I was standing in the middle of the blandly named Beaverton Pharmacy—which should, in the spirit of truth in advertising, be called the “Little Shop of Horrors”—surrounded by every kind of aid/tool/gadget one can imagine to help with gout, varicose veins, inconvenient swelling of body parts, or the inability to get in and out of the shower. I was there shopping for a sling for my mother because her useless arm (Clem, as we named it early on, as in “Clem the Claw” for its propensity to catch on everything: my mother’s clothes, other people’s clothes, chairs, the commode, etc.) was giving her fits, and she’d gone through several slings in the course of her illness. They were all slightly wrong in some way, so she pulled at them, constantly readjusting, always just a bit uncomfortable. The tumor in her brain sat on her motor strip, which left her paralyzed on the right side almost immediately. Since her diagnosis, she has lost much of her short-term memory, nearly all of her speech, and, most recently, her ability to read. In terms of the sling, most of the time her shoulder hurt, or her limp hand ended up flopping out the end of it and banging into things. Her fingers there were one giant bruise.
Walking up and down the aisles, I was reminded of something David Rakoff wrote at a time when he was faced with the possibility of losing his arm. When he considered having to wear a prosthetic, it was “the depressing neutral almond color of all aids designed to help the ill and infirm” that really got to him, and I couldn’t agree more. The almond-colored everything at the Beaverton Pharmacy personified all of my fears about getting old, death and dying, brought to life as they were via compression socks, shower handles, and walkers. I will just go ahead and say it: It all gave me the fucking creeps. I was there as obsessed caretaker, propelled by my feelings of utter helplessness as I watched my mother actively dying. This particular helplessness frequently resulted in a laserlike focus on small, tangible tasks that involved some form of shopping. Often, this led me back to predictable comforts—the shiny bright aisles of Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, or T.J. Maxx—in my search for cheery pajamas, lavender lotions, and fuzzy socks. These trips made me feel better, imagining as I did the pleasure my mother would take in feeling these small luxuries against her skin. In the Beaverton Pharmacy, however, all I could do was keep breathing through my mouth so as not to take in the smell of impending death that seemed to be everywhere, a mix of cling peaches and old cottage cheese. No amount of scented candles could mask it. I stood amid the almond-colored everything and willfully resisted the urge to sprint out the door. What kept me from running was the fact that I was powerless to stop the clock that continued on, closer and closer to her death. With that knowledge, I was determined to fix some other tiny corner of her life, and in a way mine, by buying her something. That day, it was the sling.
Except for a brief period of time before she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, my mother has never liked to shop, particularly in malls. In fact, she loathed it, avoided it at all costs. Trying on clothes was torture for her, not to mention the noise and the rampant American consumerism she has always hated. All of it overwhelmed her nearly on contact, and she would only indulge my sister and me in a trip once a year to the local mall, Washington Square, to buy us $200 each of back-to-school clothes. We wouldn’t be there more than an hour before my mother would be wincing at the soundtrack of the Brass Plum or J. Jacobs, before she was saying, “I have the phobs! I have to get out of this store. Let me know if you want to buy anything; I’ll be outside.” My mother’s “phobs” came upon her frequently in my childhood, as it was both short for claustrophobia and for her general, somewhat constant state of being overwhelmed as a single mother. Upon hearing this, my sister and I would roll our eyes and go right on shopping.
Beyond her general aversion to consumer culture, my mother made a purposeful decision early in her life to develop her inner self rather than focus on her outer shell, and to raise her daughters the same way. As a result, she read voraciously, Anais Nin, Carl Jung, Christopher Isherwood, J. Krishnamurti, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, to name a few. She started doing yoga and meditating in the early 1970s, embarking on a deep study of Eastern religions, landing on Hinduism as her chosen philosophy. Later, she got a master’s degree in social work and spent her career working in geriatrics and hospice care. Much of this internal exploration was propelled by the emphasis on outer-beauty-as-every-thing that she grew up with in the 1940s and 1950s, when little girls were seen and not heard, controlled by their parents and the societal norms of the time. Her parents may have been more obsessed than most in this arena, as her and her sister’s hair, makeup, clothes, and weight were closely monitored throughout their childhoods and beyond. The many photos of the two of them all the way through high school dressed identically in dresses, pinafores, and various camp outfits, hair combed just so and held back by large ribbons, are both hilarious and heartbreaking. So focused was my grandfather on my mother’s appearance, that during the last conversation they had, the day before he died of a massive heart attack, he asked her how much she weighed.
