Optimism—died on August 3, 2015, a slow death into a pavement. At what point does a raindrop accept its falling? The moment the cloud begins to buckle under it or the moment the ground pierces it and breaks its shape? In December, my mother had her helper prepare a Chinese hot-pot feast. My mother said it would probably be her last Christmas. I laughed at her. She yelled at my father all night. I put a fish ball in my mouth. My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape. To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.
Ambition—died on August 3, 2015, a sudden death. I buried ambition in the forest, next to distress. They used to take walks together until ambition pushed distress off the embankment. Now, they put a bracelet around my father’s ankle. The alarm rings when he gets too close to the door. His ambitious nature makes him walk to the door a lot. When the alarm rings, he gets distressed. He remembers that he wants to find my house. He thinks he can find my house. His fingerprints have long vanished from my house. Some criminals put their fingers on electric coils of a stove to erase their fingerprints. But it only makes them easier to find. They found my father in the middle of the road last month, still like a bulbless lamp, unable to recall its function, confused like the moon. At the zoo, a great bald eagle sits in a small cage because of a missing wing. Its remaining wing is grief. Above the eagle, a bird flying is the eagle’s memory, and its prey, the future.
Chair—my mother’s green chair died on August 3, 2015. We arrange chairs in rows facing the same direction to represent reverence. In a circle to represent sharing. Stacked to represent completion. Hanging from the ceiling to represent art. In front of a desk to represent work. Before my mother died, I routed all her mail to my house. Her catalogues still come every day. I imagine her sitting in her chair flipping through them for more shirts that look the same. I understand now, only the living change clothes. Last week, I took my father pants-shopping. I heard him quarreling with the pants. He came out of the dressing room with his pants on backwards. Two pockets facing forward, like my mother’s eyes mocking me, as if to say, I told you so. He was angry, pointing and cursing at the chairs that no longer fit. I entered the men’s dressing room and picked up all the pants on the floor because one of them had to be my missing father.
Do you smell my cries?
They come from another place.
The cry comes from you.
Now everything comes from you.
To be empty and so full.
*
I tell my children
that they can wake anything,
that they are not yet
dying. But what do I know?
I know that a mother dies.
Tears—died on August 3, 2016. Once we stopped at a Vons to pick up flowers and pinwheels on our way to the graveyard. It had been a year and death no longer glittered. My ten-year-old putting the flowers perfectly in the small narrow hole in front of the stone. How she somehow knew what the hole was for, that my mother wasn’t really on the other side. Suddenly, our sobbing. How many times have I looked into the sky for some kind of message, only to find content but no form. She ran back to the car. The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way the word haystack never conjures up the same image twice. The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.
Memory—died August 3, 2015. The death was not sudden but slowly over a decade. I wonder if, when people die, they hear a bell. Or if they taste something sweet, or if they feel a knife cutting them in half, dragging through the flesh like sheet cake. The caretaker who witnessed my mother’s death quit. She holds the memory and images and now they are gone. For the rest of her life, the memories are hers. She said my mother couldn’t breathe, then took her last breath twenty seconds later. The way I have imagined a kiss with many men I have never kissed. My memory of my mother’s death can’t be a memory but is an imagination, each time the wind blows, leaves unfurl a little differently.
Language—died on March 4, 2017. It wanted to live as long as possible in its form, an icicle on the edge of a roof. I lifted the roof off my father’s head and found the balcony to stand on. I spoke loudly and slowly about the Guggenheim. Two women at the table across from us with plates of all-you-can-eat snow crab legs, their fourth each. I repeated myself again and again. The women kept getting up for more, their sucking noises like eating an overripe peach. My father finally said that he would like to see a copy of the pamphlet. This year they sent a spacecraft on a suicide mission between Saturn and its rings. If I could get between my father and his brain, would I too be committing suicide? If someone is directing the spacecraft, isn’t it murder? The pictures sent back are silent. A picture represents a moment that has died. Then every photo is a crime scene. When we remember the dead, at some point, we are remembering the picture, not the moment.
Tomas Tranströmer—died on March 26, 2015, at the age of 83. He wrote: I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case. // The only thing I want to say / glitters out of reach / like the silver / in a pawnbroker’s. My father couldn’t have written those words before or after his stroke. I wonder if his daughters disliked visiting him as much as I dislike visiting my father. The way his fists stay shut, the way his mind is always out of earshot. The way his words abandon his mouth and each day I pick them up, put them back in, screw the lid on tighter. Sometimes when he complains and no one can understand, I think of all the places I hid as a child. All the times I have silenced someone by covering their mouth with mine.
