My mother is the kind of woman who apologizes for being sick.<\/p>\n
I said: I\u2019ve already talked to Gabriel.<\/p>\n
This was technically true.<\/p>\n
I had talked to Gabriel.<\/p>\n
He had said he wasn\u2019t thrilled but he hadn\u2019t objected.<\/p>\n
He had said: she\u2019s not going to be here for long, right?<\/p>\n
I had said: for as long as she needs to be.<\/p>\n
He had said: I just need to know there\u2019s an end date.<\/p>\n
I had said: Gabriel, she has cancer. I don\u2019t have an end date.<\/p>\n
He had been quiet.<\/p>\n
Then he had said: all right. Fine.<\/p>\n
That was the conversation I had in mind when I told my mother I had talked to Gabriel.<\/p>\n
The guest room on the first floor was the obvious choice.<\/p>\n
It was directly across from the\u00a0\u00a0bathroom<\/span><\/a>, which mattered enormously because chemotherapy produces a relationship with the bathroom that requires proximity, the specific urgent relationship of a body that is being treated with something powerful and that responds to that treatment in various unpleasant ways.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The room had a window that looked onto the backyard.<\/p>\n My mother had always liked the backyard.<\/p>\n We had a garden, which I maintained without particular skill but with genuine pleasure, and she would sometimes sit and watch me work in it when she visited, offering suggestions in the careful way of a woman who does not want to overstep but who cannot help knowing more about gardening than I do.<\/p>\n I brought her to the house on a Monday.<\/p>\n She had one suitcase and a small bag with her medications.<\/p>\n She apologized for the medications.<\/p>\n She apologized for the suitcase.<\/p>\n She told me the suitcase was probably too much and she could have packed lighter.<\/p>\n I said: Mom.<\/p>\n She said: I\u2019m just saying.<\/p>\n I said: you can bring as much as you want. This is your room.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n She looked at the guest room.<\/p>\n She said: it\u2019s a nice room.<\/p>\n She said it with the specific appreciation of someone who is trying to let themselves have something without immediately qualifying it back to nothing.<\/p>\n I said: it\u2019s across from the bathroom.<\/p>\n She said: that\u2019s thoughtful.<\/p>\n I said: the chemo.<\/p>\n She said: yes.<\/p>\n She said: thank you.<\/p>\n She said it simply, without apology attached.<\/p>\n That was the best she could do, and it was enough.<\/p>\n The first treatment was on Thursday.<\/p>\n I drove her.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n I could not do the thing I needed to do.<\/p>\n I could not take the cancer out of her.<\/p>\n I could bring her tea.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n She said: I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n I said: Mom.<\/p>\n She said: this is not pleasant for you.<\/p>\n I said: it\u2019s less pleasant for you.<\/p>\n She said: I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n I said: stop.<\/p>\n She looked at me.<\/p>\n She said: I don\u2019t know how to.<\/p>\n I said: I know.<\/p>\n She said: it\u2019s very hard to let people help.<\/p>\n I said: I know.<\/p>\n She said: your father never had to let anyone help him. He died before he needed it.<\/p>\n I said: yes.<\/p>\n She said: I envy him sometimes.<\/p>\n I said: Mom.<\/p>\n She said: not for being dead. For not having to be the one who is helped.<\/p>\n I said: yes.<\/p>\n I held her hand.<\/p>\n The bag dripped.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n My mother slept through the last two hours.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n But she had me.<\/p>\n She had me as a witness.<\/p>\n That had to be worth something.<\/p>\n The trip was announced two weeks into her stay.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s diagnosis and that could not be moved without significant professional consequence.<\/p>\n I arranged everything before I left.<\/p>\n I wrote out the medication schedule on a laminated card.<\/p>\n I put it on the refrigerator.<\/p>\n I also put it on the small table in the guest room.<\/p>\n I put the dates and times of the upcoming chemo appointments on the calendar on the refrigerator and also texted them to Gabriel.<\/p>\n I stocked the refrigerator with the foods my mother could keep down, which after three weeks of chemo I understood well, the specific small foods that were not repulsive to a system that found most things repulsive.<\/p>\n Plain crackers.<\/p>\n Ginger tea.<\/p>\n Rice.<\/p>\n Broth.<\/p>\n Applesauce.<\/p>\n I made a pot of rice before I left.<\/p>\n I showed Gabriel where the ginger tea was.<\/p>\n I said: she needs to take the anti-nausea medication at eight in the morning and eight in the evening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I want to say this first because it is the most important thing to understand about her and about everything that happened, the specific quality of a person who has spent seventy years making herself small enough to fit comfortably in other people\u2019s lives without inconveniencing them.<\/p>\n Her name is Helen Park.<\/p>\n She was born in 1953, the year before the Korean War armistice, to parents who had come to the United States with almost nothing and who had organized their entire existence around not being a burden to anyone, a value so deeply transmitted that my mother had absorbed it into her bones before she understood it as a choice.<\/p>\n She apologized for the chemo.<\/p>\n She apologized for being tired.<\/p>\n She apologized for the medication schedule.<\/p>\n She apologized for needing someone to drive her.<\/p>\n She apologized for taking up the guest room.<\/p>\n She apologized for eating, which she barely did anyway because the treatment had taken her appetite along with everything else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n She apologized in the specific constant way of someone for whom existence in someone else\u2019s space is experienced as an imposition that requires ongoing management.<\/p>\n I had been telling her to stop apologizing for forty years.<\/p>\n She had not stopped.<\/p>\n I am her daughter.<\/p>\n My name is Sara Choi-Bennett, which is the name I took when I\u00a0\u00a0married<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Gabriel, 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.<\/p>\n