“One hundred and thirty-five, Dad,” she said and hung up the phone. She was thirty-six years old.
In direct opposition to this, she raised my sister and me based entirely on the premise that we were beautiful, valuable, and perfect just the way were, inside and out. I have only recently begun to absorb this gift she gave us, because no matter her efforts, for much of my life I remained consumed by all things external, which naturally led to endless amounts of shopping. For me, before there were boys, there were malls. Solid, shiny things, full of flash and order, well-lit grace. What they contained was the promise of another life and another girl better than me—one with two parents living in the same house, a house they owned, complete with a lawn the color of AstroTurf, a father grilling on Sunday nights in the backyard, and a mother in the kitchen, smiling, wearing pressed khakis and a string of pearls. And the daughter? She had a room with a comforter set from Meier & Frank, a trundle bed, a bathroom counter full of department store makeup, Clinique, perfection bottled in a collection of sea-green containers. And oh, the clothes. More sweaters than she could count, ditto jeans, skirts, shoes, purses, earrings. Everything matched; everything coordinated to a season; everything was name-brand: ESPRIT, Izod, Generra, Guess? Laurel Burch, L.J. Simone, Nike.
This girl of a different life lived and breathed in the malls of my youth. Every weekend in junior high it was the same: the mall, the mall, roaming with a small pack of girls who also didn’t have access to their parents’ credit cards. Slurping Orange Julius, eating Auntie Ann’s pretzels, buying very little else, unless there was a two-for-one sale on sweaters at Forenza. I couldn’t have been happier splitting the cost of those sweaters with another friend and getting the matching socks for free. The fact that I’d be dressed the following week like everyone else who’d gotten in on the two-for-one was lost on me for a few minutes, at least in the soft lights of the dressing room. I remember one black-and-white flecked sweater that fell nearly to my knees, hiding all the things I hated about my body: my too-big tits, my lumpy stomach, and those awful thighs. From the right angle I was entirely hidden, even to myself. I was almost that other, different girl.
I was so obsessed by the mall at thirteen that my mom, on her tiny salary, somehow managed to scrape up twenty-five dollars a month to give me as a clothing allowance. I was not as grateful as I should have been, explaining to her that it would pay for maybe a fourth of a skirt at Nordstrom’s.
“So, save,” she said, leaving the room with a swish of her secondhand skirt and Birkenstocks, the only shoe she’d ever spent more than $10 on in her adult life. I glowered and howled, and proclaimed I was so deprived it made me sick.
High school did nothing to relieve my fixation, as girls were unofficially ranked by other girls based on clothes, purses, and shoes. We all fell victim, and I got a job at Häagen-Dazs at fourteen to save for a car and a Dooney & Bourke purse, while two girls I knew were fired from their jobs at a dry cleaner’s when they were caught wearing the clothes of various customers sometime between drop-off and pickup. At school, my friends and I would track the outfits the rich girls wore, how long it took them to wear a sweater, blouse, or skirt again. Sometimes, it took months. The poorer among us traded clothes and tried to wear them weeks apart so that no one would catch on; it was also verboten to wear the same outfit twice in a week. In the interim, I spent my time trying on outfits my mother could never afford, which led to the obvious: stealing a blouse from Nordstrom’s once. It had a slightly silky feel and was covered with pink and blue and green flowers. I was surprised at how easy it was, slipping it into my purse in the dressing room, but I was terrified at the core and never tried it again. However, this did not stop me or my friends from exploiting their generous return policy. Years ago, you could buy any item of clothing, wear it for as long as you wanted, and then return it with no receipt, no questions, and a smiling saleswoman handing you cash. When my mother found out I had done it with a red sweater covered in miniature snowflakes that I’d grown tired of after a few months, she explained to me that this was not ethical, not acceptable, and that I would be grounded severely the next time she caught me. I sulked and pouted, protested about the general grossness of how much money Nordstrom’s made every day, but her words stayed with me, and I didn’t do it again.
