Indeed, Candy Crush. It *is* a saga.

Yesterday I took a break from my marathon house cleaning and I thought, “I’ll just play a quick game of Candy Crack Crush!” I just updated the app a few days ago because I’m awful at updating my apps, and I discovered the joy of the “daily booster wheel” (you’re right, Kim, those jelly fish are a crap prize). So there I was, feeling like a Price is Right contestant, about to spin that little wheel, when Candy Crush stopped me to ask if I would give the other 400 people on my friends list a helping hand. As I was about to hit “accept all,” I saw it: “give Kwi Suk an extra life! She’s been stuck for _____ days.” For those of you who don’t know who that is, it’s my mom. Apparently none of us geniuses thought to delete her rarely used facebook account. I sat there, stunned for a moment, looking at that sweet picture attached to her account.

The Christmas that picture was taken was a stressful and momentous one; it was the first time my parents met my partner—ten years into our relationship. In my family, we don’t do things halfway. They didn’t just come to meet her. We packed my entire family in that apartment we were living in at the time: my parents, Kim and I, my sister, my brother, his wife and his two little babies. The visit was for some *ridiculous* amount of time.  In the middle of winter. In Bloomington. For those of you who live here, you know that means that you are largely housebound on those wintry-mix kind of days because we don’t have the infrastructure in place to always “git’er done.” There were lots of board games. But you can imagine that there were some tense moments, as well. Kim, the only one of us who had to leave the house to go to work, was granted some brief moments of reprieve. I was grateful for that. In truth, though, it wasn’t completely awful. In fact, in many ways, it went better than I could have imagined. Especially because it was my brother and my mom who, after days of mounting tension, had the blowout fight that year. You can’t imagine my relief that someone else had finally ruined Christmas. (Sorry, bro. I mean, odds are it was bound to happen, eventually.) As my parents, my sister and I departed for New York for an additional few days, my mom took a moment to say something to Kim. I think what she said was something like, “thank you for taking care of April; you’re a good girl.”  But later she told me what she wanted to say was something along the lines of, “If I had to pick, I couldn’t ask for a better son-in-law.” Um…awkward, since she’s not actually a “son,” but let’s not get hung-up on the small details. All kidding aside, it was a big step for her, and I appreciated the gesture/sentiment. She never looked back; she loved Kim after that and thought she was the best thing since store-bought kimchi (sorry, I’m reaching here). But in that picture, there are no traces of that tension or awkwardness.  

Also, this. Because it’s too sweet not to include. 

And this. 

So I sat there staring at my iPhone, wondering if it would be the thing to push me over the edge. Instead, I laughed at the incredible awfulness and irony of the moment. I “accepted all,” and then I spun that wheel and got another stupid jelly fish. Not cool, Candy Crush, not cool. That’s kind of how this process has been for me, though. It’s like the universe keeps extending these morsels on its giant silver platter, “a little grief for you today, ma’am?” “No thanks,” I say, “not right now,” and then I go about my day. What’s wrong with me? I can probably narrow down the number of minutes that I’ve spent crying about my mom’s death to the span of a single hour—a few minutes here, another minute there. It’s not that I don’t feel sad, and it’s not that I don’t feel like crying. It’s just that, for some reason, I don’t do it. Instead I endlessly defer it, “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” and all that. 

The problem is, I feel like I’m reaching the end of some allotted grief period. That’s silly, you say? Perhaps. But it’s also kind of true. When someone dies, we expect and fully support a period of mourning. People look at you with their sad eyes and alternately skirt or approach the topic depending on their personality. Then slowly, something shifts. It’s not that people mean to push the grief aside, but after all, life does go on. Any Downton Abbey fans out there? Well, the most recent episode explored this very thing—the various rates at which one is expected to reenter society with a kind of acceptance and forgetfulness concerning the deceased. It goes something like this: “Of course we don’t want you to forget, but let’s also not remember so much…so often. It’s a downer.” The Dowager Countess would say something like, “don’t be a defeatist. It’s so middle class” or “this sort of thing is all very well in novels, but in reality, it can prove very uncomfortable” (Ep. 2.8). Better yet, how about, “stop whining, and find something to do” (Ep. 3.3). Of course I’m misappropriating quotes, but you get the point. It’s not that I’m looking for the sad eyes or the awkward grief encounters. I never knew exactly what to do in those moments, anyway. Sometimes I admitted that things had been difficult. Mostly, however, I smiled at you because that’s what I do, and I was too inept to say or do anything else, even in the face of your condolences and tears. But I’m feeling the shift. Don’t worry; it’s not you. It’s me, and my own internal set of pressures about social acceptability, blah, blah, blah. I’ve wondered, recently, what I’ll do with this blog. How much longer will people want to read about this process?  Should I shut it down and start a new blog. Should I stop blogging altogether? Should I just transition this blog to something else? Should I just keep doing what I’m doing and seeing where it leads? I don’t know. I haven’t answered those questions yet. I’m guessing I won’t answer them today.

