The patients on the F1 cancer ward of Stanford Medical Center are not there to get well. They are there because their tumors have spread and grown and metastasized, taking over all that made them human. They are there because someone has uttered the crushing words, “There is nothing more we can do.” They are there, simply, because they are ready to die. Every room in this ward holds a person near the end of their life, but more than that, every room holds a story. In the form of conversations, good-byes, and funeral plans, every dying person is allowing their essence to escape from their sick body into the world once more. People’s lives are leaving them and wandering the halls, filling the air with so much love and sorrow that it is almost tangible. The stench of death and antiseptic fills the air, but it is not death that defines these halls – it is life in all these stories.

As an 11-year-old, I wandered these hallways of dying parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and children, every time heading for the same room: the one holding the story, the essence, of my mother. I say her essence because the person who lay motionless in that sterile room, taking the occasional rasping breath, was not my mother. This was not the woman who told me bedtime stories and cooked my dinners. But her story, her true self, was very much present in that hospital room. The room was bursting with what really made her her. Memories of her laughter, stories of her life, good-byes, kisses, family members, lifelong friends, her wife and children – all of these things held my real mother. I remember the day she called a friend at two in the morning to tell him that the clams were jumping off her pizza, the day her brain tumors suddenly made her artistic, and the day when I wheeled her down to the cafeteria for lunch and she kept asking me to go faster. These memories, like the people she loved, hold my mother. A body is a vessel for a story, and as my mom’s body failed her, her story escaped. This story has shaped my life in the most profound ways possible.

For me, the memory of the six months between her diagnosis and death are a series of snippets. I remember certain days, good and bad. I remember the day my mom told me she was sick. I remember the day I watched her sit in a space-age contraption behind a three-foot door to have her brain cells fried by radiation. I remember the chest tube that drained the fluid drowning her lungs. However, I also remember her hope. She thought that she would just walk out of those hospital doors and jump straight back into the ocean, her second home. She thought that she would live to see her hair come back (curly, she said) after chemo stole it from her. She thought, she hoped, more than anything, that she would live to see my brother and me grow up. But the random mutation that made her so miserable for those six months did finally set her free from her pain, placing all that suffering on the survivors. Although she never saw all the milestones that have passed since and are yet to come in our lives, she has shaped us profoundly.

The grief that one experiences after such a loss is indescribable and so massive that it becomes who you are. It is painful, beautiful, pure, angry, and terrifying. In my experience, grief has been the most beautiful form of love. The pain of loss erases any faults my mom might have had; as a teenager, instead of clashing in typical teen-parent fashion, I love my mother more than anyone could ever love someone who was alive.

Grief is pain and happiness and loneliness together; now I find it hard to smile without crying or cry without smiling. For me, sad and happy are nonexistent emotions. I live in an in-between state that is deep and beautiful. I do not have to simplify my emotions into nice, shiny boxes but can instead enjoy the expansiveness of life – the pain in beauty, the suffering in love. My life is forever altered because the woman I relied on as a child, the woman whom I believed was the strongest, smartest, most beautiful woman in the world, is simply gone from existence. But the hole that now exists is still full of her story and her love, thus forming a grief that is too painful to put into words but also full of joy and ecstatic beauty.

Since October 2011, I have returned to the hospital – the scene of the crime, if you will – just once, a couple of weeks ago. As the edges of grief begin to recede, I long for the nights full of tears and hopelessness. I know fear, I know anger, I know guilt, but most of all I know sadness. I know what it is like to cry myself to sleep after an evening at the hospital and then have to go to school the next morning and pretend to be okay. But even though they hurt so much, these moments I have just described, the moments that anyone would want to forget, they are the moments I crave, that make me miss having the hospital as my home.

I miss this pain because it is so tied up with her. Pain has seeped into every mental picture I have of my mom, brightening its colors but then dulling them with tears. When pain and memory are so intertwined, it is hard to have one without another. All I have of my mom is memory, but those memories come with a cost no one should have to bear. I can never have one without the other, but even after four years of seemingly endless pain, I know I will always choose to cry over a memory rather than not remember at all.

This is where the hospital comes in. When I went back, everything my subconscious had tried to protect me from came flooding back. I could see my 11-year-old self there with my dying mother. Some of the doors in the F1 ward were open, and every bald head and bag of IV fluid I saw reminded me of my mom. Likewise, in every attendant family member I saw myself. On this second trip to the hospital, I found what I wanted: memories. Memories laced in pain, but memories nonetheless.

To forget my mom would be the worst fate. To remember her, the best. The hospital has taught me the duality of life and death, and how something can be painful and beautiful all at once. The experience has changed me, left me without a mom, and forced me to carry on through normal life that holds no possibility of normalcy. But most of all, the experience has allowed me to feel deep, true love in the form of grief – love I doubt any other place, person, or experience could evoke in me.