The house still smelled like my mother.
Not metaphorically, like grief that lingers in the air, impossible to brush away. I mean literally. Rosemary oil in the hallway. Hand lotion by the sink, cap half-off, because she never tightened it. Reading glasses on the coffee table beside a bookmark she’d never use again. Her crocheted blanket, folded over the chair back, waiting for shoulders that were gone. Even her slippers stayed by the bed, toes pointed toward the closet, as if she might return any minute.
Cancer took her slowly. Eight months of surrendering—first her energy, then her hair, her appetite, her voice of defiance. Some days she joked, the way she used to. Other days, she stared out the window like she was listening to instructions from a world I couldn’t enter. Near the end, she apologized constantly—for being tired, for needing help, for breathing too loudly, for existing at all.
I’d tell her to stop. You don’t owe me anything. You can be sick without performing bravery as if it were a job. She’d nod, then apologize again ten minutes later, as if “sorry” were the only language she trusted.
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