If that weren’t enough, along with tracking what other girls wore and longing for my own expensive outfits to better blend in, I constantly lamented the state of my mother’s wardrobe. That was my particular suburban dream, to look perfect and to have a perfect-looking mother. She did not wear the neat, suitable garb of the stay-at-home mothers I knew (no matter that she was a single, working mother): neatly pressed pants, loafers, polo sweaters and Izod shirts, Land’s End monogrammed bags. Instead, it was those Birkenstocks or black Chinese slippers, along with terrible, terrible shapeless hippie dresses. Nearly everything she wore was secondhand, and seeing the way she dressed caused me endless amounts of angst. In one particularly dramatic fight, I yelled, “Don’t you want to look better? It would be nice to have a mom who wore good clothes, you know!”
Shocked, she said, “Don’t you think I’d like to? I can’t afford it. That money is going to you and your sister, for your wardrobes.”
I was shamed into silence, briefly.
Things did not improve much as I got older, going as I did from suburbia in my teens to the plastic of Southern California and Los Angeles in my twenties. Here, the malls were the churches, the churches often inside the malls, and there was nothing else to worship but the skinny, the tan, the stylish, and the rich. I ran on this hamster wheel of impossibility for nearly a decade, on Melrose Avenue, Hollywood Boulevard, and the mall at its core, the Beverly Center. (Never Rodeo Drive, never, as the humiliation of all I couldn’t buy would have been far too great.) When I look back on my years there, much of what I recall are endless days of shopping with my friends, looking for what exactly, I have no idea. Well, actually I do—we were looking for that blouse or pair of jeans or shoes or eye shadow that would effectively change our lives, that would make us appealing to the right men, and barring that, appealing to ourselves, always the harshest critics.
I was often reduced to my junior high self on those boulevards and in that mall, as much was the same. We were never thin or beautiful enough, and we could afford little of what we saw because we were waitresses, barely making our bills and rent. So we did what my girlfriends and I did back then—ate pretzels, drank Jamba Juice in place of Orange Julius, and tried on clothes that we couldn’t afford or that didn’t make us look quite the way we wanted, and always, always, no matter what we bought or didn’t buy, left each store feeling progressively more unsatisfied and depressed. And then we did it again, the next free afternoon the next weekend, the next week. I was so exhausted by Los Angeles after six years, that in 2004, at the ripe old age of thirty-two, I embarked on a sabbatical from life. I moved home to my mother, to Portland, Oregon, straight back into the bedroom I grew up in. Many things fueled this decision, from the hopelessness of dating in L.A. to graduate school PTSD, but I came home in part because I knew I needed to shed this intense and endless need, this decades-long search for another, entirely superficial skin.
My transformation didn’t happen overnight, and in many ways is still happening nearly nine years later. My sister would get cancer first at twenty-eight, and I moved again from Portland a few months after I’d relocated from Los Angeles to Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle, to help her through treatment. To cope, in between chemo, radiation, and surgery, well, we shopped. We shopped nearly incessantly that year, the two of us, in part because the mall was nearly the only place to go on that island unless you counted the wilderness, and my sister and I didn’t. She had just barely survived two years on twenty acres with no water or electricity, and she wanted civilization and, moreover, all its artifice. It was also a salve to what was happening to her—when she lost her hair, we shopped for stylish hats; when she dropped so much weight she barely looked like herself, she bought her first pair of ridiculously expensive 7 For All Mankind jeans. I bought myself a new wardrobe, too, during that time, trying to pin down the person I was going to be now, a chic northwestern career woman, buying cashmere sweaters and hip, if sensible, shoes, wool wrap-skirts, heavy tights. The mall we frequented was an old one, run down and retro in a bad way, a forgotten warehouse full of chain stores that no longer existed in more updated malls in bigger cities. It had what we needed, no matter the scuffed linoleum and fading paint.
Oddly, it was in this mall, maybe a year before my sister’s diagnosis, that my mother began to discover the pleasures this type of shopping can bring. She was attending her fortieth high school reunion that summer and had decided to make herself over. It started with new, refined glasses, finally getting rid of the ones with lenses the size of espresso saucers. Then came the shedding of her hairdresser of two decades who had faithfully permed my mother’s hair for the better part of that time, and a chic new haircut that made her sixty-year-old face look fifty, if that. When we were all together for spring break, we dragged her to that old mall, to the Gap first where nothing was quite her style and then to the ladies’ section at Macy’s. There, she discovered the glory of Ralph Lauren, Jones New York, and Eileen Fisher, buying jeans that fit her right and were comfortable for the first time in her life, silk shirts, and long, elegant skirts and jackets that hugged her in the right places and hung elegantly over the hips she tried to hide. She was a size six but always bought eights, tens, twelves, or fourteens, still dressing for the thirty pounds she’d put on while pregnant with my sister, although she had lost them decades ago. When she went back to work the following week, all her coworkers asked how she’d lost so much weight so quickly, and strangers stopped her in stores to compliment her outfits or tell her how fabulous she looked. I know she was overwhelmed by the attention at first, but I think she relaxed into it after a few months and began to enjoy this newfound aspect of herself. She had worked so diligently for decades to develop her intellect, compassion, and spirituality that it was refreshing to see her allow herself this less meaningful indulgence, perhaps even revel in it in ways she hadn’t known were possible.
