Her name is Helen Park.
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.
She apologized for the chemo.
She apologized for being tired.
She apologized for the medication schedule.
She apologized for needing someone to drive her.
She apologized for taking up the guest room.
She apologized for eating, which she barely did anyway because the treatment had taken her appetite along with everything else.
She apologized in the specific constant way of someone for whom existence in someone else’s space is experienced as an imposition that requires ongoing management.
