by Kat Chow
When I finished the book, I left its world and was thrust back into my grief.
It’s OK, it’s OK, I told myself as I realized where I had been all along.
Meanwhile, Steph journaled in the margins of a medical school textbook. Caroline had just arrived and settled into a chair while she held our mother’s hands.
Occasionally, our father stood over his wife’s face. He slid one of her eyelids back and peered at her pupils. When he returned to his seat, stroking her arm in apology, disappointment heaved itself onto his shoulders.
The TV hummed in the background and countered the dings of the machines. The sitcoms I watched at home were on: Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle. My family angled ourselves so we could see the screen. In that moment, we were briefly returned to our kitchen table, our whole unit bent over our bowls, an occasional patter of laughter dotting our silence.
When I call Kau Fu a decade and a half later to ask questions about my mother, he mentions our attempt at distraction.
We were so mad, Kau Fu says. It was so disrespectful how you guys were watching TV and smiling. It made me so mad I didn’t want to come in the room and be with my sister.
In his eyes, my family’s laughter meant we didn’t care if my mother died, that the fact that we turned on the TV above her unconscious body for our entertainment was sacrilege.
You let this keep you from being with your sister? Seinfeld kept you away? I want to ask my uncle, but I shut my mouth. All these years later, he still froths with resentment.
* * *
In the New York hospital, my family congregated in the reception area. We folded our limbs into chairs to sleep while another family prayed in a language I couldn’t place. They clasped hands and rocked back and forth. Was this a family that regularly turned to their god or gods, or was it now that they were driven to do so? My family did not pray out loud. We begged in silence.
We had been in the hospital for a day and a half when the last of my mother’s relatives had reached the hospital. The adults in the family had decided, per the doctor’s recommendation, that we would take her off life support.
Time is no longer of the essence, I wanted to shout.
Time could fuck right off. Time could wait. There was no such thing as time anymore. There was just our panic, which were thick, humid days slapped against our chests. I wanted to hurl my copy of Howl’s Moving Castle at the waiting room wall.
This is what’s best, Caroline said at one point. She would have wanted this done.
Steph nodded.
I felt far away.
It wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t. Caroline’s voice trailed off, as if she were trying to convince herself. Not fair to her, not to anybody.
Katelin, Kau Fu said, as our family filed out of the waiting room to the ICU. You should stay here. You’re too young.
He pressed his hands to my shoulders to keep me in my seat.
No, I said. No. I shrugged off his grip and searched the room for my sisters, but they had already left with our father.
You shouldn’t see this, my kau fu said. You’re too young.
Please, I begged. I began to sob. No, no, no.
I tried to stand again. Hands, from a cousin’s wife, locked me in place.
I want to be there, I said. I yowled and twisted in my chair. I am old enough.
Please. Please! I repeated as my uncle retreated to the ICU. I did not care that the other families stared.
Defeated, I fell silent.
When my family emerged, their faces ashen, my body bolted from the waiting room. It was the quietest I’d heard the ICU. My legs propelled me past the nurses and into my mother’s room. It was empty. I turned and looked down the hall behind me.
There my mother was, already strapped to a gurney. Her body was draped with plastic. The nurses had stuffed her mouth with gauze, which had turned the color of rust from the blood that rose from her throat when the intubation tubes were removed. She was alone.
* * *
Your body was limp and blue, and the sight has been locked into my memory. Here you were. Here I was. Here we were. I reached for you through the plastic. I don’t want this to be how I said goodbye. Years later, when I think back on this specific memory, it is the silence that emerges fastest. My anger and alarm have been strained and sifted, carefully remade into something more containable. But the absence of sound wrenches me back. As if I’m watching a home video and suddenly, when I come across you, limp, the audio cuts. This rattles me each time, but it allows me to see you in clear focus.
* * *
After we took my mother off the ventilator, my father ordered an autopsy. I still don’t understand why, exactly, despite asking him. Autopsies aren’t standard. They’re usually reserved for deaths considered unnatural or suspicious. I can picture, though, this scenario: When the doctor declared my mother dead, she asked my father routine questions. The two of them were alone and my mother’s family gathered elsewhere, inconsolable and already shouldering my father out.
He was the one who had to steer our family now. There was no alternative; he was the father, we were the daughters, and what he said must go. The doctor asked whether or not our family wanted the hospital to perform an autopsy. She expected my father to say no.
Yes, he said. More is better, he always believed. The death of his wife was no different. If there was an opportunity to learn more, and it was free? Sure. Why not? Though just seconds before he had no opinion, he was adamant now. He wanted from his wife’s death all the answers he could not receive in life.
This, I would write in my diary in the coming weeks, made my mother’s siblings more furious.
How could you do that? they asked my father. Her spirit will never be able to rest.
* * *
Hours later, Kau Fu stood at the end of his driveway with my sisters and me while our father waited in the car. It was after midnight.