I went back to cleaning after failing to beat that dang level for the thousandth time (I’ll take some of those extra lives, peeps). Eventually, I came to that gallon-sized Ziploc bag underneath the bathroom sink that’s full of my mom’s old cosmetics, various makeup brushes, etc. that she left here when she returned to Korea last August. Every time I come across it, I push it a little further back in the cabinet. This time was no different; I pushed it back again. “Another day,” I told myself, “I’ll deal with this another day.” And so it goes. 

Lost and Found

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a lost and found box for life? You could occasionally peruse its contents to locate “things” you’d lost along the way: “Oh, look! It’s my self-esteem! I can’t remember the last time I saw that” or “Hey! Look at those life goals! I’d completely forgotten they existed!” Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. While we might find a pair of sunglasses or a phone in a state similar to that in which we lost them, it’s unlikely that we ever find these other intangible things—if we find them, that is—in quite the same condition.

Around here, 2013 has been a year of profound loss as I said goodbye to my mother, and it’s been extraordinarily difficult, over the past few weeks, to see beyond that heartache. The thought of entering a new year without my mother is unfathomable. I can’t help but think of all the things that she’ll miss. I keep expecting her to call. I keep picking up my phone to text her the latest pictures of Bennett’s antics. Most days, I’m still waiting for the weight of my mother’s absence to sink in, the loss suspended somewhere just out of grasp. Other days, however, it knocks me over and takes my breath away.

But it has also been a year of equally profound discovery, and I would be remiss if I didn’t let myself acknowledge those things that, in my mother’s absence, have sprung up quietly, dissipated suddenly or simply ceased to matter. In some ways, I’ve grown up occupying the negative space around my mother. I’ve spent time trying to shape myself around her, in relation to her, against her. My choices, though they’ve been mine, have always found her at their center in some way, wondering if she’d be angry or pleased, disappointed or proud. Like any tiger mom with *real* skills, she always claimed that the pressure I felt to “perform” or “succeed” was somehow a thing of my own creation, and sometimes, I actually bought into that.  Sometimes, she actually bought into to that. Despair and loss, however, have a way of bringing us face to face with those things hidden in the otherwise unfathomable depths of ourselves. During those last few months together, she began the process of making space for me. It was an uncomfortable and disconcerting experience for someone so used to being constrained by the shape of another person’s desires and demands. Gone were the caveats and qualifications. Gone were the insurmountable mountains of her expectations. And eventually, of course, she was gone altogether.

Losing my mother has felt very much like a void that no amount of time can fill. But lately, finding no resistance in that space that she once occupied, I’ve begun to discover the potential for a kind of fullness or wholeness. What have I kept back? What have I denied or written off for fear that it wouldn’t be enough…that I wouldn’t be enough? This is what she offered me in those last months. After a lifetime of “buts” and “if onlys,” she said simply: “you are enough.” My mother can’t be replaced, and I’ll never stop missing her. But the funny thing about absence is that it always, inevitably, makes room for something new. She understood that as she chipped away at the hard lines of herself. She’s given me space to grow into myself more fully, to see around those things—be they hers, or mine—that took up so much room.

People say that “time heals all wounds.” I’ve begun to think, however, about the way that it is time, itself, that wounds us with its relentlessness. So many of us spend our time looking back, planning for the things to come and trying to keep up with the everyday. There’s never time enough, money enough or peace enough to assess the damage incurred daily. Certainly, there’s even less time to reflect on the ways in which things wear on us year after year. We patch ourselves up, push things aside and power through…at least I have. And suddenly we find that we’ve lost whole parts of ourselves, whole histories, whole lifetimes of desires. No, what’s lost can’t always be found, but as I enter 2014, I’m fortunate enough to have found some time. The hard work will be accepting it without guilt or shame, without pressure to perform in some way, without buzzwords like “idleness” or “privilege” compelling me to fill my time endlessly and frantically. Instead, I’ll try to spend some time breathing into that space of being “enough.” Perhaps I’ll rifle through that box of old selves, discarding things that no longer fit, exploring things that might be worth trying on. Whatever it is, after a long season of loss, of losing, and of feeling lost, I welcome this season of discovery, of finding and of being found. 

