The Small Slope of Her Shoulders
We were running late to our own wedding reception. It was the middle of October, and the rain came down heavily, pattering insistently against the windshield. There was no wedding ceremony, of course: social anxiety won in the end, and the reception was the compromise.
As we waited, gridlocked and enveloped by smoking car exhaust, I received a phone call. My parents were not going—my mom was sick, had been throwing up all afternoon. She reckoned it was food poisoning, and worried about being seen as disrespectful for not showing face at dinner.
The reception was lovely, despite the uncomfortable spotlight, and the restaurant had taken care to provide to-go containers for my absent parents. We stopped by their house on the way home with the idea that we’d drop off the leftovers and take pictures to commemorate the night.
The house was dark, quiet. Not at all the way they normally kept the house, blaring television and every light on, evidence of a well-lived home. It was my first clue that something was wrong. My dad met us at the door.
“Your mom is upstairs,” he said, by way of greeting.
A knot of anxiety started forming at the pit of my stomach. I climbed the stairs, crossed the hallway to her room. The hem of my dress caught against the carpet, and I suddenly felt out of place, overdressed for the occasion. I stopped at the doorway. She was reclined against a pile of pillows, quiet, unmoving, but awake. The light was low.
“Mom,” I called out, soft and cautious. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. How was dinner?” she asked, after a moment.
“Fine,” I said. “Are you still sick?”
She had not turned to look at me; she faced forward, her gaze fixed straight ahead. “I’m fine,” she said. Despite the strange, heavy silence, her tone was familiar, dismissive. “Just very dizzy.”
We were quiet. I still had not stepped into the room, as if afraid to intrude. There was a world of intent behind what she was not saying, and I dutifully immersed myself in that reality, a habit born of decades of study.
In my family, we do not say the important things to each other. Not out loud. I was reminded of Billi in The Farewell, caught between two worlds, a stranger to her own culture. Like her, I do not fully understand the rules that govern us, but their hold on us is nevertheless powerful, unshakable.
I stood there, troubled. The feeling of wrongness sat in my gut, cold and leaden. I did not say, I’m worried about you. I drew a breath, exhaled, and said, “Maybe you should go to the hospital.”
Her rejection came swiftly. “I just need rest. Go home.”
I stayed, silent and frozen, even as she repeated her dismissal. But my presence was a burden. I could glimpse the truth of it in her voice, the tension just under the surface. So I did as I was taught. I went home.
My dad said goodbye at the door, his mouth pressed into an unhappy line. I watched him as we drove away, the house fading from view, foreign in its darkness.
It turned out to be an intracranial hemorrhage. They showed a CT scan of her brain, blood spilling across the image like a watercolour painting in greyscale.
Her small form was slumped in the hospital bed, hair falling across her face, unwashed and unkempt. My dad sat in the lone chair next to the bed, head bowed, hand running over his head, over and over again. There was more white in his beard than I remembered. I hadn’t noticed that the night before.
The ICU nurse came by and recited the details of her treatment plan, all perfunctory professionalism. My dad turned to me, awaiting the translation, and I struggled through words I’d never learned before immigrating at the age of six: intraparenchymal, angiogram, cerebral amyloid angiopathy.
Before leaving, the nurse turned to my mom. “Do you need anything?”
“Can you open the curtains? It’s very dark in here.”
We all turned towards the window, and bore witness to the overcast sky, the sunlight peeking through rolling clouds.
“It’s to be expected,” the nurse told me kindly. “Her vision may be affected because of the blood and swelling in her brain.”
I nodded mutely. “The window is to your right,” I told my mom, and watched her head turn, slow and unseeing, towards the daylight. She closed her eyes, and said she wanted to rest.
“I’m useless now. I’m like grandma,” my mom suddenly said.
It had been nine days since her admission to the hospital. We had walked down to the hospital café in small, shuffling steps. It was all part of her rehabilitation, her body remembering its base function.
“She had to live in that care home for years,” she continued. “I don’t want to live like that. I would rather die.”
To my left, my dad was having a separate conversation. “You need to find out how to pay our bills,” he was saying. “Your mom doesn’t remember any of her accounts right now. I think our phone bill is due soon.”
I rallied my focus. “Mom, do you keep your passwords anywhere?”
“No, I’m very confused right now. Nothing makes sense. I don’t think I will live very long.”
My dad passed me her phone. It was a welcome distraction, something tangible to quell the building, wild panic. I reset the passwords on her accounts, set up automatic billing, and wrote it all down so that she could change her passwords again when she recovered. If she recovered.
My mom was still muttering into her cup. “Your dad visited grandma every day when she lived in the care home,” she said. “I hated it. I hated going every day. Don’t visit me. Go live your life.”
