“It is true,” I insisted, glad to be playful with him, instead of facing the sadness that had seemed to hover over much of our interactions these days.
“Perhaps, I am just perfect for you,” he said.
And I couldn’t think of a single argument to that.
Chapter 10
In a way, it was at least interesting to see how other people were reacting to a life lived in lockdown.
Every day I read about things going on in the world, from people organising mass appreciation for the National Health Service workers, to mastering sour dough starters, to multi-tasking working-from-home and homeschooling children from their living room.
Everywhere, all around the world, people were pivoting to a new way of living, and I was… stagnant.
It wasn’t that I was moping. I had gone through, and embraced the sadness I had felt – and still felt. I just didn’t know what to do. I was motionless. I was like the utensil in the back of a kitchen drawer that everyone’s forgotten about. I had no purpose.
I seemed to spend my time drifting through the house on errant breezes, without direction. I was here, but I was doing nothing. Not really.
I helped with chores, I kept my folks company – but maybe that was the other way around.
Mum had had her first round of chemo now. Because it was essential medical treatment, she was allowed to travel to the clinic, but Dad wasn’t allowed to go in with her. He had to wait in the car. He took a book with him, but I don’t think he ever read it.
The first few days afterwards, we’d all waited anxiously, expecting her to throw up any second, like on TV. I kept looking her over, taking inventory, as though I’d expected her to look different, but she hadn’t. For days afterwards she’d showed no outward signs at all, except that she’d said water tasted weird.
We’d just begun to relax, to joke that she was as resilient as we always said she was, when one morning she launched from bed, running to the toilet to be sick so violently that it woke me up.
Later we joked that Mum was as human as the rest of us, but it had come with a sort of forced levity. Really, it had been to cover any disappointment we might have felt knowing that Mum was, in fact, going to go through this the same way most everyone else did. That she would not get off lightly.
After the first bout, the anti-sickness medication seemed to kick in, which was a relief. Mum had switched every other cup of tea to the ginseng tea Jihoon had sent. At first, I’d thought she was doing it to be polite, but she insisted it really did settle her stomach.
We’d expected the nausea. What we hadn’t accounted for was when Mum said she’d swapped feeling poorly with full body pain.
The migraines confined her to the house for much of the third day, but the rest of the first week she barely left her bedroom. She said her bones hurt too much to get out of bed.
We had been prepared for so much. We had stocked the cabinets with hot drinks to help with nausea, filled the fridge with nutritious, but bland food to combat any sickness. But what did you do for a person whose bones ached?
Dad and I floundered. We didn’t know how to help.
Seeing my Mum go from the ever-in-motion force of nature to someone mortal was difficult. I hadn’t realised how built up she had been in my mind. How I’d equated her with something implacable, ever-present. An edifice like Hadrian’s Wall. In my mind, she had, and would always exist.
It was a strange realisation that she was human.
By the second week, she was mostly feeling better, but for the exhaustion. She kept apologising, which was crazy to me, because what expectations did she think we had of her, that she felt the need to apologise? She needed to sit down during making dinner, and kept saying she didn’t feel up to pushing the Hoover round, despite the fact we kept telling her to stop doing those things. That we could do them, but she wouldn’t let us.
The time Dad had found her standing on a kitchen chair, dusting the oven hood, he’d scolded her so strongly it had turned into a proper argument. His point – a fair one, in my opinion – was that she might get faint and fall. He was cross she was taking unnecessary risks.
I opted to keep out of it, lurking in the door, watching as they stood across from one another.
“You keep acting like you’re back to normal, love, but you’re not.” Dad said in a measured tone.
“I’m bloody fine!” Mum shouted, waving the yellow dusting cloth around like a flag.
“Val, you’ve just had major surgery, and now you’re going through chemo. You are not ‘fine.” Even from across the room,I could see the way his jaw clenched, as though he were biting back the words he really wanted to say.
“You don’t need to remind me what I’m going through, Ernest Thompson, I was bloody there!”
“Then act like it, you stubborn woman!”
“Stubborn, is it?” Mum put her hands on her hips, staring him down, even though she was several inches shorter than him.
