Umma’s cancer, which the X-rays had shown as minor, turned out to be serious once they opened her up. The surgeon suspected that it had metastasized to the lymph nodes, and the liver function also seemed impaired. He recommended a multistep treatment implemented over a longer period of time. Despite multiple bouts of radiation after her hysterectomy, the cancer cells were slow to disappear. The road to remission turned out to be long and difficult.

It was around then when I first met him, in a humanities class at a private institute. The reason I picked the class on “The Philosophy of Emotions” was because I was having a hard time keeping a lid on my feelings. Not only was I cramming for English aptitude tests and entrance exams for companies, I was also taking care of Umma at the hospital and going with her for a daily walk after she had first begged for and then demanded it. Taking care of someone who was thoroughly sick in both body and mind made me feel like I was coming down with something myself. Hoping to avoid the well of unhappiness that was my mother, and to understand the feelings that kept threatening to boil over, I went to the class once a week. The course used Spinoza’s Ethics as a textbook and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and A Lover’s Discourse as supplementary texts, dividing up classes by different emotions. The instructor, who introduced himself as a “freelance philosopher,” did what most inexperienced teachers do, which was to force everyone to go around introducing themselves to the class. The school being run by a human rights organization, half of the students were activists. They went on about their affiliations, political beliefs, and sexual orientations (not that anyone had asked them), and I felt the pressure to confess to being a “center-left male homosexual” when my turn came, but I just stated my real name and that I was a college student. Jo Wind, James, Mapsosa, Legend of the Fall . . . The others had activist nicknames of bizarre national origins and esoteric references.