The bitter frankness was surprising. Her resentment had always been there, carefully banked. While it sometimes burst through in a flood of explosive temper, this was not that. This was her unfiltered, totally exposed, all defenses down.
In that moment, I wondered how much of her I had never known. How much was already gone. The lies that she told, the truths that she didn’t, and all that lay between.
Then I wondered what she would look like at eighty, gnarled hands, cloudy eyes, wispy hair—and didn’t know what I found more painful.
That she’d grow old. Or that she wouldn’t.
We were getting ready to leave when my husband said, “Come give your mom a hug before we go.”
I stared at him, utterly thrown. He stared back at me, eyebrows raised, expectant.
“Come on,” he urged, when I didn’t move.
I felt frozen in place. My mouth worked, opening and closing, as I thought about what to say. Excuses were briefly considered and quickly discarded. What was appropriate enough? It was, strangely, unfathomable. Or was it not strange? The entirety of our history, our relationship, our every interaction up until now all suddenly culminated into this single defining moment, and I wondered if there was reason enough to explain, to him and to myself, why I faltered now.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had touched her, even in passing.
The last time I gave her anything resembling a hug was likely before I was ten.
My family doesn’t do hugs. I don’t do hugs.
She used to tell me to stop talking when I’d say I was sad.
Then she’d blamed me for not being sad enough when my grandma passed.
She’d thrown a fit one evening, screaming and slamming things. She’d wanted destruction. When she had finished, she announced that she didn’t care about us. She said that sometimes.
I was too fat, I was too skinny, I was too loud, I was too quiet.
She’d called me a whore, once. Well—very strongly implied it.
A goddamn hug. It was such a small thing to stagger me. It made me pull out the things I’d hastily shoved deep inside, things I never allowed myself to think too deeply about, and hold them up to be judged. It felt like being split open, all my pieces exposed. Maybe I remembered wrong. Maybe I had changed the context of things. Maybe I was bullshitting myself. Maybe it was bullshit, all of it pretext, but it required more than I thought I was able to give.
Then I looked at my mom, barely able to sit in a chair, advised by the nurses to stay upright as much as possible to help in her recovery. It cost her, I could tell. She seemed out of it, not quite there. A small smile was fixed on her face, her polite smile, not aimed at anyone in particular. It looked out of place, and I wasn’t sure if it was there to reassure us or herself.
And, just like that, it became inconsequential. It was a complicated feeling, capitulating in spite of it all, but it somehow didn’t feel like giving in. It felt like falling with no end in sight, but instead of anticipating the inevitable, painful impact, I reveled in the terrible and wonderful swooping sensation that swept through me.
I was slow in moving, buying time to work out the logistics of hugging someone. (Not just someone.) In the end, I came up empty. I felt clumsy as I wrapped one arm around her shoulders. The uncertain press of my arm against her shoulders felt unfamiliar, strange. Her shoulders felt smaller than I had imagined. I released her, stepped back. And said goodbye.
I stopped by the washroom on our way out of the hospital. Someone had just left, leaving it empty. I paused in front of the mirror and stared at myself, at the careful, blank expression.
I was struck, all at once, with the realization that I was not okay. I thought about her shaky, hesitant steps. The feel of her small, slight shoulders. The memory of her face, turned towards the window, like a flower reaching for the sun. Something painful was unfurling in my chest. I felt like I was on unsteady ground, teetering on the edge of another precipitous drop. Instead of carefully retreating to safety, I took a gasping breath, and another, before I finally relented and allowed the deep anguish to yawn and swallow me, and cried, and cried, and cried.
It was a while before I could take my first unfettered breath.
Three months later, I received a phone call from my dad. I picked up the call immediately, blood pumping and heart jackhammering against my ribs, my body reacting as though it already knew.
“Call an ambulance,” he shouted, and his voice was nothing like I had ever heard before. Shaky, panicked. Scared. I heard him speak away from the receiver. “Wake up. Open your eyes. Wake up!”
I stumbled through the 911 call on another phone, translating the questions from the dispatcher and relaying the answers from my dad.
“Is she breathing?” the dispatcher asked.
My mind went blank. “Is she—?” I stopped midway through the translation. I couldn’t remember the word for breathe. “Is she—?” My thoughts were scrambled. My hands grew clammy. When I finally spoke, my voice was low, barely audible. “Dad, is mom alive?”
He’d hung up accidentally, and didn’t answer the phone again.
I rushed to my parents’ house, heedless of the January ice on the road, arriving just as the paramedics were wheeling the stretcher to the ambulance. My dad looked stricken, as if the earth had shifted under his feet.