Approval—died on August 3, 2015 at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m. How much money will you get was my mother’s response to everything. She used to wrap muffins in a napkin at the buffet and put them in her purse. I never saw the muffins again. What I would do to see those muffins again, the thin moist thread as she pulled the muffin apart. A photo shows my mother holding my hand. I was nine. I never touched her hand again. Until the day before she died. I love so many things I have never touched: the moon, a shiver, my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like rough branches covered with plastic. I trimmed her nails one by one while the morphine kept her asleep. Her nails weren’t small moons or golden doors to somewhere, but ten last words I was cutting off.
Sometimes all I have
are words and to write them means
they are no longer
prayers but are now animals.
Other people can hunt them.
*
You don’t need a thing
from me, you already have
everything you need:
the moon, a wound on the lake,
our footprints to not follow.
Secrets—died on August 7, 2015 and they were relieved to die. No one at the funeral had known about my mother’s illness. No one had known how fiercely my mother and father fought. One Chinese face after another. I told the story. Told it again. Their mouths opened like time. Red sashes with Chinese characters I couldn’t read. The stems spoke with their flowers. To look down and see their legs missing. Later, I found a photo of my mother smiling with friends at her home, just the year before. No oxygen tank, no tube in her nose. She must have taken it off, put it in the closet between the beginning of her life and the end of her life. I imagine her panicking inside, waiting for them to leave. The mind and speech assemble and disassemble like geese. Scientists now say that a mind still works after the body has died. That there’s a burst of brain energy. Then maybe she heard the geese above disassemble one last time. Then maybe my kiss on her cheek felt like lightning.
Music—died on August 7, 2015. I made a video with old pictures and music for the funeral. I picked “Hallelujah” in a cappella. Because they weren’t really singing, but actually crying. When my children came into the room, I pretended I was writing. Instead, I looked at my mother’s old photos. The fabric patterns on all her shirts. The way she held her hands together at the fron
t of her body. In each picture, the small brown purse that now sits under my desk. At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn’t looking, I turned the music up. Because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn’t looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.
Appetite—died its final death on Father’s Day, June 21, 2015, peacefully and quietly among family. We dressed my mother, rolled her down in her wheelchair. The oxygen machine breathing like an animal. They were the only Chinese people at the facility. The center table was loud again, was invite-only again. Like always, I filled my mother’s plates with food. Her favorite colored puddings contained in plastic cups. When we got up to leave, her food still there, glistening like worms. No one thought much of it. There are moments that are like brushstrokes, when only much later after the ocean is finished, become the cliff’s edge that they were all along. Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care whom we have dined with.
Appetite—died on March 16, 2015. Once, in graduate school, I was the only one to order a drink at the restaurant. My boyfriend did not like this. He dropped me off in the middle of town to walk home. I looked at the children’s clothing in the window, the little striped cap, pink dress, and thought about beauty. I spun around to avoid darkness but darkness was the one spinning me. I hid in a bright Taco Bell. The man at the register had a narrow hole for a mouth and a brown mass on his cheek. He was so beautiful that I thought he must be Death. Twenty years later, my mother requested Taco Bell for lunch. I ran out to buy her bags and bags of tacos. No one in line understood my emergency. The man I handed my credit card to had a brown mass on his face. He nodded when he handed me the bag, as if he knew. My mother pressed her lips to the tacos, as if she were kissing someone for the rapturous last time.
Form—died on August 3, 2015. My children sleep with framed photos of my mother. Leaden, angular, metal frames. My ten-year-old puts her frame in the red velvet bag that held the cremation urn and brings it with her on vacation. A photo of my mother sits in the bag that once held a container of her ashes. When we die, we are represented by representations of representations, often in different forms. Memories too are representations of the dead. I go through corridors looking for the original but can’t find her. In Palm Springs, the desert fails me. Dust, sand, gravel, bits of dead things everywhere, a speck of someone else’s dead mother blows into my eye and I start crying again. The heat is now too optimistic. The pool and its luster like an inquisition. My own breathing, between the splashes and children laughing, no longer a miracle, but simple mathematics.
Optimism—died on August 3, 2015, of monotony. Before my sister would fly home, she and my mother would cry together. The one time my mother cried to me, I said, The doctor’s wrong, you don’t know how long—it could be a year or more. She didn’t stop crying. I got up and left the room. Outside, three floors below, behind the building, a family was celebrating something in their yard. Piñatas, music, children momentarily suspended above Earth in a bounce house. That summer, we were not on Earth, but pacing in a building above it. People in a city can spend a lifetime never actually touching the earth once. I was so afraid their happiness would rise up through the window like steam. I could hear the thumping of the sticks on the piñata, once a happy anticipation, altered to the inevitability of the candy dropping. Now I close my eyes and try to remember the optimism of the thumping, the origin of things.
I can’t say with faith
that I would run toward a bus
to save you from death.
If a girl is only as
good as her mother, then what?
*
To love anyone
means to admit extinction.
