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.
