My father, always stoic, broke down in tears. I needed a smoke.
My sister followed me. As she stepped outside, tears mixed with mascara running down her face, she asked me, “What are we going to do?”
I exhaled, telling her that I didn’t know. Furrowing my brow, I wondered why I wasn’t crying.
It was late evening now. As I stared up at the cold concrete hospital in front of us, many of the rooms lit, I thought about how my mother was inside one of those rooms, dying. Listening to the low hum of automobiles passing on the nearby freeway, I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do now. I needed to move back home to be with my mother as much as possible. For once in my life, I would try to be the son that I never had been. Once she passed away, I would hit the road permanently, just wander. Fuck it. What’s the point now, you know? There is none. A bit dramatic and over-the-top, but these were the thoughts running through my mind as I stood there with my sister, through smoke and tears.
Having returned from D.C., I went to my parents’ house. My parents still lived in the home I’d more or less grown up in, a beige stucco two-story, in a style characteristic of many California homes built in the early 1980s, complete with three-car garage. My father had worked hard to save money for a house in a low-crime suburb with good schools, white pickups showing up weekly to keep the lawns manicured; the ideal location to raise a family.
When I arrived, I saw that all of my mother’s hair had now disappeared completely as she lay asleep on a hospital bed in the living room where we’d spent so many years living, covers pulled up to keep her warm.
Even in sleep she appeared to be in pain. My father did too, though a different kind of pain, an emotional pain; you could tell that this was also taking a heavy toll on him physically. He was going through hell, and he looked the part. He walked with a slight limp, had enormous bags under his bloodshot eyes, and commented that the last time he was this sleep-deprived was back in Vietnam.
He had always been a strong man, and his spirit was not entirely broken; he still clung to the hope that my mother would somehow pull through all of this. That, I think, kept him going.
I never said a word about it, but I was somewhat more skeptical. I didn’t like what I was seeing one bit, and by now, a part of me wished my mother dead. I wished her dead because, well, she’s my mother. The lady who’d walked me to school every morning, holding my hand. You only get one biological mother, and for many, including myself, nobody will ever love you as unconditionally. I no longer wanted to see her suffering the way that she was—a slow, torturous death leaving her in severe, unrelenting pain. I wanted it all to end.
Absolutely exhausted, my father explained to me my job for that evening. After that, he slowly walked upstairs to the room he had once shared with my mother. I pulled a chair up to my mother’s bed and sat there. Waiting, listening to my mother’s lungs expand and contract silently and slowly after every breath while she slept.
For some reason, the cancer, or maybe the chemo, was now making my mother feel that she always had to urinate. Whenever she needed to go to the bathroom, my job would be to lift her out of bed, place her onto her wheelchair, cover her with a blanket, roll her to the bathroom down the hall, lock the wheels, lift her out of the wheelchair in a bear hug, place her in front of the toilet, and, while holding her with one arm, use my free hand to pull down her sweatpants, and then seat her on the toilet. From there, I’d take a seat on the wheelchair outside the bathroom, waiting for her to finish; sometimes it was a couple minutes, sometimes nearly an hour. When she was finished, I’d have to wipe her off, and if she needed new adult diapers, I’d change them for her. Then we’d run through the same motions in reverse, get her back on the bed, straighten her out, and pull the covers up to keep her warm.
My father had been doing this for the past several nights, and it was now my turn for the next several days.
Every time I had to wipe off my mother after taking her to the bathroom, I couldn’t help but think that this was not the way it’s supposed to be. I vaguely remember being a toddler, yelling for her whenever I was finished taking a shit on the potty, and she would arrive to wipe my ass. It vexed me to have it all turned around now. Seemed wrong. Here I was, years later, wiping her ass.
For the pain, I gave my mother two generic Vicodin every forty-five minutes. Two for her, one for me. Why they didn’t give her something stronger than Vicodin, I’ll never know. Vicodin hardly did anything for me anymore, even when I mixed it with alcohol, as I have unfortunately often done.
