attentiveness for a sacred duty and endurance for grace.

What bound us together also kept us from becoming whole, and the cost of that closeness was

quietly paid over time, in ways neither of us chose. Her lymphoma was a tragic yet clarifying

insistence on sovereignty, when the spirit had been too loyal, too entwined, too self-sacrificing to

ask for it outright. So yes, her disease began with me—with her response to my addiction.

I can’t prove this belief, and I’m not sure I want to. Guilt is persuasive that way. It offers

meaning where randomness does not, and responsibility where grief would otherwise have

nowhere to land. There’s no denying that my addiction dominated Mom’s days and nights for

years. It gave Mom’s lymphoma a landscape in which to take root.She didn’t choose her role, any more than I chose to be an addict, but over time, that posture—

the watching, the worrying, the readiness for the next call that might break her became

embodied. The lymphatic system, which is about boundaries, flow, and immunity, carried what

her spirit refused to release.

She lived for my survival; carried my fear as if it were her own, until her body could no longer

tell the difference.

I beat my addiction.

She did not survive what loving me cost her.

That is the sad, cruel truth: the thing that nearly killed me took her instead. It ruled her

life, and in the end, she lost to it. I live with that knowledge not as blame, or guilt, but as

reckoning—because love saved me, and love exhausted her, and both can be true at once.

You can find Lisa on her Substack:

https://substack.com/@lisatannert