A New Season

I’ve been reading/watching The Joy Luck Club with one of my classes. For all of the obvious and clichéd reasons, it has always resonated with me. But watching it today, on the heels of my mother’s death, it shook all of the remaining reserve and detachment right out of me. It’s not that it’s an especially powerful film; in fact, I think the acting’s really bad for the most part. But stereotypes or not, it manages to capture enough truth about mothers and daughters, particularly, about cross-cultural mother/daughter relationships. As I watched today, I felt those gaps and misunderstandings between those mothers and daughters in newly painful ways. Before, even though I’d kind of sympathized with the mothers in the film, I was pretty firmly entrenched in the daughters’ perspectives, feeling the hurt, rejection, embarrassment, etc. that came with having an Asian mom in “American” culture. Today, however, I felt those mothers’ stories more acutely. I found myself explaining, rationalizing, and excusing their behavior to my students who were appalled and aghast at the way they treated their children. “Can’t you see,” I asked my students, “how their expectations and reactions are informed by all of those secret sorrows, forgotten loves, deep regrets and alternate lives that their daughters never fully know or understand?” “No,” they answered, “that lady’s just cold!”

I suppose that on an intellectual level I’d understood how these women had become the looming matriarchs that they appeared to be to their daughters. I hadn’t, however, really understood just how much we are shaped by those unexpected currents of life that sweep us up without our permission. Some people never make it back to the bank; they never get that opportunity to take a breath, to lie in the sun for a moment, assess the damages and chart a new course. They simply get swept further downstream, pummeled here and there by debris, barely managing to stay above water. Perhaps because I’m a mother myself, now, I have a bit more understanding and empathy for the way we get carried away from ourselves without realizing it.

In many ways, this was my mother’s story…and mine.  As we sat together in those last minutes together, she looked at me and said, “I have been so stupid…” She trailed off, lost in her regret and sadness. I understood all that would have followed if we’d had time enough; we’d both been stupid. We’d used up all the time we had caught up in things that, perhaps, should have mattered less than just loving one another.  Why do so many things get in the way of just loving one another? She cupped my cheek with her hand and with all the love, with all the affection, with all the things between a mother and child that there are not words enough to express, she said, “goodbye, baby girl.” In an instant, I was filled up, emptied out, destroyed and put back together again. It was, without a doubt, the most profound and sacred moment that I’ve experienced in my life thus far. I could try to explain, try to talk around it, but I don’t think I can yet articulate why or how that moment has changed me so completely; I only know that it has. It tossed me onto the banks of that river that carried me downstream, and now it’s up to me to find the way back to myself.

But today, I found myself missing my mother, truly mourning her for the first time. Before now, I’ve been in some kind of denial. It’s not that I deny her death, but somehow I’ve found a way to deny her absence. It’s fairly easy because she wasn’t a daily presence in my life. We texted every few days and skyped once every week or two, but there were long stretches of time between our face-to-face visits.  It helps that I’ve been so incredibly busy and bogged down in the day-to day, but the tension has been building over the past few weeks as the leaves have started to turn. Every time I drive beneath the brilliant canopy of trees, I think about how much she would have loved this fall. I took a picture of my son recently pulling his wagon on a walk: the trees behind him are golden, the leaves on the ground are raspy oranges and reds—you can almost hear them crackling beneath his feet.  I took that picture for her. I knew how much she would have loved it.

After we buried my mother’s ashes, my brother asked me whose idea it had been to bury them beneath a tree. I told him that one of the pastors had actually suggested interring my mother’s ashes there. And then he told me a story I’d never heard before. When he was in his language school for the military, my mom visited his Korean class on what happened to be Arbor Day. She told my brother that when she left Korea with my father in the 70s, she looked down at her country from the airplane and all she could see was brown; the countryside was still razed and ravaged from the wars.* But upon her return many years later, she told him, she’d cried with joy when she looked down on her country again and discovered the lush green landscape below.

*For many years in Korea (until just recently, I think), Arbor Day was actually a public holiday and the government launched national campaigns to support reforestation; it was done with a kind of fervor for a long time.

Hearing that story undid me a little. Not because of the story itself, though I’m glad it’s one that I have now, but because I was struck by the fact that I’d never heard it. I realize that there’s so much about my mother and her life that I don’t know. She didn’t talk about her childhood or her life before my father very often. Some things she shared. Some things I cobbled together on my own. Other things I overheard. And then there were things that I stumbled across here and there that I’m sure I was never meant to know. But it’s easy to forget, with the familiarity of the everyday, that my mother was, in so many ways, an unknown entity. When my brother told me his story, I was consumed with sadness for all the ways in which I’ll never know her now. If we’d had more time, more than those last few moments on the couch, what would she have told me? Sure, it’s easy to romanticize now, to imagine that things might have been different. Honestly, though, I don’t know. I don’t know that we would have found a way to meet one another in some sort of truth. But I like to imagine that we might have.  

