How it Started

(Friday, Jan. 23, 2009).

There are eight of us to two bedrooms. I sleep in a double bed with my mother, who cuddles with me but complains that I make a bony substitute for my father. My brothers toss in their sleep on single beds in the corners of the room. Liz and Donald sleep on a haphazard nest constructed from parts of the unsatisfactory fold-out couches in the living room/kitchen, leaving the light on to keep mosquitoes off. Joan and Barry have a room to themselves, an entire wall windows looking out at the sea. You should see the assortment of toiletries in our one bathroom.

I am wielding my camera today, taking photos. I stand knee-deep in the surf and watch my brothers ride in on a wave, their mouths giant smiles through my flickering lens. My mother insisted that I do it, said she wanted to be able to remember it all. She thinks when we die we live on in the memories of others. I think she's right. But secretly I hate doing this. I love photography, but it's not enough to remember today. Flowers look great in photographs, but you can't fit people in frames.

It is Liz's second time in the sea - her first was yesterday. She is my new aunt, from Taiwan. I met her yesterday. She doesn't know much English yet, and speaks rarely unless she has something important to say. "You have a kind heart", for example. I watch her lie back in Donald's arms and sing a new squeal of love as each wave breaks over her plump belly. Inside it my unborn 7-month-old cousin learns, along with her, to love the waves. They disappear for 1/200th of a second and a happy and wet couple is written to my memory card.

Looking back to the shore I find Joan and Barry quickly. Joan stands under the umbrella she bought in Taiwan when she went to meet Liz's family. She cannot go in the water with us, and needs to keep the sun off her sensitive skin. Barry stands close at her side. Joan married him when she was 18, and they have been married for 47 years and 362 days. Together they watch the others play in the sea, while I halfheartedly document the occasion and my mother swims out, far out, beyond the waves, and looks back at us, leaving me sandwiched between the gaze of the two women who held my egg in their womb. With my camera around my neck I cannot reach my mother, and with the surf around my knees Joan cannot reach me.

Back at the beach house Donald and my brothers are ready for the next dose of fun, and Liz will look on with a smile between the chores she does without being asked, expected, or wanted to. My family is full of amazing women. My mother tried three times for a daughter, but hasn't got one yet. My brothers and I will do our best. I have just put my camera away when I look up and see Joan's face erupting into tears. She lurches from Barry's side and throws her arms around my mother, tells a room full of three generations of silence: "Before we leave here, we all have to hold hands, and ask the sea to take the cancer away".