I had been telling her to stop apologizing for forty years.
She had not stopped.
I am her daughter.
My name is Sara Choi-Bennett, which is the name I took when I married Gabriel, attached to the name I was born with because I refused to give it up entirely, which was a compromise that Gabriel had found unnecessarily complicated.
He wanted me to be Sara Bennett.
I became Sara Choi-Bennett.
That was the first negotiation of our marriage, and it told me something about who he was, and I had told myself it was about names rather than about something larger.
I was not entirely correct about this.
Gabriel Bennett and I had been married for nine years when my mother’s diagnosis arrived.
Stage three breast cancer.
The oncologist was a woman named Dr. Reyes who had the quality of good oncologists, which is the quality of someone who delivers terrible news clearly and without excessive softening, because excessive softening suggests the information is too terrible to be held by the person receiving it, and Dr. Reyes understood that my mother was someone who could hold terrible information and who needed it straight.
She said: the survival rates at this stage with this treatment protocol are encouraging.
She said: the treatment is aggressive. She is going to need support.
My mother said: I’ll manage.
Dr. Reyes said: Mrs. Park, managing alone during chemotherapy is not advisable.
My mother said: I’ve managed alone before.
My mother had managed alone for nineteen years, since my father died.
She had managed alone in the specific way of a woman who has made herself into a self-sufficient system, who has organized her daily life around what she can do without help so that the question of needing help does not arise.
I said: you’re staying with me.
She said: Sara.
I said: you’re staying with us.
She said: I don’t want to be in the way.
I said: you’re not in the way.
She said: Gabriel.
She said his name with the specific question in it of someone who has spent nine years in the presence of a man who made her feel like a guest rather than a member of the family.
I said: I’ve already talked to Gabriel.
