When You Were Here

the last five years. My mom had been to Mexico, to the Mayo Clinic, to every doctor in Southern California, to Stanford, to Greece for some whacked-out treatment that didn’t work. She was in and out of remission all the time. She wanted to live; she wanted to make it; she fought for so long. And then she found him .
    The possibility of a miracle.
    But he wasn’t just my mom’s last great hope. He was mine as well.
    “If I could have saved her, I would have. I do everything I can to help my patients. That is not just my job. That is my calling.” Takahashi presses his hands together and leans forward in his chair. “And your mother was one of the bravest, toughest, most resilient people I have ever known. She lived longer than anyone thought she would with her diagnosis. On paper, she should have died years ago.”
    The lump rises in my throat.
    “But she was as strong as the cancer. She was stronger most of the time,” he says.
    “She could have lasted two more months then. Couldn’t she have?” I ask as desperation gets the better of me, and my voice rises. “She wanted to. Don’t you know how much she wanted to?” I push the question onto him, throwing it in his hands, and as I do I can hear the words echo—butnot just the words, the idea of the words, of what it means to want to hold on.
    “She wanted to live, more than anyone I have ever treated. She had the strongest will to live. And that is why she lived so long. That is why she was as healthy as she was for someone who had cancer. I am sure you can recall that she was more well than she was not the last five years?”
    I think of breakfasts at the fish market, of walks with Sandy Koufax, of crosswords she filled out, of songs she played on the piano, of the boat orchids she planted. She was more well than not. She was ridiculously healthy a lot of the time for someone who was so sick.
    “Yes.”
    “But when she worsened, she knew her time was running out. And so, Danny, she wanted to heal in her own way, in the only way that she could heal at that point.”
    And so now I am here. The last thing. “So she stopped taking her meds?”
    “Most of them, yes.”
    “Was she trying to break a habit or something?”
    He shakes his head. “No. Not at all. She hadn’t been dependent on pills or medications. She didn’t feel beholden to them, but even so, she made a deliberate choice when her treatments ended to stop all medical assistance. She made a choice then to finish out her days as free as she could be. She wanted to experience life and death on her own terms.”
    “When you sent her to the teahouse, it wasn’t because ofthe legend then, right?” I ask, even though the question hurts as it forms in my throat.
    He nods. “You are correct. I did not send her there for the legend of the tea. I did not send her there for the mystical powers of the Tatsuma tea.”
    I press my lips together, then speak. “You sent her there for some kind of peace, right? Peace of mind. That’s the healing she was looking for?”
    “Yes. Yes, I did. And yes, that’s what she was looking for.”
    I know I have to ask the final question. I know this path is leading to this question. And I think I know the answer. It’s come in and out of focus these last three weeks, and it’s the thing I’ve been dreading. The answer I’ve always pushed aside. I can’t push it aside anymore.
    “She always told me she was holding on to see me graduate. That that’s what she was fighting for and living for. She told me the reason she held off cancer for five years was to get to my graduation,” I say, but as the words come out, I can feel, finally, how small they are, how hollow they are in light of everything my mom embraced, everything she was. Still, I need to come out on the other side. “But I don’t think she was holding on anymore, was she?” I ask, but I know the answer. I was the one holding on then. She was the one ready to go. “She stopped holding on, didn’t she?”
    There is a pause, so quiet it’s like his office is now the temple, so still I can smell incense drifting through.
    “She told me she was ready,” the doctor says. “She saidshe was ready to die. That she did not want to hold on any longer.”
    For a second, I want to ask if it was suicide. If he’s just another version of Dr. Kevorkian. But I don’t. Because it wasn’t, he’s not, and she never would do that. Instead I say what I had feared to be true. What I now know to be