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.
