My mother is the kind of woman who apologizes for being sick.
I want to say this first because it is the most important thing to understand about her and about everything that happened, the specific quality of a person who has spent seventy years making herself small enough to fit comfortably in other people’s lives without inconveniencing them.
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.
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.
She said: the survival rates at this stage with this treatment protocol are encouraging.
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.