By the time she and my stepfather traveled to India in the fall of 2008, six months before her diagnosis, my mother looked and felt better than perhaps ever in her life, and was nearly as gorgeous as she was in her twenties. She saved for months to be able to buy herself what she wanted on that trip: rugs, paintings, bedspreads, scarves, and half a dozen everyday saris in hot pink, brick red, ivy green, indigo blue. In her bedroom, there was an electronic picture frame that flips through a selection of photos, many from this trip. When I could take it, I stared at those photos and marveled. She is a flat-out beauty in those shots, one that I can only now see fully. Her skin is rich and olive colored, her black hair glossy, the lines on her face minimal. In these pictures she simply glows. Almost four years later, she resembled more closely a decades-old photo of my ninety-year-old great-grandmother that sat on the bookshelf downstairs. Her face was full, with rosy balls for cheeks and a puffy layer of skin between her chin and the rest of her neck that never before existed. She was an aged, soft-angled version of her former self, sixty or seventy pounds heavier, her fingers, legs, face—everything—all puffed out from immobility and steroids. Going on them long-term was one of her greatest fears. Given her experiences in hospice care, she knew how the drugs would ravage her body, and death aside, she didn’t want to look exactly the way she does now. She was so adamant about this that she informed the neurosurgeon, politely, that she wouldn’t be taking the steroids—it simply wasn’t an option. He smiled and nodded, and then informed her evenly that, actually, not taking them wasn’t an option, as they were one of the only things that would buy her time and stave off the swelling in her brain. It wasn’t about vanity, really; it was about completely losing control. You are dying, the doctors told her, and you will look like hell for the duration.
None of those beautiful clothes she bought over the last few years fit; they hung on racks in the spare bedroom or were shoved into a closet in the basement. She was a miraculously good sport about this, but I know it bothered her. One day as my sister and I were caretaking, as I was getting her from the bed to the commode and back, my mother said, “Don’t look at my butt!” My sister was sitting directly behind her and had a full view.
“Okay, I won’t,” she said, and I watched her half-cover her eyes in mock horror.
I got my mother’s pants back up and positioned her back in bed, and we were all quiet for a moment, and then my sister started laughing, saying, “I couldn’t not look at it. I mean, if you say that, that’s what everyone is going to look at, right?”
My mother laughed and sighed, holding her head in her one good hand, cheeks going completely red. “I accidentally caught a glimpse of it in the bathroom mirror the other day,” she said. “Let’s just say I never, ever want to do that again.”
A few months later, she seemed less interested in food than usual, and it alarmed me, as hospice had told us it was one of the biggest signs that someone was starting to go, really beginning to die. When I brought up the fact she was eating less, she denied it and then said that three meals were too much. A day or so later, she told me not to worry, that it “wasn’t as bad as I thought.”
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever that means. It’s all pretty bad, you know?”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s not that bad.”
The next day, when we were alone, I asked her what she wanted for lunch, since it was nearly three and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She shook her head and sighed. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t want to get any fatter. That’s what the eating thing is about.”
“What?” I was shocked.
“Yep,” she said.
“Oh my God, Ma. That’s what this is about?”
She looked at me knowingly.
“Well,” I said, “I do understand.” I had recently subscribed to Jillian Michaels’s website and purchased several of her DVDs. I was attempting to get shredded for summer while my mother sat, dying. I’d approached my workouts lately with a near-religious fervor.
“I knew you would,” she said. “I knew you would.”
And it was our secret, at least to the rest of the family. We didn’t think they would get it. I teased her about it, however, when they weren’t around.
“There will definitely be whispers,” I told her. “Did you hear about that poor Bobbie Mims? She’s gotten so, well, fat. I mean, huge. And then there’s that brain tumor. Poor thing.”
