We’re in the middle of archiving years of KoreAm stories on charactermedia.com. It’s mostly a process of copying and pasting text—not too exciting. But every once in a while, you come across a story that draws you in. This essay by Tonya Maxwell is gripping and beautiful. She writes about taking care of her mother, who had terminal cancer. I’d like to share it with you today.
This story was published in the November 2007 issue.
Her Final Gift
A mother-daughter love story
By Tonya Maxwell
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.
“Tonya, I’m sick. I have cancer. I’m so sorry, Tonya,” she said, apologizing as if the disease were her fault, something she did to me intentionally. This was my mother’s way. Never did she want to burden me, even as she faced a monster.
Immediately, I took leave to return home, spending two months with her as she underwent, and then recovered from a radical hysterectomy. The surgery was unforgiving, wreaking havoc on her hormones and sending her into a bleak depression that was reminiscent of the months following another tragedy from long ago, the death of my father, Dan Maxwell.
He’s been gone more than a quarter century, but even recently, when strangers inquired about my father’s death, Mom would revise history with a little lie. “He had a brain tumor,” she would say curtly, cutting short their curiosity.
For her, the truth was too complicated and heartbreaking and left a wound that never quite healed.
When my father courted my mother, he was a promising young Army specialist stationed in Korea, personifying all of America’s best dreams. Blessed with Indiana boy good looks and a good career, he also had the gentlest heart my mother ever found in a man. But a decade into their marriage, he plummeted into a mental illness that left him hearing imaginary voices and music. In the winter of 1981, he quieted the piano in his mind by reaching for a handgun stored alongside his hunting gear.
That gunshot haunted my young nightmares, but I was 5 years old and gloriously ignorant of its ramifications. It was my mother who, with little emotional or financial support, faced an empty American dream and an anguished choice: Leave that cold town for Korea to find family comfort along with a place in this world, or stay in Indiana with her young daughter, to make sure that one day, she would find her place in this world.
My mother made her decision, a quiet sacrifice she never flaunted, never even mentioned until I was an adult. As her illness became debilitating, I often considered how she purchased my stability and peace by abandoning her own. I stood by my mother as she battled cancer. She stood by me for a lifetime.
She moved from the house where my father died in 2003, after she finished radiation treatments. We decided to buy a home together near my job in North Carolina. It made good sense on several levels.
Before the cancer, she had worked on the assembly line of a factory that manufactured car parts. But the plant moved to Mexico, causing her to lose both her job and insurance several months before her illness. For a Korean woman in her 50s who had no education, the prospect of finding new work wasn’t promising in that recessed Indiana market. So she looked forward to the move, which promised better weather, an easier job search and my company.
Moving in together was an even bigger boon for me. With her help, we could buy a house, and I was eager for her exquisite Korean dishes and shopping days with my fashion-savvy mom.
But we also saw the potential pitfalls of two hardheaded, independent women under the same roof. She was always my biggest champion and I her most important security, yet we often squabbled about my lackluster housekeeping skills or her unyielding manner. So it was filled with tempered optimism that she came to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
In some ways, the arrangement was better than we imagined. We gave each other high-fives when we installed new storm windows, planted azaleas and decorated the house like a magazine cottage. We doted on our dog during mountain hikes and shared meals she prepared of kimchi jigae, Korean pancakes and dumplings. Then in 2005, we moved to Chicagoland after I found a reporting job at another newspaper.
Still, the arguments we had during my adolescence lingered, the kind that typically grew from miscommunication and misunderstandings. I was in my late 20s, had already watched her suffer through cancer and loved her fiercely, yet still had learned little about patience.
She taught me that lesson this summer as she lay dying. She had confided to Michael, my boyfriend and support, that she feared becoming a burden to me. He countered with a view she had not considered: The desperately ill have much to offer. Sometimes they can make the people around them feel whole.
Gently, almost imperceptibly at first, our roles began their reversal. The cancer slowly stole the little things that defined my mother; her enthusiasm to tend the garden, her compulsion for clean laundry, her mornings preparing elaborate meals, even her doting on our dog. All of these things I began doing, often with her vigor, wondering if that old adage is inevitable, that we all do become our parents.
Shortly after her diagnosis, I had stopped working, instead focusing on her frequent doctors’ appointments, infections that landed her in the emergency room and the daily worries brought by a terminal disease.
She had always been thrilled to see my name in a big city newspaper. My byline was her triumph: A woman with no schooling can have a child who is paid to write. But in those months of her long illness, we were both happy to let the outside world dissolve away.
“I’m glad you’re home. Stay with me,” she once said, but by then, it was clear to each of us that my place in the world was there, beside her.
For my mother, that statement was her gift to me, a way of saying she would let me take care of her without protesting her loss of independence. Out of that came an intimacy in our relationship that melted away years of differences and on the last day of her life, I like to imagine that this bond helped her die in peace.
On Aug. 24, Mom was restless and had not spoken in days. She had been in home hospice care for a few weeks. I thought she just needed more fluids and better pain management but in retrospect, her kidneys had likely shut down. Social workers came by and asked if we might like music therapy or a chaplain.
I was leery of another stranger coming to the house. Mom hadn’t even told her family in Korea or friends she was ill. But Michael said Mom would find comfort in a man of God. The chaplain arrived that afternoon.
“Tell me about your mom,” he said as we crowded around my mother.
I told him that she sacrificed for me and never asked anything in return. That few people have endured more hardship.
Born in 1948, she grew up in a mountainous Korean village and though poor, felt charmed until she was about 12, when her own beloved mother died. She always talked about my grandmother with a sort of magic, her conspirator in a rare, epic kind of mother/daughter bond. My mother never expected me to love her like that.
Afterward, young Yi Chong Hui became the woman of the house, rising before dawn to cook for her two brothers and father. She hauled drinking water, washed clothes in an icy river in the winter and walked miles to find medicine for the family.
But she began dreaming of a big city job that would lift her family from poverty and so, a few years later, stole money from her father’s tobacco harvest and ran away to Seoul. Instead, she found more hardship, in part because she was never educated, barred from going to school by her father.
I told the chaplain about my own father, how Mom came to America both for love and hope that she would find a job that would allow her to send money back home. I told him about my father’s death and how Mom didn’t consider taking me to Korea, fearing I’d be an outcast. How she never remarried, never even dated. How she was demanding of my education. How even, throughout the time we lived together as adults, she would have a hot Korean meal waiting, though I often arrived when most people were readying for bed.
Hours after the chaplain left, Mom quietly stopped breathing, as gently as if she were closing a book. Her face gave no hint of months of agonizing pain. She looked beautiful once again, as though she fell into the most refreshing nap. There is a gift in that too, giving me the memory of a peaceful death.
And most important, I know that we each recognized something that we had long overlooked in one another. I saw her stoicism, how she endured so much without complaint for me. She saw my dedication to her.
“My daughter. I didn’t know you could care about me this much,” she said to me one day as she sat in bed, her hands on mine. Her mouth was a taut little smile as she pushed back tears. Chemotherapy had already made her scalp smooth, giving her the look of a wise little scholar-monk. “In all of this, we finally see each other.”
Yes, my mother, we do. We too are united in an epic mother/daughter bond. We too are conspirators in our own charmed love story.
Tonya Maxwell is a freelance writer and reporter who lives near Chicago.
