It’s the waiting that kills. Six months becomes three months becomes one month. Yet here we are seven months later, and she still lives.
Cancer of the breast.
Stage four.
Terminal.
―
She is 80. Too old for surgery, though the doctors say it’s inoperable anyway. The pills make it impossible for her to eat, impossible for her to cling to the joys of food. Unable to keep even rice porridge down. My brothers decide the pills will go. Though I’m the oldest, my voice is unwanted. I have nothing to say anyway. What kind of daughter could admit she’d rather pickle her mother in pain than lose her?
―
I missed the birth of my first grandchild so that I could be with Ma when she passed. My desire to fulfill my filial duties means that I look at photos of my teeny granddaughter knowing I was oceans away when she came into the world. Though our four generations of women exist simultaneously, we will never know one another together. I wonder what else I will miss by being here.
―
We took her to the doctor last week.
They asked her how she felt.
She said, “Alright.”
They refilled her pain medications and sent her away with a bag of medicinal Chinese tea. They did not take her blood pressure or feel her pulse. They did no tests or scans. She has been left for dead, but she refuses to die.
―
I want to savor life with her, but reality is cruel. My brothers continue their lives while I collect the barbs of our parents’ lifelong hostilities. Though normally their words fall on ears deafened by years of marriage, they now fall on me.
Why did you throw away that peach? We can cut out the bruises! I was saving that for your mother! Aiya so careless!
You cannot savor six months of time. I grieve that I cannot appreciate the time I have with her. I grieve that I am grieving. But I do not grieve for her.
I contemplate the exhaustion of grief. Perhaps I’ve never truly known it, having never known the loss of a parent, spouse, or child. Please doctor, when will this unending grieving end? You were wrong. I grieved for six months, 180 days, 4000 hours, 15 million seconds. I did my duty.
―
It’s 3am. We call my brother in Arizona and catch him at work. There was blood this morning. At the hospital, we must decide whether to operate. The doctors remind us that the cancer is terminal. We hear: surgery only prolongs the inevitable.
My brothers discuss by video while I sit holding her hand.
They speak with the doctor. My brother in Arizona hangs up. My brother beside me heads to the waiting room to update the rest of the family.
Ma and I are alone.
The fluorescent lights of the hospital room cast a sickly glow. We are in the dark. And together we wait.
Lauren Bo is a half-Taiwanese writer of fiction and poetry and reviewer of works by AAPI and Asian diasporic writers and of international works that have been translated into English. She has written for World Literature Today, Asymptote, The Maine Review, Koukash Review, The Cosmos Book Club, and My French Life Magazine. She lives in St. Louis with her husband and bunnies.
Kristina Martino is a poet and visual artist. Winner of a 2022 92Y Discovery Prize, her poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, Paris Review Daily, Best New Poets 2021, and Ninth Letter.