Yerevan had plenty of orphanages, but I didn’t need one after my mother died. After all, I was already living with my grandmother. All that was different was that suddenly I had a whole bedroom to myself. I was no longer sharing one with my mother. And now I was as sad as my grandmother had been for weeks. When you’re a teenager, it’s hard to believe your mother really is dying. I guess the teenage brain doesn’t get it that the chemotherapy is going to fail or the radiation is only postponing things. The teenage brain doesn’t accept what’s coming. I only saw the little steps forward, not the bigger steps back. My mother was never in remission. The doctors never said she was cancer-free. And yet I viewed her hospital stays and the ways she got sicker only as phases. I saw setbacks, sure. But I believed in the end she would get better. She had to, yes? How could a girl lose her father when she was toddler and her mother when she was teenager? I would join my grandmother in church when my mother was hospitalized, and the reverent fathers were very kind. Looking back, they probably thought my teenage quiet was my understanding of how sick my mother was. It was actually the opposite: total teenage denial.
During the last two weeks of my mother’s life, I would sit beside her hospital bed and try and hold her hand. By then I was holding all bones. I would go there for few minutes right after school and before dance, and then I would go again right after dance. It was amazing how quickly she deteriorated those last days. We could still talk when she went into hospital for the last time, even if her sentences were short and often racked by a hacking cough. But by the end, I would just hold her hand. We didn’t speak. When she slipped first into morphine cloud—when she finally stopped coughing and her body was no longer spasming in agony—and then into death, I was so stunned.
In the days that followed the burial, Grandmother and I were lonely, even though we had each other. But she had lost a child and I had lost a parent. My grandmother had obviously seen lots of people die, but it’s different when it’s your daughter. It’s different when you have to witness your granddaughter watching her own mother die.
We were both very quiet those days. There really was very little to say.
…
Those weeks, we also had Vasily. Or, at least, we had Vasily’s people. He would show up at our apartment or at hospital—always foreshadowed by his cologne—and he would hug us. He would tell us very funny stories and laugh at his own jokes like crazy person. And his laugh was so big, so contagious, that sometimes we would laugh, too.
At least a little.
Chapter Three