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.
