But that technical and fussy business, which could not begin until my mother had recovered from her surgery, was to prove darker than I could guess. I do not think she would have liked for me to tell you about the details of her surgeries or of her treatments. Forgive me, then, if I do not describe to you some things that I am trying, for my mother and for myself, to forget. Forgive me if I do not dwell on the acid white anonymity of those many hospital rooms, and on the ceaseless comedy of lumpy beds with elaborate control panels, which we never, or almost never, adjusted. Forgive me if I do not speak of how those needles were put into vein after vein, how one vein after the next collapsed, those tiny delicate veins of my mother’s, more like filaments in the stems of flowers than like vessels to carry blood. Forgive me if I do not dwell on those sacs of poison, like giant spider glands, that were hung on a steel pole and then pumped into her arm or her abdomen as though she were a Strasbourg goose being prepared for the slaughter. Chemotherapy became as regular as a metronome, as tediously inevitable as days that give way to night. I will tell you until you are tired of hearing it how I lived from one test result to the next, but I will not tell you the complex, almost Masonic significance of those numbers, a system I learned so well that you could say twenty-eight to me and make me breathe easy, or say sixty-two and make me scream. I will not tell you too much of spread and containment, of bad cells we thought would wash away in the flood of sepia liquids, as if they were only markings in the sand on a tide-flooded beach. “It’s incredible to me,” my mother said one day, “that I go into the hospital just as I’m beginning to feel better, and allow them to give me therapy that makes me feel terrible, that I go to the doctors, not when I’m in pain, but as soon as the pain abates.” What kind of faith is it that allows us to run so contrary to our own experience?