Her white blood cell count was off, and her doctors were concerned that she was exhibiting early signs of pneumonia. She sent that message from a hospital bed. This time, however, there was a reply from her, two hours later: “Love you baradar – I’ll meet you there.” Bita was on Twitter, too, but almost always passively she rarely posted. I snapped a picture with my phone and, in what had become a daily ritual, posted the poem to Twitter. Time washing up on my shore: a poem from the previous century, a book from another life. Each night, before she lets her leave the room, Bita makes our mother promise that everything is going to be okay. In my earliest memories, we’re each in our own bed, lying in the dark. The shag carpet in our room was red, faded from the sunlight that poured through the sliding glass doors each afternoon. For the first few years we shared a bedroom. Bita had herself been six when we’d moved to California from Iran I had been one. Now it was the sixth summer after her diagnosis, and I had brought my six-year-old daughter from our home in Pennsylvania to California to visit my parents and stay for a few weeks in the house where Bita and I had grown up. I listened and redescribed what I’d heard I connected threads, or tried to. What I did in the oncologist’s clinic was not so different from what I do in the classroom or on the page. I discovered I had a talent for explaining to the doctor what my sister wanted to know but was reluctant to ask directly, and for explaining to Bita the implications of what he’d actually said rather than what she was afraid she’d heard. Inside, I’d watch and listen and take notes. They tended to be on Mondays: I’d take the train from Philadelphia to New York City and meet her in the waiting area of her oncologist’s clinic. When the radiologist friend who’d helped get Bita into Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center saw me in the hospital corridor after her diagnosis, he burst into tears.īita had been in treatment ever since I had been beside her for nearly every appointment. There was a thirteen-centimeter mass-roughly the size of a grapefruit-in her liver. Five and a half years earlier, Bita had been diagnosed with stage four intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and deadly form of cancer. Ninety-three days before she died, my sister sent me a message.
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