The first treatment was on Thursday.
I drove her.
I sat with her in the infusion room for five hours, which was the time the first session took, and I watched my mother undergo the specific experience of chemotherapy, which is the experience of lying in a chair while a bag of something powerful and expensive drips into your arm, your body both fighting and surrendering, and which produces in the people watching it a particular helplessness.
I could not do the thing I needed to do.
I could not take the cancer out of her.
I could bring her tea.
I could hold her hand when the nausea started, which it did, thirty minutes into the session, the specific wave of it that chemotherapy patients learn to recognize.
She said: I’m sorry.
I said: Mom.
She said: this is not pleasant for you.
I said: it’s less pleasant for you.
She said: I’m sorry.
I said: stop.
She looked at me.
She said: I don’t know how to.
I said: I know.
She said: it’s very hard to let people help.
I said: I know.
She said: your father never had to let anyone help him. He died before he needed it.
I said: yes.
She said: I envy him sometimes.
I said: Mom.
She said: not for being dead. For not having to be the one who is helped.
I said: yes.
I held her hand.
The bag dripped.
The infusion room was quiet and efficiently organized and the nurses moved through it with the practiced care of people who had been doing this work long enough that the efficiency and the care had become the same thing.
My mother slept through the last two hours.
I watched her sleep and I thought about the seventy years of her life and what they had contained and what I knew about them and what I didn’t, and I thought about the specific privilege of being present for the part that was happening now, the hard part, the part she would have preferred to have without witnesses.
But she had me.
She had me as a witness.
That had to be worth something.
The trip was announced two weeks into her stay.
It was a business trip, four days, a series of meetings in Seattle that I could not reschedule because they involved external clients and a timeline that had been set before my mother’s diagnosis and that could not be moved without significant professional consequence.
