beat this cancer. She told me she just knew I would. I wished I had her blind faith. The next day she came to see me again, this time suddenly bursting into tears as she entered my room. This sister of mine who never cries hugged me and told me how I was the strong one, that I wasn’t supposed to get sick, and how she had been trying to hold it together constantly around the girls and our parents, and now that they were all outside somewhere, she couldn’t keep it pent up anymore. My sister was my daughters’ surrogate mother during those early days. At my parents’ house, while my mother made sure the girls were fed and bathed and as Josh slept in the hospital with me, Mia and Belle turned to my sister for comfort, cuddling against her every night because she was the closest thing to me that they had. My poor sister bore a heavy burden. I hugged her back, told her that indeed I was very strong, that I had always been and would always be.
Cousin N came to see me after work. She is notorious in our family for crying at anything and everything, but she’d been oddly stalwart since my diagnosis. I told her how I was astounded that she hadn’t shed a single tear for me, secretly wondering if she didn’t care as much as I thought she did. Oh, no, she said, just that day she’d cried a lot; she’d cried on the phone while talking to Cousin C, she’d cried at her desk afterward and to her co-workers, and she’d cried in her car, all the way to the hospital; but now she was all cried out; she was good for the time being. She flashed a smile that was a little too big, trying to hide the tears that glinted in the corners of her eyes. I think I loved Cousin N more than ever in that moment.
Even though I had frequent visitors, numerous phone calls, and much love, I spent many hours alone in my hospital room while everyone else was working or playing. Alone with my thoughts, my sadness, my fear, my shock. Fortunately, UCLA was my hospital heaven and angels abounded. I had and have stayed at other hospitals before and since, when I gave birth to my children and then after my HIPEC surgery, but there were no angels then, nothing particularly remarkable or memorable about the nurses who cared for me. There was something extraordinarily special about UCLA for me that I’d never known before and haven’t known since. Perhaps another sign of God’s hand in my life.
Karen, Noreen, Ray, Roxanne, Costa, Manuel, Ginger, Anita, Damian—names that mean nothing to you, but for me those names bring back memories of comfort and solace, hands, hugs, and words that consoled me in the darkest moments of my life. The people who are represented by those names were my true pillars of strength at a time when no one who loved me seemed to be able to bear the weight of my turbulent emotions, so for the most part I hid those emotions from the people I knew and loved, and instead unleashed them on these angels of mine. Their ability to listen, reassure, smile, and be optimistic in the face of all the horrors they saw every single day astounded and inspired me.
Costa clutched my hands one afternoon after she’d caught a glimpse of my girls leaving the room and prayed solemnly to God for me in a language I didn’t understand. The fervor of her prayers brought tears to my eyes. Then she went about changing my sheets.
Karen, the twenty-six-year-old Chinese American woman—a girl, really—who reminded me so of my good friend V, accompanied me on many a walk around the floor, telling me about how when she saw my name, she had been taken aback because Yip had also been the name of her mother, who died at age thirty-eight of colon cancer when Karen was only two years old, leaving behind her overwhelmed father and three grieving older siblings. I could feel that Karen took comfort in me as much as I took comfort in her. I could feel that hand of God again when I looked into her strangely familiar face.
Then there was the man whose name I never knew, the one who didn’t speak a word of English, whom I might have mistaken for a youthful