At night, while my mother was passed out, I’d watch television. They had cable, but I was surprised to find that there’s hardly anything to really watch late at night except paid infomercials, all promising a quick fix with little to no effort, solving every imaginable major problem afflicting your average American. If they can regrow hair, enlarge a penis, provide senior citizens with all-day erections, use bands of rubber to whittle away a tummy, pills to dissolve fat, first, what the fuck is wrong with these people and more importantly, why can’t they come up with a cure for cancer?
I’d buy that.
The morning sun began to peek in through the windows, creeping across the white carpet my parents had installed after all of us kids moved out. I decided to leave the television on, turning it to one of those channels playing nothing but music, having found one playing only big-band music.
No idea what happened to it, but when I was growing up, there was always a radio in the living room. Whenever my mother was folding clothes, or in the kitchen, she’d always have it on Magic 61, an AM radio station playing nothing but oldies, and a lot of big-band tunes. It was always set to that station, and as I got older, she’d get pissed off whenever I changed it to Live 105, the alternative rock station, angrily making me change it back. It’s funny because I now love the music made during those early eras, the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. If somebody was to change my radio presets over to an alternative rock station, I’d react exactly as my mother had—pissed.
An old Glenn Miller song was playing, I forget which one, but it was one of his more somber numbers. Sitting by her bed, I could see my mother slowly coming to, not in pain, eyes opening. She asked what I was watching.
It was a near miracle to see her waking up calmly, as she often woke up in horror, head swiveling, frantically looking for my father, asking “Where is he?! I want to see him before I die!”
That morning, she didn’t do that. She seemed to be just as relaxed as the melodies coming from the television, and for the first time in a long while, able to talk. I wanted to jump all over this opportunity, so I told her how I remembered that she used to listen to the big-band station on the radio all the time when I was a kid. She seemed surprised I could recall all this.
“You remember?” I told her I remembered a lot of things. She smiled, then sourly commented that today’s music was “garbage,” that she liked older music “much better.”
I nodded in agreement, and the two of us, there in the living room, stopped talking, listening to that wonderful song together in silence.
Then out of nowhere she said, “I’m hungry.”
She said it as the song ended, and another one came on, maybe Tommy Dorsey. I don’t remember, since I was more stunned than anything by my mother’s statement—she hardly ever ate. Lately she had only been able to stomach protein shakes, which we purchased in bulk at Costco, force-feeding her through a straw. So I got up quickly, heart rate going, and asked her what she wanted. She thought about it for a second, and then she said, “Miso soup.” Okay, miso soup it is. Frantically, I wondered how in the hell to do this. I didn’t know how to make miso soup; did we even have miso soup?
She told me to go over to the fridge, and that there I would find a jar labeled “Miso.” From the bed, she gave me instructions on preparing it: Get a pot, fill it up with water, boil it. Dump a teaspoon of miso into the water. Easy
enough. She then told me that she wanted tofu with it, so I quickly grabbed a pack of that from the fridge, chopped it up, and dumped it into the soup. While that was getting ready, I asked her whether she wanted anything else. She paused, and then requested a Korean pear. Again, from the bed, she instructed me to cut one into thin slices. While cutting into it, still in shock that all this was going on, I accidentally cut my finger. Drawing blood, I cursed. My mother asked what happened. While grabbing a napkin to wrap around my finger, I told her, “Nothing.”
Blood seeping through the napkin, I brought the pear over to my mother, who sternly gave me some constructive criticism on how I needed to concentrate more when doing things instead of moving too quickly. She ate her pear feverishly, asking for her soup. I brought it over, and while waiting for it to cool down, she asked me if I loved the girl I was with, who, I surprisingly discovered just days after the news that my mother had cancer, was now pregnant, several months along in carrying my son.
