Chong Hui Maxwell with the family dog, Bailey, in her bedroom in August 2007.

 

The writer and her mother on the stoop of their home in Garrett, Ind., in October 1994.

 

COUNTERCLOCKWISE, STARTING FROM TOP: Dan and Chong Hui Maxwell in Korea in 1970, the year they married. • Tonya at 6 years old, just nine months after her father’s death. • A September 2001 photo of mother and daughter on the shores of Jejudo in Korea.

 

The season of my mother’s cancer was filled with fearful things. Infections that nearly turned septic. Chemotherapy needles. A fog that settled over her mind, wrought by pain and drugs. Every week a new challenge more brutal than the last.

For me, a new worry came with a handful of words she spoke one afternoon. She gestured to her swollen feet and said a few sentences in Korean, her native language, one I cannot understand. Suddenly everything felt unstable: not only months of being a caretaker, but even the decades we spent being the most important person in the other’s life. Lying in her own bed, she slipped to another time and another country, and I could not follow. I felt like a fraud of a daughter.

Please don’t fall further from me, I thought.

She never wanted me to learn Korean. I grew up in a small Indiana town and she was determined I not be marked by anything that made me different. She didn’t want me ever to know her struggles as an immigrant.  

Her Hangeul brought to mind some of the bruising arguments we had when I was young, the kind I imagine plague many foreign-born parents and their American-born kids.

“You don’t know me at all,” she would calmly say.

“Yeah, well, you don’t know me either!” I would yell.

But I like to think that somewhere during our long goodbye, my mother, Chong Hui Maxwell, and I each learned a few things about the other. I only wish I had been wise and patient enough to tell her how much I appreciated her sacrifices and loyalty long before her second bout with endometrial cancer, a malignancy of the lining of the uterus. 

The American Cancer Society estimates 500,000 women nationwide have survived endometrial cancer and predicts it will take the lives of about 7,400 women this year. My mother, at the age of 58, is now among that smaller number. She died on Aug. 24 in our home just outside of Chicago.

In large part, it was the cancer that brought us together as roommates nearly five years ago. Back then, she was still in my childhood home in Indiana, and I lived 10 hours away in the mountains of North Carolina, where I was a newspaper reporter.

She called me at work in 2002 to tell me she had gone to the doctor, her voice oddly subdued, hesitant.