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.
This was technically true.
I had talked to Gabriel.
He had said he wasn’t thrilled but he hadn’t objected.
He had said: she’s not going to be here for long, right?
I had said: for as long as she needs to be.
He had said: I just need to know there’s an end date.
I had said: Gabriel, she has cancer. I don’t have an end date.
He had been quiet.
Then he had said: all right. Fine.
That was the conversation I had in mind when I told my mother I had talked to Gabriel.
The guest room on the first floor was the obvious choice.
It was directly across from the bathroom, 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.
The room had a window that looked onto the backyard.
My mother had always liked the backyard.
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.
I brought her to the house on a Monday.
She had one suitcase and a small bag with her medications.
She apologized for the medications.
She apologized for the suitcase.
She told me the suitcase was probably too much and she could have packed lighter.
I said: Mom.
She said: I’m just saying.
I said: you can bring as much as you want. This is your room.
She looked at the guest room.
She said: it’s a nice room.
She said it with the specific appreciation of someone who is trying to let themselves have something without immediately qualifying it back to nothing.
I said: it’s across from the bathroom.
She said: that’s thoughtful.
I said: the chemo.
She said: yes.
She said: thank you.
She said it simply, without apology attached.
That was the best she could do, and it was enough.
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.