I tell myself this
so I never fall in love,
so that the fire lights just me.
Hands—died on January 13, 2015. My mother’s handwriting had become jagged and shaky. Bodies jump out of bed. Feet leap off of bridges. Hands never leap. They flag people down. They gesture to enhance language. They are the last part of hugging, which the body mostly does. They wipe off the tears that the eyes release. They write on paper the things the brain sends. After my mother died, I looked at a photo where she had moved into assisted living from the ER. Her oxygen tube in her nose, my two small children standing on each side. Her hands around their hands pulled tightly to her chest, the chorus of knuckles still housed, white stones, soon to be freed, soon to be splashing.
Oxygen—died on March 12, 2012. At first, it came in heavy green canisters. Then a large rolling machine that pushed air day and night. When my mother changed her clothes, she had to take the tube out of her nose. She stopped to catch her breath, as if breath were constantly in motion, as if it could be chased. I’m not sure when I began to notice her panic without the oxygen, in the way we don’t notice a leaf turning red or an empire falling. One day, it just appears, as if it had been there all along. Like the hospice staff with their papers, bags of medicine, their garlands of silence. Like grief, the way it dangles from everything like earrings. The way grief needs oxygen. The way every once in a while, it catches the light and starts smoking. The way my grief will die with me. The way it will cleave and grow like antlers.
Reason—died on June 24, 2009, like make-believe trees that just get taken down and put away. My father’s words taken out of his brain and left downstairs. Remote but close, like a wound on your child or a curtain blowing in the other room. This week, he is obsessed with the scheduled walks again. This week he doesn’t want to wait for the other much older but sharper residents. The memory of reason is there, of once pulling the ropes. When reason dies, determination does not. As in, my father is determined to walk at 10 a.m. at a certain pace. As in his body is determined to move forward with or without his brain, which is two empty slippers nailed into the ground.
Home—died on January 12, 2013. The first of five moves meant the boxes were still optimistic that they would be opened. They were still stiff, arrogant about their new shape, flatness just a memory. At the new house, my father on one of his obsessive walks found the one old Chinese person, a bony lady with branches for teeth, the kind of woman my mother would normally shun because of her background. She visited my mother every day for a year. She brought oranges, vegetables, a salesperson from a funeral home. My father left them to speak in Chinese as he wandered the neighborhood so he wouldn’t die. The lady swore at my father in Chinese. Called him stupid. A fool. At the funeral, she said, God brought me here to help your mother. And it struck me. My father’s words were an umbrella that couldn’t open. My mother held the umbrella, refused to let the wind take it. And this old woman was the wind.
Memory—died on July 11, 2015. When I returned from a trip, my mother on the edge of the bed, hair mostly white, black dye underneath, like a memory. Sheets off the bed in a corner like crushed birds. The caretaker hadn’t come for a week. My father pacing, his hands tried to speak for him. Too much pressure on the hands. No one knew what happened that week but the hands. My mother had soiled herself. It was all over her hair that she had rolled in pink curlers one by one her whole life. She denied the soiling. Yelled at me in Chinese for saying it. My child and I bathed her as she sat on the shower chair, naked, slumped over, a defeated animal. Death was still abstract, it could slip down the drain. Sadness was still indivisible. In twenty-three days, it would detonate and shower us like confetti. The water flattened my mother’s hair and began burying her tongue.
II
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
—Sylvia Plath, from “Nick and the Candlestick”
I
Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue.
III
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Friendships—died a slow death after August 3, 2015. The friends visited my father. They sat in chairs and spoke Chinese. Wore dictionaries for coats. Strange looks between spouses. The friends went home feeling good that they had done their duty, picked up odds and ends of words. Each had memories of offices, of seeing the other side of the sun. The visits lessened and lessened. They were being pursued by their own deaths. I wonder about the leaves and their relationship with fruit. Do the leaves care about the swelling of the fruit? Does the fruit consider the leaves while it expands? Maybe the leaves shade the fruit as it grows and the fruit emits fragrance for the leaves. But eventually, each must face its own falling alone.
Caretakers—died in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, one after another. One didn’t show up because her husband was arrested. Most others watched the clock. Time breaks for the living eventually and we can walk out of doors. The handle of time’s door is hot for the dying. What use is a door if you can’t exit? A door that can’t be opened is called a wall. On the other side, glass can bloom. My father is on the other side of the wall. Tomatoes are ripening on the other side. I can see them through the window that also can’t be opened. A window that can’t be opened is just a see-through wall. Sometimes we’re on the inside as on a plane. Most of the time, we’re on the outside looking in such as doggie day care. I don’t know if the tomatoes are the new form of his language or if they’re simply for eating. I can’t ask him because on the other side, there are no words. All I can do is stare at the nameless bursting tomatoes and know they have to be enough.
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