aloe vera

There’s a giant, half empty bottle of aloe vera on the far side of my bathroom counter. Part of the plastic spigot broke off at some point, but other than that, you wouldn’t think it was that old. It’s been there for so long, I forgot where it came from.

The gel (what’s left of it) in that clear plastic bottle is a wholly unnatural shade of lime green. A weird, artificially bright color you see on a lot of American products, looking like how a cartoonist on The Simpsons might draw radioactive waste.

Somehow, that dumb neon-green bottle always found its way into a cardboard moving box. From house to house, apartment to condo, it probably saw the inside of at least 10 suitcases, moving trucks, and one shipping container from Japan to Singapore.

That bottle caught my eye this morning, as I woke up early to get ready for work. As much as I tried, I couldn’t pinpoint when I bought it. Without much of a thought, I slid it into the wastebasket next to the bathroom sink. As the bottle fell, it sparked a memory in my head.

A year or two after graduating school, I took a short vacation to the Big Island with my mom. It was my early 20s, and I was excited to see Hawaii for the first time.

I was living in Japan at the time, having recently started my first job in Tokyo. My mom thought a trip to Hawaii would be the perfect way to meet in the middle. She had always wanted to visit the Big Island, and at the time there was a lava flow on one of the volcanos, so it seemed like a good opportunity. That trip to Hawaii is the only vacation I can remember that was just the two of us.

It was the hottest part of the summer and the sun beat down on us the whole week, particularly during our day on the barren Kīlauea volcano, exacerbated by the sweltering heat radiating off the molten rock flowing sluggishly past our feet. The lava crawled like thick molasses, layering over itself and hardening in rounded chunks, like a baker folding pizza dough. It was black, except for a few dwindling pockets of glowing orange, peeking out from beneath the dark ground. The dramatic crackling of lava and hissing of steam from where the plasma met the ocean, flowing off the mountain cliffs like a flaming waterfall, had since passed. We barely caught the tail end of the spectacle.

By the end of the day we were both, as my mom used to put it, burnt to a crisp. I don’t know if that was the day I bought that monster green jumbo bottle of aloe vera, but in my mind I decided that it was.

I have pictures from that trip on my computer, in old grainy pixels. I had just bought my first digital camera, and those 1 megapixel files sit on a dark corner of my hard drive, buried in a folder stuffed with old photos.

My mom did most of the talking on that trip. There was no problem on my end, I was just on the quiet side at the time. Although I was grown and working my first full-time job, I still felt like a kid going sightseeing with his parents, feeling somehow awkward to be alone with my mom, despite the fact she’d been by my side my entire life. I didn’t feel the need to engage in a lot of conversation. I was just kind of there.

About a year after our trip, my mom called me saying she’d been feeling uncomfortable for a while. The doctor had diagnosed her with diverticulitis, and put her on antibiotics. She continued seeing her therapy patients every day. Nothing slowed my mom down.

She enjoyed movies and books, and would always recommend films to me and my sister. She would rent a new movie from the video store down the street at least once a week.

Cooking was her joy, serving up delectable gourmet dinners for me, even when I would much rather have eaten at In-N-Out Burger or Chick-fil-A.

She was obsessed with staying organized, having a meticulous pen-and-paper system she followed her entire life.

As far back as I can remember, she had insomnia. The only hard and fast rule I remember growing up was to never, no matter what the emergency, wake my sleeping mother. She would be up the rest of the night, and you would hear about it the rest of the week (at least).

One time, I was 5 or 6 years old, throwing a fit (as children do) in the hallway at night. My mom was steadfast in her principles, and one of them was to never, for any reason, physically strike a child.

She yelled at me from her bedroom to stop, stormed into the hallway, and for the first and last time in my life, gave 3 tender flicks to my bottom, told me to be quiet, and went back to bed — something she apologized for on a regular basis for the next 25 years.

It became a running joke in my family that any time I wanted my mom to feel guilty about something, I would bring up the “spanking incident”. It never failed.

She had been taking the diverticulitis medications the doctor prescribed for a couple weeks, without any improvement to her symptoms. Not too long after that, she called again to say she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A day later she was in the hospital getting a hysterectomy. The surgery lasted 9 hours.

It wasn’t until the funeral, 8 years later, that my sister and I spoke to the oncological surgeon about the details of her operation. He told us that more cancer was removed from my mom that day than in any other operation he’d performed. My sister heard from others that most doctors, after seeing what they saw in that operating room, might be fully justified to close the patient up, telling them to start getting their affairs in order.

The doctor also told us that day that my mother’s was the only funeral of a patient he’d ever attended.

After the surgery, my mom told my sister and I that her cancer had been diagnosed as stage 3. We later found out that it was easily stage 4.

To this day, we don’t know if she just got it wrong, or wanted to protect us.

For 8 years after the operation she got up every day and went to work, seeing her patients, cooking meals, throwing parties, getting treatment, watching movies, and reading a book every week. She lived longer and fuller than anybody would probably expect of somebody in her condition.

Around the last half year she took work calls from home, sitting up in her bed to listen to her patients and give advice, not always strong enough to get dressed and go downstairs.

In 2011, she sent a note to her patients that she was “pausing” her practice due to health issues. She never mentioned the word retirement. A few months later, my sister, who’d been taking care of her for years, let me know that she’d taken a turn.

I remember being at work in Singapore at the time. I caught a flight, arriving home in a taxi roughly 22 hours later. I dropped my suitcases to the ground and bounded up the stairs of my childhood home, like I’d done every day since I was 12 years old. Her room was empty.

She was in my old bedroom, resting on my bed, an aide by her side. She could hardly respond, but she opened her eyes and saw me. I felt like she used all her strength to muster a contented half smile, which spread across one side of her face, as she drifted peacefully back to sleep. She lived for another 4 days, but that was the last time I saw her awake.

It was about a year before I got married and had kids, and a decade before I started my own company. She would have been proud of that. I wish she could have met my boys.

My sister and I both gave eulogies at her funeral. I met her old friends. Even some of her patients came to say goodbye.

No matter what I was going through, my mom was always there. She encouraged me through every endeavor. She gave her unfiltered opinion to anything I asked, and sometimes, even when I didn’t ask. I was naive not to realize, until she was gone, that nobody in your life would be a cheerleader for you like your mother.

I looked down at the aloe vera bottle I had thrown away, that radioactive shade of lime green emanating a faint glow onto the surrounding trash.

I reached down into the wastebasket and fished it out. I placed it back on my bathroom counter, where it had always been.

Big Island, Hawaii. Aug 2002.