There were two beds in my mother’s room. She was in one. That night, I was in the other. I had driven up from Madera after my own treatment, the shot still working its way through me, that particular sick heaviness settling in the way it always did a couple of hours after. I walked into her oncology ward room and it was full of family. And as I came in, one by one, they hugged her goodbye. They told me it was my turn to watch her. And then they left.

I want to be careful about how I say this next part, because I’m not trying to indict anyone. But it discouraged me in a way that went deeper than that one night, because it was a pattern I already knew by heart. In my family, the person who looked out for me was my mother. She was always the one.

And now she was the one in the bed. The single person in my life who had reliably taken care of me was dying, and the room had just emptied of everyone else, and it was my turn to take care of her.

So there I was. Sick myself, in the second bed, watching over her. She was lucid right up until the day she died. But that day she was sleeping, so I didn’t get words. I just got to be near her. I stayed put in that second bed, trying not to be in the nurses’ way when they came in, trying to make myself small and useful and quiet. I didn’t feel well. I was up most of the night. Though, honestly, I was up most nights in those years anyway.

And down the hall, a man was screaming. Most of the night. Some pain I couldn’t see and couldn’t help and couldn’t stop hearing, coming from another room, another family’s worst night, carrying down the corridor into ours. I lay in that second bed in the dark and listened to it, and I was afraid in a way I don’t have a word for.

Because I wasn’t just grieving. I was seeing my own future in that room, the way I couldn’t stop doing the whole time I was sick. The man down the hall in that kind of pain. My mother in the bed a few feet from me, at the end of the same disease I was in the middle of. And me in the second bed, still in treatment, still uncertain, still not knowing which way my own story was going to break.

I looked at my mother, and I was watching my grief. And I looked down the hall toward that screaming, and I was watching my fear. Her ending, and my possible one, playing out on either side of me while I lay there sick and awake.

I didn’t sleep much. I told myself it was the ward, the noise, the strangeness of it. But I hadn’t slept much in a long time, and I wouldn’t for a long time after.

I stayed until morning, because underneath the discouragement and the fear was the simplest thing of all: she was my mother, and she had never once left me alone with something hard, and I was not going to leave her alone with the hardest thing there is.

She’d taught me that, without ever saying it. You stay. Even when you’re sick. Even when you’re scared. Even when the room has emptied out and there’s screaming down the hall and no one is coming to take the next shift. You stay.

So I stayed.