The paramedics asked if I spoke English, if I could tell them about my mom’s medical history. I saw her head briefly lift up, lost and confused, before settling again.
I opened my mouth to respond and, bewilderingly, burst into tears.
She’d had a seizure.
They wheeled her straight into an emergency room. We were asked to stay in the waiting area, but my dad marched right in without invitation.
“Your mom gets scared easily,” he said, poking his head in different rooms. I trailed along, tried to highlight the importance of hospital protocol. “She’ll be looking for me, wondering why I’m not there.”
We found her in a room at the end of the hallway. She was struggling to turn over, calling for my dad.
He leaned over the bed rail, brushed the hair out of her face. “I’m here. Do you know where you are? Do you remember what happened?”
“We were walking in the park…”
“No, that was hours ago. Don’t you remember? We were at home. We had dinner. Remember?” he insisted.
“I remember,” my mom said, slow and hazy. “We were walking in the park…”
My dad’s face was a study in devastation. “No. We went home after the park. You had a seizure,” he said, almost accusatory. “Do you remember that? Do you remember fainting? You scared me to death.”
“Did I? I don’t remember.” She looked up at him then, saw his expression. “Why do you look like that? Don’t be scared. I’m okay.” She smiled, her hand reaching up to touch his cheek, heartbreakingly tender.
His eyes were wet and desperately sad. Something in my chest pulled taut. I looked away, eyes burning, the tenderness too much to bear, the moment too painfully intimate. I swallowed the lump in my throat, forced it down.
It was startling, the realization that I’d never seen them like this. In love. I thought, absurdly, that they should be out of practice by now. But the art of loving someone must be primal, biology, because they somehow looked as if they’d been doing this—loving each other—for decades.
Then I thought of my dad, living alone in that big house—
Suddenly, my mom’s eyes rolled up into her head, and her whole body undulated, seizing. A medical team swarmed the room, and my dad and I watched as she was given oxygen and lorazepam, her body fighting it, and then—
Her body abruptly stilled. She slumped over into a dead sleep.
The doctor was telling me something as he left the room, but I hardly heard him. There was a roaring in my ears. I was consumed entirely by white noise.
A memory: I was twenty-three and still living with my parents when I woke up past one in the morning. There was screaming and shouting coming from my parents’ room. I had stayed in bed, listening closely.
I was twenty-three when I learned about my mom’s affair.
“I won’t kill you,” my dad had said. “Tell me everything and I promise you I won’t kill you.”
My mom had stayed silent, even as my dad’s rage shook the house and swallowed us both.
Come home, I had texted my sister. Come home now.
I had stayed awake until I heard my sister open the front door at four in the morning. She’d walked up the stairs, passed by my parents’ room, and quietly opened and closed her door. Only then did I close my eyes and fall asleep.
It was hardly fair, I’d thought. My dad had had an affair of his own. He’d even brought the woman home for dinner, once.
Looking back, maybe their love was in how much they could hurt each other.
And now: “I’m going for coffee,” my dad announced.
It was past one in the morning. We had been waiting for an update from the doctor, for the results of her scan. My mom was still in a deep sleep.
“I can go get it for you,” I offered.
“No,” he said, and left.
Ten minutes later, I passed by the lobby on my way to the washroom. It was dark and deserted at this hour, but I caught sight of my dad sitting there, alone. I slowed down, paused. Watched him for a moment. His head was in his hands, unmoving.
It was uncomfortable to see him like this, to watch for too long. I felt I had already seen too much. I looked away, continued along, took my time in the washroom before heading back. This time, I didn’t turn my head towards the lobby. But the memory stayed, and a small detail wore away at me.
My dad, sitting in the dark, head in his hands. There was no cup of coffee next to him.
It was almost three in the morning when we left the emergency room and went home. That night in bed, I scrolled through old emails my mom had sent to me before the advent of instant messaging on mobile. She still sends the odd email here and there, even now. Countless cruise and flight deals, tax deadline reminders, stuff about school—never anything of real substance, and yet I was terrified to know a world where I’d go without.
Her hospital bed was in the corner this time. There were no windows, but she didn’t seem to notice. She slipped in and out of sleep, unable to stay awake for more than minutes at a time. My dad kept adjusting her bed covers, tweaking the corner here, smoothing the blanket there.
It was explained that seizures can follow strokes, can mimic their symptoms. The doctor asked about her condition, how she had been recovering since the stroke. They were trying to establish a baseline, to determine if she was returning to her previous level of function. The postictal state, the doctor said. The return to normalcy.
“She’s been bringing up really old memories,” my dad told me. “Things that happened a long time ago. She talks like they just happened yesterday.”
“And new memories?” the doctor asked, after I translated.
