It starts with a word I can barely pronounce.
Primary. Biliary. Cholangitis.
It sounds clinical.
Clean.
But the truth of it is messy.
It’s in the yellow tint of her eyes,
the persistent itch that breaks her sleep,
the tired that drapes over her like a second skin.
It’s a slow erosion.
Not a storm, not a flood—
but a river that carves away at her liver,
cell by cell,
quiet and cruel.
I was just a daughter.
But illness turns you into more.
A researcher.
A translator of test results.
A calm voice in the chaos of hospital rooms.
A silent witness when she cries in the dark,
thinking I’m asleep.
I learned to watch her hands—
how they shook after bloodwork,
how they steadied when she braided my hair anyway.
I learned to memorize the rhythm of her breath,
so I could sense the shifts,
the nights her body betrayed her more than usual.
I hated the word “chronic.”
It means forever.
But not in the romantic way.
Not like a love story.
Like a sentence.
Like something you survive instead of live.
She tried to protect me from it.
But I saw.
I saw how she rearranged her pain behind a smile.
How she rationed her energy to make dinner,
even if it meant lying down halfway through.
I saw how strong she was.
Not the kind they write about in books,
but the kind that gets up
after falling apart
in a a hospital bed
quiet but intense on
her own.
Being her daughter means walking beside her,
but never fully understanding what her body feels like
from the inside.
It means Googling treatments at 2am and
Asking doctors the questions she was too tired to form.
It means feeling rage at a disease
you can’t punch,
can’t bargain with,
can’t scream at until it backs down.
But it also means knowing love differently.
Not the easy kind.
Not just the birthday cake kind.
But the holding her hand in waiting rooms kind.
The learning to administer meds kind.
The reading her silence kind.
The sitting with fear kind.
She is still my mother.
And I, still her daughter.
But illness taught us a new language.
One made of glances,
and touch,
and an ache I carry in my own body
even when I feel fine.
She was fighting something I cannot see.
But I see her.
And I will not look away.