Ashes to Ashes...

I’m exhausted. No, I’m whatever lies beyond exhausted. Last week was brutal and insanely busy. I returned late Monday afternoon and was back at work by 7am on Tuesday--jetlagged, heartsick and overwhelmed. In Korea, I was surrounded by people 24/7, literally. And since I returned, I’ve been inundated with students and all of the catch-up that comes with being away for a week. So there really hasn’t been a moment for me to catch my breath, let alone to process or to really even think about grieving. Sure, I wrote the last blog post and I even wrote up the second part of the “carnival of grief” on the plane ride home, but it just felt…flat. It’s not what I want to say. But I don’t know what I do want to say. There are moments that a thought or a memory springs to mind. The swell of emotion threatens, for a moment, to pull me under.

In Hawaii, 1986

But I keep forcing it back, pushing it down because I don’t have time to feel; I don’t have time to grieve. My days are so full of things that have to be done that I can scarcely find a minute to just be. Even now, writing this, I know I’ll pay for the time spent not working when I have to wake up even earlier to get it all done tomorrow.  But I can’t shake the feeling that I want to say something—something about how I loved my mother, something to honor her memory, something to fill the space that she once occupied.

Leaving Korea was harder this time around. I’ve seen my parents more in the past few years since Bennett was born, but before that we went as long as 2 years without seeing each other in person. Each time I boarded that plane or sent them away, I was always struck by a sense of panic that it might be the last time I saw my mother.  This time, of course, it became a reality. I’ll never see her again. So I’m not sure why it was so hard to leave. She’s no more there, than here. Not really, anyway. But it felt like my last clear connection to her—surrounded by people who had been with her in those last few days, but also in the last decade of her life that she has spent there.

I spent time in their house, a house that is still very much my parents’ house, but will be upon a later return not theirs, but my father’s alone. As I went through her things, emptying out wardrobes and drawers so that my dad wouldn’t have to do it alone later, I felt numb. I still can’t quite wrap my heard around the fact that she is gone. Literally, no more than ashes…is that shocking to say? Is it crude? I don’t know.

My mother was cremated. That’s how it’s done in Korea, primarily because of the lack of space. Like so much of the experience there, the cremation process was full of ritual and a kind of unparalleled dignity that we rarely afford to such processes here. After another strange and elaborate affair, when her remains were finally ready, they called us to the viewing room. There, they transferred her bones to a box and proceeded to grind them to ashes. It sounds like a brutal and somewhat gruesome thing to observe, but I was comforted by their attention to detail, by their efficiency and respect.

I’m grateful that she’s no longer suffering and that her body is no longer riddled with disease. Still, parting with her body was one of the hardest parts of the funeral process. Though I understood that there was nothing left of her, that body had still given birth to me and fed me. Those hands had once bathed me and braided my hair. Those arms had lovingly cradled my child in the recent past just as they had once cradled me. That face, her face, had always been the easiest to recall because I’ve known it longest and, perhaps, studied it more than any other in my life except my child’s.

Lately, as I put Bennett to sleep, he takes his little hand and caresses me from my hand, up my arm and neck across my face, all the way to the very top of my head and back down the other side. Sometimes he gazes at my face, and sometimes he rests his forehead against mine. This new little bedtime routine (I’m sure it will shift to something else soon) is so deeply moving. I don’t know why he does it or what he’s thinking, but I’d like to think that it speaks to that way in which one’s parents,for some time at least, not only shape one’s world but are, in fact, the world.

That process of emerging from them, as distinctly other, can be full of wonder and excitement, but it can also be full of sadness, longing and pain. For me, that first separation was long ago and there have been many other forms of separation since, but this final severing of ties is so full of unspeakable longing and sadness. As we put the box containing half of her ashes into the space that they made, under a tree she would have loved, I was paralyzed by anxiety. How do I even begin to describe the finality of that moment? Though I have loved many others after her, I loved her first. I remember vividly the fierceness of my love for her as a child; for me, she was love. As I stood there, I was that child again, and I was consumed by grief. I said my goodbyes there in that lushly wooded area as I’ve said them everyday since—whispering them in the dark, chanting them in my heart and sending them through the airplane’s windows as I watched my mother’s land grow distant through the clouds beneath me: “I love you, I love you, I love you. May you find rest and peace.”