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

"The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her."

"She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.
Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her"

"She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized. The formation of every characteristic. Every ailment and little victory. She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion."

"... unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create."

"I imagined myself years from that moment, confronted by the same emotions. For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me."

"That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted."

Ay💔

"Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again."

"I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. That someone my mother’s age could still have a mother."

"I’ll wonder what my mom would have looked like in her seventies," OOF