She started getting out of bed on her own. Then walking to the kitchen. Then sitting on the porch. Then, on a Saturday morning three months after treatment ended, standing in the garden looking at the roses that had bloomed while she was too sick to notice them.
She told me the roses were beautiful.
I told her they had been waiting for her.
She looked at me with an expression I recognized from my entire life. The expression of a mother who has watched her daughter become the kind of woman she hoped she would become and is seeing, in a single moment on a porch beside roses, the full accumulation of that hope.
She told me she was proud of me.
I told her I was proud of her.
She told me seventy was too old to survive chemotherapy and a basement in the same year.
I told her seventy was apparently exactly the right age because she had survived both.