I said yes, with plans to remarry. My mother then told me that she knew she didn’t have much time left, and that when she was gone, she wanted me to take care of the mother of my child, and my son, ensuring that he had everything that he needed, always, and to spend as much time with him as possible.
“Your father, he keeps everything inside—no good. You do same thing—no good, too.” She then, again, stressed the importance of family and that nothing else really matters.
“Look at me, say I have no family. Then nobody care and help me. Who help me? No one. Family important.”
While we talked, my father came downstairs to go to work. As he stepped into the living room to check in on us, he lit up, shocked at what he was seeing. My mother was talking! And eating! He couldn’t believe it, and I was still having a hard time believing it myself. I knew he was thinking the same thing I was, that maybe she was on her way to a full recovery. Before leaving for work, he said something to me about how I should continue to talk to my mother, and do so more often, something I’ve been historically bad at doing. He threw in something about how it “seemed to work.”
Before leaving, my father leaned over to kiss my mother good-bye. The garage door shut as my father was on his way to work, and it was once again just the two of us, my mother closing her eyes to rest.
As I felt my eyelids getting heavy and began to doze off, all hell broke loose. My mother started moaning in pain again, each moan more and more intense, every minute more turbulent. I was shoving Vicodin in her mouth, but could see that they weren’t doing a damn thing. After popping a couple myself, I called my father and told him he should come home, it was time.
We moved her, crying in pain, into the car and left for the hospital. As we pulled out of the driveway, I stared at the house and remembered the first time we’d pulled up to it when we were moving in. My father, driving, called my Korean aunts, relaying the grim situation. He didn’t go into much detail, though the severity of it was implied by his directness.
After assessing the situation, the doctor came to the decision that it was time for my mother to be in hospice. In Korean, my aunts explained to my mother what that would mean; seated in a wheelchair, sobbing, she bobbed her head up and down, indicating that she understood. That image, and the sounds I heard in that room, is permanently engraved in my memory. Aside from the doctor, I was the only one in that room not crying. I once again wondered what in the hell was wrong with me. I wasn’t emotionless, but just stood there grimacing.
Both my sister and brother dropped everything to take the first available flight home. Now that hospice was involved, the entire family was to be home. My brother and I assigned ourselves to the rooms we’d grown up in, my sister slept next to my mother on her hospital bed there in the living room, my father on the sofa beside them.
After a short night of sleep, my sister woke me up. I could tell by the low look on her face and her tone that she didn’t have good news. Solemnly, she told me, “Mom’s not going to wake up. She went into a coma last night.”
Walking downstairs, I entered the living room, where my mother lay, softly breathing. We all pulled up chairs from the dining table around her as my father contacted the hospice nurse and my Korean aunts.
Aunt Annie arrived first, the hospice nurse arriving soon after. She began to check my mother’s vitals, lifting her eyelids, appraising her breathing pattern. With years of experience, she got to the point and told us all that whatever we had to say, we should say it now.
Looking at my mother lying peacefully in a coma, we asked how much time we had. She hesitated, as though she was withholding information, and just said, “Minutes,” adding, “Maybe even less.” Great.
The hospice nurse told us that despite being in a coma, my mother could hear us. She mentioned that she didn’t think Aunt Suki and Halmoni—our Korean grandmother, who we lovingly referred to as “Harmony” while growing up—would make it in time, as they were coming from San Mateo. My father pulled out his cell phone, called them quickly to communicate the status, and then put the cell phone up to my mother’s ear. From my seat there, I could hear a bunch of crying and Korean coming loudly through the cell phone, and since I don’t speak a word of Korean, asked Aunt Annie what was being said. She told me that Halmoni was telling my mother to hold on for her, and not to go until she got here. They were a good forty-five minutes away. We again asked the nurse if they’d make it in time, and she told us probably not.
Defiantly, Aunt Annie told her, “She’ll still be here. You don’t know my sister, she’ll hold on for her mother, she will.”