I looked at my dad. He shook his head. “She has trouble forming new memories,” I said.
She still didn’t remember anything beyond walking in the park. The doctor warned that the disorientation may last another day, but my dad couldn’t seem to accept this gap in her memory.
“You had two seizures. Do you really not remember? You fainted after the first one,” he said, strangely earnest. He was looming over her, speaking into her face as if he could put the words right into her mouth.
“Don’t remember,” she slurred.
“There was a really loud noise when you fell,” he pressed. “You were in the bathroom. I rushed upstairs and you were on the ground, shaking. Are you listening to me?” His voice was growing louder, tenser.
She mumbled something. My dad leaned closer, asked her to speak up. She was quiet.
“She’s tired,” I said.
He continued as if he didn’t hear me. He repeated the same words, starting from the beginning, as if reciting a play. She closed her eyes and turned on her side, away from him.
“You’re scaring her,” I told him. My voice was sharp.
He stopped. Leaned back, passed a hand over his head. His exhale emerged loud and heavy. His mouth curved down into his unhappiest frown.
We watched her in silence for a long moment. She started snoring, her mouth falling open, and there was wetness gathering at the corner of her mouth. My dad ran a hand down her blanket, tucked it in.
In hindsight, maybe I was the one who was afraid.
“What are you doing?”
I looked up from my phone. We had been sitting for hours, quiet, waiting for my mom to wake up. Something must have caught my dad’s attention. He was leaning over the bed rail, speaking to her.
I stood, walked to the other side of the bed. She was on her side, hands in front of her face. Her left palm was open, fingers slightly curled, hand suspended in the air. Her right index finger swiped across her palm, over and over and over. Her eyes were open, staring.
“Stop that,” my dad was saying. He tried to hold her hand, still her movements. She didn’t respond, her finger continuing its strange dance over her palm.
I said nothing. I chewed on the inside of my cheek as I studied her, a terrible suspicion taking form. Her finger in perpetual motion, swiping in the air. Her fixed, intent gaze. The position of her body, a posture I’d seen many times before.
I inhaled as realization hit. Swallowed, then said, “She thinks she’s on her phone.”
My dad paused, leaned back, watching her, and then he was rummaging through her bag. “That’s not your phone,” he said. He took her hand, placed the phone into her open palm, still suspended in the air in front of her face. “This is your phone. Take it.”
It slid onto the bed, unnoticed. Her finger continued drawing characters only she could see. He tried again, this time closing her fingers around the device. Her grip remained lax. The phone fell once more.
He moved to pick up the phone again. “Hold it properly,” he demanded. There was an edge, a tightness to his voice. He seemed angry, but it was a helpless kind of anger. It was easy to mistake unless you knew how to tell. I knew how to tell.
I put my hand over hers, pressed down until she stopped. “Your phone is out of battery,” I said softly.
“Oh,” she said, and fell asleep.
My mom always had a small frame at just under five feet, but she looks smaller than she is, now. It’s the way she folds in on herself, head down and all limbs tucked in, as if she could make herself disappear. But maybe she can’t help it. Her antiseizure medication takes a lot out of her, and it takes a little more of her each time.
She doesn’t keep up with physiotherapy. Her rejection of all rehabilitative efforts is curiously hateful. She’s never said a word about it, but I imagine it acts as a constant reminder of what she’s lost. Beneath the complaints about the inpatient rehabilitation centre—the food she was forced to endure, the schedule she was forced to keep—it was obvious that she hated trying, and failing, to be herself again, to be confronted daily with how much of her had eroded, how parts of her feel like a stranger in borrowed skin. So she stopped trying.
But she is softer, these days. She’s always been a bit rude, careless with her words. My sister and I often shared glances whenever she said something indelicate, stunned that she would say something so thoughtless out loud. That side of her is still there, but there is a vulnerability to her now that I’ve never seen before. She speaks of regret, numbered seasons, leaving things behind, a haunting nostalgia of days past. Her own inevitability weighs heavy on her mind, and it’s evident in how she talks about herself in the past tense. It’s hard to listen to, but it’s harder to watch. It’s a side of her I wish I had never known.
We don’t talk about it, so I guess this is how I mourn, how my grief takes shape. It’s fragile, confusing, and very quiet. It consumes me some days, when I see her lose confidence in herself. How she gives up on walking before she’s even started, how she isn’t sure if she’s repeating herself, how she questions things because she isn’t sure if she’s a good judge of reality. There are more ways than one to lose someone, and this is how it starts.
The thing is, I know what it’s like to lose someone. But I don’t know, exactly, what it would be like to lose her. Somehow, it is not the same thing, and I don’t actually want to know.