50
Focus: a localized area of disease or the chief site of a generalized disease or infection Four days before my 50 th birthday, a mob of Trump supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying a fair and democratic election. They stormed the Capitol building, sporting shirts that read “six million were not enough” and waving Confederate flags, filling the Rotunda where, not so long ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman and first Jew to lie in state. “It’s not like there’s just one of them,” my sister said later on the phone. “They’ve expanded like…like a cancer.” Four days before my 13 th birthday, my mother, age 49, came home for the last time from the hospital at the end of an on-and-off, four year battle with cancer. The photos of my birthday are poignant; I’m wearing a jean dress with a red shirt and blue polka dotted bow tie. My mother is sitting in a wheelchair wearing a red robe. “We match,” I remember her saying, smiling up at me from her chair just before my aun...