Nothing will change, your brother said. He drew me into an embrace and shoved my head into his armpit.
Nothing has changed, OK? he said to your daughters.
OK, Steph said.
OK, Caroline said.
OK, I said.
13.
For my mother’s funeral, we followed the template that she and her siblings created when her father and Yi Ma’s husband died. We bought a casket similar to the one that she said that she liked. It was glossy and made of cherry wood. It reminded me of the car she’d pined for but never could afford: a Cadillac the color of hot cinnamon candies that had a boxy butt and a square face. She constantly referred to car grilles as their mouths and taillights as their butts, categorizing their expressions as she saw them: That Honda has such a happy face, or: That van has such narrow eyes, like it’s suspicious. But she liked the Cadillac’s perky expression. She thought it suited her, the way she always wore a hint of a smile.
One day you’ll get a Cadillac, Caroline, Steph, and I assured her.
A red Cadillac, our mother said.
Yes, a red one, we promised. Your favorite color.
For good luck, and prosperity, too, she said. Maybe one day my daughters will be so successful they can buy it for me.
Yes, sure, of course. We were also hopeful.
Six days after she died, we stood in the funeral home’s parking lot around a metal bucket. We burned joss paper and fake money. This was one of the few grief rituals that my sisters and I knew how to do on our own. Each Lunar New Year, our mother led us in cutting objects out of tissue paper that we would burn to send to Jonathan in the afterlife: tiny shirts, a car, shoes. One year, I cut him a tissue horse, with a saddle and boots. We watched this incinerate and lingered near the bucket until the paper was ash and we were certain our gifts had made it through this postal service for the dead.
Inside, Steph, Caroline, and I approached her casket and laid three pieces of cloth that we’d bought at Jo-Ann Fabrics over her body, so that she’d be warm as her spirit moved to the afterlife.
But the dress was short-sleeved and didn’t cover her arms, which looked unnaturally orange and plastic.
Yi Ma approached Steph.
You dressed her in that? Yi Ma asked. It looks so cheap.
She quivered and her normal softness was gone. She was already a frail woman, but after her sister’s death, she was unable to sleep or eat.
When Steph relayed this to me and Caroline, we weren’t sure if we should hug our yi ma or recoil in shame, so we did both.
I wore the flower that my father’s sister-in-law had crocheted out of indigo yarn. One evening not long after our mother’s death, our baak leung appeared on our doorstep. She and her son had driven hours from Toronto, and our father had forgotten to mention this to us. He needed someone from his family to help plan the funeral and my sisters and I needed a maternal figure, our baak leung insisted. She had spent the past few days propelling our family through funeral preparations, admonishing us when we weren’t sure how to proceed.
As my sisters and I greeted other mourners at the funeral, Baak Leung peered into the open casket.
It looks like she still might have some life in her, Baak Leung told Steph. She pointed to the blush on our mother’s cheeks. She might still be alive.
Watching this, I wanted to scream.
No, Steph said. She drew herself back.
Dead, Steph said. Her voice sharpened. Sei.
Alarmed by Steph’s tone, Baak Leung turned again to search our mother’s face for signs of life.
Did you just hear that? Steph said after she excused herself. She tried to tell me that Mommy was still alive.
Huh? Caroline said. She actually thinks that?
That’s really fucked up, I said. This aunt, with her gray, frizzed hair matted around her head like a helmet, looked more corpse-like than our mother.
My sisters looked at me sharply. I shrugged and suppressed a laugh.
What if Baak Leung was right? What if you weren’t dead, and you suddenly sprang from your casket? These days, when I think about your funeral, I conjure this, you standing before us:
You guys were trying to bury me alive? you say. Having thrown everyone into sudden chaos, you break into a seismic, full-body laugh. Then, you look down at the polo dress.
What the hell is this? You demand. When I really do die, put me in something that’s not so cheap, OK?
You blink your eyes a few times, your movements hard and theatrical.
* * *
During the funeral service, Steph, Caroline, and I stood beside our mother’s open casket and shared a few stories. I mentioned how, after nights at the barn, my mother and I stopped at the Burger King drive-thru on the Silas Deane Highway for an order of extra-large fries. She let me sit in the front seat. We passed the bag of hot fries between us and licked the salt from our fingers. We rubbed the grease on our jeans and finished long before we pulled into our driveway. I liked this small luxury; it was a secret we kept from Daddy and everyone else. It was our ritual, and I was often more eager about the fries than the barn visit itself.
After, we trickled out of the funeral home and Steph turned to me.
Why do you have to always talk about food? Steph asked. Why couldn’t you have talked about something nicer, told a nicer story?
I dunno, I said, confused by her irritation. We each took a tiny packet containing a Werther’s hard caramel and a nickel. I thought that was nice.
