Lillian’s Reviews > Crying in H Mart > Status Update

The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.

I imagined our four bodies in aerial view. On the right side, two newlyweds beginning their first chapter, on the left, a widower and a corpse, closing the book on over thirty years of marriage.

Days passed and my mother never moved. With no control over her body, she kept wetting the bed. Twice a day my father and I would have to change the sheets around her, pulling off her pajama pants and underwear. We thought about moving her to the hospice bed but we just couldn’t.

“I never thought I was going to get married,” Isaid. “But having witnessed for the past six months what it means to keep the promise to be here for someone in sickness and in health, I find myself here, understanding.”
I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.

On long drives the rumble of the engine and the warmth of the gas tank below would put me to sleep, and sometimes when I’d wake up we’d already be back in our driveway. And I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.

There was a dangerous and unspoken prospect looming, that without my mother to bond us, my father and I would drift apart.

Their identities were absorbed by their children.

It felt strange to be together without my mother. The two of us never spent much time alone.

“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save.” She would add.

My grief comes in waves