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.
My mother slept through the last two hours.
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’t, 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.
But she had me.
She had me as a witness.
That had to be worth something.
The trip was announced two weeks into her stay.
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’s diagnosis and that could not be moved without significant professional consequence.
I arranged everything before I left.
I wrote out the medication schedule on a laminated card.
I put it on the refrigerator.
I also put it on the small table in the guest room.
I put the dates and times of the upcoming chemo appointments on the calendar on the refrigerator and also texted them to Gabriel.
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.
Plain crackers.
Ginger tea.
Rice.
Broth.
Applesauce.
I made a pot of rice before I left.
I showed Gabriel where the ginger tea was.
I said: she needs to take the anti-nausea medication at eight in the morning and eight in the evening.
He said: I know.
I said: the card is on the refrigerator.
He said: I know, Sara.
I said: she might not ask for help. She won’t ask for help. You need to check on her.
He said: I’ll check on her.
I said: Gabriel.
He said: Sara. I’ve got it.
I said: call me if anything changes.
He said: nothing is going to change. Go to your meetings.
I went to my meetings.
The meetings were in Seattle and they were the specific kind of meetings that required full attention, the kind where you could not be somewhere else mentally, where the clients were paying for your presence and the presence had to be actual rather than performed.
I was present.
I texted my mother every evening.
She texted back in the brief way of someone who found texting effortful but who understood it as a form of care.
