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.
