Two years ago, I met my mother for brunch one Saturday, and over poached eggs and lattes, my mother told me, in precise medical verbiage, about how she was dying.

 

“It was on the left lung’s inferior lobe, and there was some chance it’d respond to high-energy radiation," she said. She had a Ph.D. in paleobotany; it was how she talked. “But now with advanced metastasis, the prognosis is one, maybe two months.”

 

There was a silence. My mother emptied a packet of sweetener into her cup and rolled the yellow paper into a tiny cylinder.

 

“I wish you hadn’t told me any of this,” I said. I knew it was a cruel thing to say and I didn’t mean for it to sound like it did. I don’t know how I meant it to sound. I was a little ashamed. She must’ve been driving herself to all the appointments, waiting in cold rooms, poked and radiated. Aside from me, she had no one else in this world.

 

“How long have you known?” I asked.

 

She reached out and held my hand. “It’s OK,” she said. “I knew you’d react like this.”

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I noticed now that there was a thin Band-Aid on the back of her right hand. The skin on her palm felt dry and papery.

 

“How long have you known?” I repeated.

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“A couple of months. A couple of days. What’s it matter?”

 

“You don’t even smoke,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

 

“I thought we were going for a little hike afterward.”

 

“The medical plan, Mom,” I said.

 

“Oh,” she said. “There are no plans left.”

 

She sipped more of her water, then asked the waiter for the check. She tucked a strand of grey hair behind her ear and reached across the table again to touch my hand.

 

As was our habit each Saturday after brunch for the last ten years, we headed for the nearby trail. At the lookout, we saw the clouds stretching in long parallel lines, as if they were being pulled towards the water by some invisible thread. Above the harbor stood the town’s old Ferris wheel, coins of sunlight bouncing off its small and slow-moving cabins. We turned to each other and smiled. Our eyes closed, we inhaled, then tried to identify every plant we smelled.

 

“Eucalyptus,” my mother said. “Pine. Oak.”

 

“Mint,” I said. “Azaleas. Fern. Fresh cut grass.”

 

This old ritual from my childhood calmed me. As we continued walking, I found I wasn’t panicking as much as I had been but was instead beginning to think of my mother as a character in some story, a person to whom life was happening and for whom life must soon end. This sudden distance was disorienting. Old memories began to pass through me — the brothy smell of the cup noodles she made on long nights spent typing her thesis; the headband with the little flashlight she wore when she’d go out some evenings to check if any aphids had gotten into her strawberry planter beds; her knee pressed against mine on Ferris wheel rides during the long summer days.

 

We walked some more until we found the trail blocked by a fallen branch, its sprawling offshoots expanding in all directions. There were patches of moss on its bark like tiny islands. A man in a reflective vest and gloves stood facing it, holding a chainsaw.

 

“When did it go down?” my mother asked.

 

The man shrugged. He pulled on the string. As the blade made contact with the wood, the moss formed a small green cloud around it. My mother winced from the noise, but she didn’t look away. When the man was done, he rolled the parts he’d sawn down the ravine we were standing by. He motioned for us to continue along the trail now that it was cleared. But my mother stood still, watching all the debris as it came to rest at the bottom of the ravine. “I think I’ve had enough trail for the day,” she said. I drove her home.

 

A few weeks later, she was admitted to the hospital, and two days after that, with her fingers wrapped around mine, she exhaled, closed her eyes, and died.

 

I carried her belongings to my car: a water bottle, a counterfeit Chanel purse, and a heavily highlighted Bible. Inside the purse were her wallet, a tube of cherry-flavored chapstick, a silver compact mirror, and her membership card to the botanical garden. There were several yellow Ferris wheel tickets and, resting above those, her journal — a green notebook with her name emblazoned in gold on the cover.

 

It was in reading that notebook that I discovered my mother journaled, primarily, about me. At first, the entries followed a pattern: she’d talk about the weather for a couple of sentences, God for a few more, sometimes she’d sketch some ancient plant in green or red ink, the name of the species scribbled neatly above it. And then, inevitably, she’d spend about a page and a half on me. My trials and tribulations, my work life, a recent trip I had come back from, the many embarrassments of my love life.

 

She wondered if I was doing well, wrote reminders to herself to call me later in the day, short prayers. But then, gradually, the weather and God and the plant sketching took a backseat, and my mother began introspecting about this frequent journaling of me. “Lord knows I love him, but why is it that he’s the first thing I think about?” she wrote. “I can’t, for the life of me, remember one fucking day when I didn’t write of him in these journals. My journals. Part of me just hates that. There. I said it.” That was the end of that day’s entry.

 

And from the next day on, it all came pouring out. It appeared my mother had spent the better part of her last days writing — in cold and clinical detail — of her many feelings about having me. She wrote of how hard it was to go at it alone, the whiplash of the infant years — of soiled diapers, soured milk, of drooling and mucus, of the texture of vomit, its acrid stench, of whining and tantrums and fevers and frantic visits to urgent care — stomach bugs, influenza, asthma. She wrote of how it felt to be estranged, with such violence, from one’s own body, of one time catching her reflection in a bathroom mirror during those early years, and sensing no one looking, and no one reflected.

 

She wrote of field research trips cut short then abandoned, of her best friends finding other best friends, of watching whole parts of herself shrivel and shrink, “like a blueberry left too long in the cold.” As the pages wore on, her writing became more disjointed. “Ferris wheel again this morning,” she wrote in an entry dated a few days before she was admitted to the hospital. “My world somehow both small and big. Don’t know if this was a worthwhile exercise, if I can ever make sense of raising a child. It is the single strangest thing I have ever done with my life.”

 

It wasn’t easy reading. There was a moment of feeling hurt, but it wasn’t that. What I mostly felt was a peculiar guilt, as if I had eavesdropped on a private conversation. And yet, it seemed, my mother never made an effort to hide the notebook from me. Perhaps, in making sure she took it to the hospital, she had even wanted me to discover it.

 

I don’t know if she looked at all this once it was out of her, if she made something of it. I choose to believe she did. I picture her sitting, cross-legged on her bed, like she often did, the notebook in her lap and her head bowed in prayer. I imagine her filled with awe at this cavern she had come upon inside her own mind, pointing a blinking flashlight into a dark and endless passage.