The first treatment was on Thursday.
I drove her.
I sat with her in the infusion room for five hours, which was the time the first session took, and I watched my mother undergo the specific experience of chemotherapy, which is the experience of lying in a chair while a bag of something powerful and expensive drips into your arm, your body both fighting and surrendering, and which produces in the people watching it a particular helplessness.
I could not do the thing I needed to do.
I could not take the cancer out of her.
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.