I slipped the candy into my coat pocket for later. The day before the funeral, my sisters and I spent hours wrapping the gold candy and coins in strips of white printer paper. My mother had taught me how to neatly fold the packets when we were preparing for Gung Gung’s funeral. She ran a fingernail over a fold to sharpen a crease. Guests were to take one of these envelopes after the wake, she had explained, and on their way home, they’d spend the nickel and eat the candy to pass along good fortune and to sweeten the bitterness of death. When she told me this, she popped a Werther’s into her mouth, smiling to show me that it was OK. I did the same, savoring the taste of buttery sugar, confused how anything could soften death.
It rained as we buried our mother a row and a few plots away from Gung Gung and Yi Ma’s husband. We opened our umbrellas, but the storm drenched us anyway. I wanted to wave my arms and yell at the sky, to scold it for its absurdity. You couldn’t have waited an hour? Instead, my family and I turned our backs and listened to the groundskeeper crank my mother’s casket into the earth. Chains clanking, gears groaning, rain thrumming—sounds that will forever evoke the memory of you leaving.
* * *
A few days after we buried our mother, we returned to the funeral home to retrieve the items we had left. The miniature white packets. Photographs of her from years before. Extra memorial cards.
At home, we set the box of Werther’s and nickels on the dining table. Over the next few months, I unwrapped them. I dropped the coins into a jar of change you started years ago to save for the trip we never took. Each time I ate one of these caramels, I mumbled an apology, trying not to think too hard about how, exactly, this might disrupt your spirit.
Part Two
1.
In the weeks after our mother’s funeral, well-meaning neighbors and friends brimmed with platitudes. They lingered on our front steps with their cars still running in the cul-de-sac. They carried casseroles in platters that I’d forget to return and that would remind me of my family’s grief each time I used them.
One woman arrived around dusk. Evenings grew gloomier each day and the light receded earlier the further we were marched into fall. She was the mother of one of Steph’s high school classmates. She had expensively highlighted hair and pale skin, and she clutched a cerulean prayer blanket that her church group had knit for us.
You are all so young, she kept saying, as if we needed reminding. Your mother was so young.
Steph and Caroline leaned on either side of the doorframe and listened to the woman. All through the weekend, we scrubbed the house and tossed moldy food from the fridge. We exterminated anything grimy or dying or dead with a vigor that first stunned and then soothed us. It seemed our father was constantly out of the house or tucked in the office off his bedroom. I had no idea what he was doing, and I didn’t ask.
She’s watching over you, now, the woman with the blanket said. She wouldn’t want you to be sad. She’d want you to be happy.
My sisters offered the woman bland compliments while they fanned out the blanket’s folds.
So soft, Steph said, always dutifully polite.
This will be…useful, Caroline said, never one for insincere or saccharine niceties.
I hung back in the hall. This visitor was the type of woman our mother would have poked fun at as soon as she left. When Steph was in middle school, she invited this woman’s daughter to our house for her birthday. My parents bought Roy Rogers, Steph’s favorite. We watched in dismay as Steph’s friend slid the fried skin from the chicken and discarded it before eating.
Aiiiiiiy. She’s the mother of that girl who didn’t eat the skin? our mother would have said, personally offended. Who teaches their kids that? What’s the point of fried chicken if you don’t eat the skin? Then she’d launch into a poor imitation of how the woman drew out her words. She thinks we’re cold or something? That we need that tiny blanket? Chi seen. My mother would smack her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and we’d titter conspiratorially.
But in that moment, I thought that Steph’s friend was lucky to have a mother who crocheted blankets and prayed for other people’s children. Imagine what she did for her own kids. It didn’t matter if she was a good mo
ther, whatever that meant. Being alive was what mattered.
These house calls thrilled and confused me. Before our mother died, we rarely had visitors. My parents did not have friends whom we invited over for dinner or saw casually. We weren’t like the other Chinese families in these suburbs, since we didn’t attend church or speak Mandarin. We were our own island. But these visits made me hopeful that we might gain a community, though I knew these drop-ins would eventually come to an end. I felt greedy and guilty for wanting something positive from our mother’s death.
Hours later, swaddled in the prayer blanket, I turned this woman’s words over in my head.
Watching over you.
Wouldn’t want you to be sad.
Other adults—the guidance counselors at school, neighbors—said similar things. I often didn’t respond. When I did talk, I blurted out details of her death regardless of how they fit into conversation: that she technically died of cardiac and respiratory arrest and not cancer. Her passing was relevant to everything. I spoke in chronic caps lock—MY MOTHER JUST DIED TWO WEEKS AGO!—and I noticed that adults often struggled to find the right words, unsettled by my abrupt declarations, then concerned when I smiled earnestly to prove I was OK. My guidance counselor wrote me a hall pass that I could use whenever I wanted, which I flashed liberally until I graduated. I used it to lie in the nurse’s office and stare at the ceiling when I found class boring. I napped. I cried. I wrote in a notebook and sketched poems about my mother’s death that I would later share with my English teachers for feedback; this act allowed me to express what I could not, or did not want to, say at home.