“You didn’t? But all those trips in and out of the hospital. All that chemo.”
“I knew she was sick. I only ever thought she’d be sick. I didn’t know she could die.”
I understood then what my stepmother had known all along: that she was allowing me to ask all the questions I could never ask my real mother. She’d said once, “I’m so sorry you’re going through this again.” I felt a gratitude for this mobius strip of mothers, how one led me to the other, and that other led me right back.
I asked my stepmother, “Are you afraid?” She had just returned home from yet another hospital visit.
“I was afraid,” she told me. But then a chaplain came and talked to her and my father, and finally, she told my father: no more. She told him he could still hope, and she would hope, too, for a miracle. But in the meantime, she said she felt ready and she needed him to be with her. She said her angel had been in her room all week; she could see him as clearly as she could see me now. I thought of how in Cambodia death is just the end of a cycle, making space to start all over again.
I helped her to the toilet and she pointed to her C-section scars, all four of them. Then she asked if I had one. I unbuttoned my jeans, pulled them down slightly. “They’ve gotten better, haven’t they?” she said. This is where we meet, women and our bodies. I told her the story of my daughter’s birth in Bangkok and she said, “I like that story, Rache.” I sank down to my knees on the floor, laid my head on her hospital bed beside her hip. She put her hand on me.
Then she said, “Can I talk to you about the Lord? I just have to because he’s my life.”
I nodded.
Jesus was on her right side at that moment and her guardian angel was on her left. She could see them. They didn’t talk, except once to say that everything would be all right. She just wanted me to know she could see them, her angel and her Jesus, that they had come to help her on her journey to wherever and whatever came next.
I nodded, listening. I believed her. Of course I did. We travel with our ghosts. Who better to lead us to what comes next? Our next life, our heaven, the birth of a daughter, a new mother, an old one.