One by one we started talking to my mother, who at this point was just barely breathing, like a fish out of water, each breath looking as if it would be her last. We all started telling stories, sharing memories that we had of her, and out of nowhere my aunt brought up how she remembered that when my mother was pregnant with me, all she wanted was miso soup. I stood up in my seat. I never knew that, nobody had ever mentioned it. I could barely believe it.
My father leaned over the woman he had married some thirty years earlier, put his hand on hers, and with tears slowly making their way down his face, dropping, absorbing into the fabric of the blanket covering her, said, “Honey, I love you, it’s okay to let go. I love you so much, almost too much. You put up a good fight. It’s okay to let go.”
I was off in my own world, taking this all in, when suddenly my sister exclaimed, “Oh, my God, Mom can hear us! Look!”
There was a single tear welling beneath her eye, which slowly rolled down her cheek. At that moment, the front door opened, and my mother’s sister, mother, and brother, who had flown all the way from South Korea, burst into the house. My mother had held on for her mother. A few minutes later, right there in the living room, in the house we had grown up in, her entire family around her, she quietly stopped breathing.
Many times early on at the hospital, when my mother was first diagnosed, she would simply say, “Talk to me.” And I’d always be at a loss for words, never knew what to say other than, “Hi, Mom,” which would break her heart. Tears would pour from her eyes when she’d tell me that I needed to communicate with her more often, open up to her. As she became more ill, I tried my hardest to force myself to talk as much as I could, but there will forever be a part of me that hates myself for not doing so sooner.
One of the many things I learned about my mother during this time spent with her was that her father killed himself. I arrived at the hospital one evening wearing a scarf around my neck, since it was a bit chilly. A scarf around my neck was a bit out of character for me, which caused her to take suspicious note of it and inquire as to my reason. Not thinking anything of it, I told her I had come across it in some shop, put it on, liked it, liked the price, liked the color (it was gray), and so went ahead and purchased it.
She nodded, called me strange, which was normal, and then told me a story about her father, whom I knew next to nothing about.
All I knew about him was that he was dead. Period.
The story began with her reminding me that they were poor, and needed money for food. One day, her father came home wearing a brand-new scarf around his neck. Upon seeing this, a battle ensued between him and my grandmother, Halmoni, who exploded, cursing him over his stupid scarf, since what they needed was money for feeding the family, not for scarves.
He tried to explain to her that it was fashion, and that he liked the scarf. I would imagine she didn’t care for that at all, since men’s fashion had very little to do with food. While listening to the story, I laughed at the thought of my Halmoni, all five feet of her, unloading on her husband like a caged pit bull at the mere mention of the word fashion.
I was taken aback by all this. When we were kids, she would tell us her father was up in heaven, or “happy mountain,” whenever we’d asked about him. By the way she wouldn’t say anything further, it was understood that we were never to bring him up.
But on this occasion, late at night in her room at the hospital, just the two of us, my mother told me more about her father. She told me he liked to drink, a lot, especially loved whiskey, and how he also loved to gamble and chase women. So far, he sounded pretty cool to me. When she sensed this, she tried to extinguish that thought by explaining that due to his behavior, she and her family grew up poor, very poor, and that her mother, who had grown up rather well off, had to raise the entire family by herself while her husband blew all his money on booze and gambling, leaving nothing for the family he had abandoned.
To emphasize this point, she told me that in her village in Korea, the kids would have to bring money to their teachers every now and then to pay for school. If you didn’t have any money for the teacher, the teacher would beat you in front of the entire class. The ruler smacked hard on her hands, and the worst part of it all, she told me, was that the other kids would tease her for not having money for school. My mother also had stories of being very young and her mother sending her out into their village many times to find her father and to tell him that the family had no food, and needed money. Many times he’d be drunk or with another woman when my mother would find him. She’d yell at him for money, and every time he would claim to not have any, sending her home empty-handed.
Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey Page 2