I will not teach you the vocabulary of disease, the thousand thousand terms I learned, until I could chat with the doctors and nurses and my father and Freddy in a language that, a year before, would have been far stranger than Greek to me, nor will I say much of how, in my mind, I translated those terms into words gentler than the bodily violations they, in fact, represented. I will speak as little as possible about the stream of medical staff for whom the quality of life was in the fact of living, and not in pleasure or the relief from pain. All there is to tell about the modern way of death, the American way of death, the way of death we come upon when we suppose that all things can be cured with enough logic and enough pragmatism—I will not dwell on those ordinary indecencies, those bedpans and breathing games, one like a child’s toy, a three-ball device in which your lung power is measured by whether you can keep all three balls at the tops of their vertical chambers. I have tried to forget the questions asked by interns in whose eyes my mother was an example of the grotesque, whose disease they battled as if it were an orange monster in a video game, and not as though it were something that consumed her very humanity. Forgive me for steering clear of the accompanied visits to the bathroom, of the days of guiding an IV pole around the hallways and calling the dull perambulation from room 702 to room 740 by the ridiculous term of “exercise.”

“Of course he wants me to get well,” my mother said of one doctor, “because it will give him a better statistical rate for this treatment.”

I will try to forget how we sought out every grain of kindness in those doctors, clinging to the scant evidence of feeling as though any emotion were a vein of platinum in a monolith of shale. I will not detail the complexities of blood tests, but I will tell you that they could have filled a swimming pool with the amount of blood that was taken from my mother during her two years of illness, that in my worst dreams I imagine all that blood floating like a tanker-spill over a sea far more than wine-dark. Perhaps you will laugh if I dwell on what they fed my mother after surgery and chemotherapy, when she could hardly have taken a boiled egg or a piece of toast, if I tell you about the thick leaden lumps of meatloaf, the pasty cream soups, the inexplicably slimy vegetables. I would like not to remember hospital arrivals and departures, installation and check-out, my brother and me collecting odds and ends as my father almost carried my mother (as light as a wilted spinach leaf on her weakest days) out to the car, with only her anxiety bearing witness that she was still alive.