Ironically, when she was first put on steroids in those early months, we had to talk her down from buying everything in sight. She went completely manic for six weeks or so and ordered cookbooks written by the naturopath at her cancer center for nearly every family member, silver lotus bracelets for all the women close to her heart, Guatemalan beaded ones for the men, baseball caps with the Hindu word “ram” (which means God) on them in every color for the “God Squad,” as she coined it—everyone who circled around her with love and prayed she would heal. She sent us on myriad trips to Target for the things she was sure she needed: basket upon basket to store her sympathy cards and reply notes; scotch tape, which she used on everything she could, affixing whatever she could get her hands on to the walls and bookshelves that surrounded her chair in the living room; paper plates and napkins for all the people who came to visit, so that we could offer them snacks and not have to do dishes, and on and on. Thankfully, she adjusted to the steroids after a few months and this phase ended, but, during that time as she shopped manically (or sent us to do it for her), I was so exhausted by it and the general prospect of knowing my mother was going to die, I began to lose my taste for shopping altogether, at least in the ways I used to do it. As her illness went on and I moved in to help my stepfather with her twenty-four-hour care, I was consumed enough by what was happening that there was simply no time to worry about that new shirt, sweater, pair of jeans—anything, honestly—in the face of losing her.
I lost track of myself enough a year or so into her illness that for a friend’s upscale out-of-town wedding, I didn’t even think about buying something new. Instead, I wore a fuchsia dress I hadn’t put on in years, five maybe, from a time when I was notably tanner and thinner. I squeezed into it with the help of some Spanx, and, as I modeled it for myself in the hotel room, I realized it wasn’t as flattering as I remembered, and the color did not illuminate my skin, now northwest-winter pale. I was screwed, with nothing else to wear. Worse, at the wedding, I realized the dress was very much out of date (having completely lost track of current trends) and nothing like all the fashionable, off-the-shoulder, slinky miniskirt numbers most of the other women there were wearing. One, a former model with an eight-week-old baby at home, was dressed in a red silk version of said dress, looking as if she could have easily done a bikini photo shoot later in the day if pressed.
Normally in this kind of situation, I would have felt fat and awkward, insecure that I had worn the wrong thing, and horrified that everyone would notice. Miraculously, after a few moments of self-consciousness, I found myself simply not giving a shit, realizing that no one cared what I was wearing or what I weighed, most surprisingly, me. My mother still dying, so what did any of it matter? This attitude has stuck with me for the last three years as she continues to defy the odds and live. This internal shift wasn’t a fully conscious one; it’s just what was, and now is, and the freedom is quite something. This process of shifting to deeper concerns in life, of putting someone else’s needs before my own started with my sister’s illness, but with her, there was hope of recovery and a future, whereas my mother wasn’t supposed to live longer than eighteen months. It was this devastating understanding of how little time we had and my mother’s immediate level of need that caused this shift in me, too, as suddenly, leisure trips to the mall became irrelevant. From then on, my shopping trips, along with my life, became about necessity and her comfort, and more often than I liked, confronting the things I most feared.
A few weeks after we first learned of our mother’s tumor, my sister and I made a trip to the main mall of my youth, Washington Square. This was a time suspended in hope, as the mass hadn’t yet been biopsied and we could still believe things were going to be okay. We were there to buy several boxes of See’s suckers, which our mother loved and also wanted to pass out at her various doctor’s visits to the staff and fellow patients and their families. She wanted to be able to give prasad, she said, which literally means “gracious gift” in Hindi, and is often the bit of food or sweet treats that are placed on altars in India as offerings to the gods, blessed by them and then eaten by the devotees. This was yet another part of her steroid-fueled missive, but my sister and I went along.
The mall had recently been fully remodeled, and it was all too much really, between the Pottery Barn Kid’s and the Sephora and the slick black-and-white marble floors that led to the twenty-foot-tall doors of the ubiquitous Cheesecake Factory. It was gaudy now, transparently fake. Little was as I remembered, and nothing was in the same place except the See’s Candies store, on the same corner it had always been, and I found this incredibly comforting. We bought our suckers, got our free samples, and were headed out when we came across a kiosk full of swirling wind ornaments, silly things to hang on a patio that no one actually needs. My sister and I were inexplicably mesmerized as we watched them twirl. They were in the form of everything from lotus flowers and island scenes to rainbows and University of Oregon logos. Much of it was tacky crap, but a brown-eyed boy came up to help us before we could walk away. He was very good at his job and sold us entirely on one in less than five minutes, in part by holding up a copper-orange sun against the black exterior tiles of the Ben Bridge Jewelers a few feet away, showing us how you could see it at night. The sun he demoed had a coiled silver tail attached to it, with a ball inside that moved up or down according to what direction the wind was blowing.
