It’s Christmas and my family and I are skiing with Bei Bei and her mom. Bei Bei’s mom has been complaining about her leg, hip, and back for over a month now. I think that she’s starting to limp. Every time anyone talks to her about going to the doctor she always ignores them.

About a month later she says that her leg hurts more. The limping is also much more visible. Almost every day she comes over to my house so that my mom can massage her leg. She says that my mom’s massages make it feel better, and it’s true. After the massages, her limp is less noticeable. But my mom doesn’t have time to do this every day.

Bei Bei and her mom have gone back to China for the summer. It’s a relief for us all. Hopefully her family can help convince her to finally go have a doctor look at why her leg is hurting.

She’s so stubborn. She won’t listen to us, she won’t listen to her husband or daughter, and she won’t listen to her parents. At least her sister convinced her to go to a traditional Asian doctor. But it’s only acupuncture and herbs. Everyone knows that western medicine is better than traditional Asian medicine. Everyone is starting to suspect that it’s cancer; no one says it out loud though. I think that even she suspects it is cancer. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to go to the doctor. I think that she is scared of that possibility; so if she doesn’t acknowledge it, then it won’t actually happen. Apparently her family has a history of having cancer. Even her sister had it.

I don’t really know what happened but Bei Bei finally went to the doctor today. It’s a bittersweet day for us all. Her limp has gotten so bad that she can barely walk, and when she does she’s near tears. We are all almost positive by now that it is cancer.

When she finally went to get the MRI done, she couldn’t even fit in the machine because she couldn’t straighten her leg. About a month later, after the open MRI and the doctor visits, the doctors finally confirm that she had Stage 3 cervical cancer. The doctors say that if they’d found out about the cancer earlier, then they could have treated it. Everyone around her feels guilty. Everyone thinks that if only they had tried harder to get her to go to the doctor sooner, then she wouldn’t be in so much pain and that this wouldn’t be so serious.

The doctors tell her that she can’t be cured and that they can only try to make her last days as comfortable as possible. She refuses and insists on doing chemotherapy even though the doctors say that it won’t do much. It’s kind of strange that before the doctor visits and the diagnosis it seemed that she was ready to throw her life away, but now that she is on death’s doorstep, she is trying everything she can to stay alive. No matter how much money she has, it won’t do any good towards saving her life.

Day by day, month by month, she is slowly withering away in front of all our eyes. Her husband and sister have practically moved to America to take care of her. She has lost so much weight in so little time. Before the chemo she was a fit and happy person; but now she is a bag of bones. It’s scary to see her reduced to so little in such a short time. She doesn’t even move around in her bed; it’s too painful.

A bunch of her friends came from China to visit her but they were too late. She died the day before they got to America. She died on November 30, 2014 only a few months away from seeing her only daughter graduate from high school. After her mother died, Bei Bei took an extended break from school. She went back to China to see her old friends and the rest of her family. Even after Bei Bei came back to America to finish up the rest of her senior year, she was withdrawn and often skipped school.

I didn’t have as strong of a reaction to her mom’s death. I created a little bubble around myself. When Bei Bei’s mom got sick I started to distance myself from her. In some ways I am kind of like her: if I don’t acknowledge something, then it doesn’t exist. As if, in this way, I can protect myself from any bad thing.