My sister liked the lotus, but I insisted on the copper sun, and she eventually agreed. “But no tail,” I said. “I don’t like the tail.”
“Okay,” he said but put another offer on the table while ringing us up. He had first quoted the tail at an extra thirty-five dollars, but now he said, “For you, how about five dollars for the tail?”
“No,” I said with far too much emotion, “no tail. I don’t like the tail.”
“Geez,” he said, “you scared me. Anyone else would say, sure, five bucks, I’ll take the tail.”
It was then I started crying. “Our mom has a brain tumor,” I choked out, “and see, we want it to stay round, if it grows tentacles or tails or whatever—” When I looked up again, I saw tears in his eyes.
“Oh, no, not your mother. If anything happened to my mother, I don’t know. I’m Israeli and the oldest, the closest to her. Oh, I am almost crying. I just hope your mother is okay.”
My sister was nodding along with the two of us, for that wish to be true. “I think we should have a group hug,” she said, and so we did. When we separated, she held his hand and said, “We love you.”
“Oh, I love you, too,” he said. And we smiled and bought the copper orange sun without the tail and opened up the box of See’s suckers and gave him one. I tried to explain it, calling it prassat instead of prasad, and my sister corrected me, and he looked confused but happy. We waved to him all the way to the door, all the way back out into the day.
We hung the sun from the roof’s eave, just outside the sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard. She could see it from her chair in the living room, and watching it twirl, she said, “Oh, wow. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.”
I stopped buying my mother new clothes a few months ago, as it overwhelmed my stepfather, who is already faced with the huge surplus he will have to get rid of when she dies. I only see her once a month now, as I moved to California last December to be with my long-term boyfriend. My mother insisted I do this from the earliest months of her illness and eventually wouldn’t take no for an answer. When I finally left, she told me that I had cared for her for two years. She said I had done enough and needed to move forward with my life. So I left, but it wasn’t easy, and because I am no longer with her every day, I find myself buying her more than a few things every time I come home, usually the reliable lotions or socks or soft T-shirts. Overall, I’ve bought her more clothes than she needs, clinging to this last vestige of her outer vessel.
When I was home recently, we were going through her normal morning routine of brushing her hair and teeth, when I offered to shave her mustache. She looked surprised at the suggestion, although she has asked me to do this since she got sick. (We share this genetic blight, although I had mine lasered off years ago.) She shrugged and said okay. In the beginning, this shaving was always part of our bathing routine, along with her reminders to wash her back and the inadvertent moans of pleasure she let escape, small sounds inherent in the act of getting clean. My mother loved nothing more than being clean or soaking in the bath. I christened her in a different way, on a shower bench, her paralyzed right side dragging along behind her. It was a sitting shower really, not a bath, but it doesn’t matter now, I realized, as we were done with all that, as close to the end as we are. We were done with the feeling of water running over her head and down her body. We were done with her leaving the house, the room, the bed. She was done wanting pajamas or lotions or worrying about the hair on her upper lip; she was done with vanity.
When she shrugged, I sensed the nearly complete liberation in where she was, no longer worried about anything but the current moment.
“Thank you,” she managed to get out when I finished.
I nodded and reached for her, knowing there was nothing left for me to buy, that there was only this to do: the act of sitting here and holding her hand.
I looked at her and felt her baby-soft skin, remembering the day I found the saris in the hope chest at the foot of her bed. She had completely forgotten they were there, but when I pulled them out she marveled, touching the hems, telling me she’d had all of them altered in India to fit.
“Do you want to wear them?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, excitedly. “Yes!”
I started dressing her in them on Sundays, for the meditation group she and my stepfather hosted every week. I let the seams out as far as I could and wrapped her in the matching scarves, light as spider webs around her neck. When she wore them, she sat taller in her wheelchair and I could see she felt beautiful. And she was, incredibly so, and for a few moments, we were both transported back to that time before, when she was well.