“And then which one do you get rid of next?” Eunmi asked, neatly skimming her spoon along the shaved ice and sweet red bean, a thin thread of condensed milk trailing after it.

I mulled over the question, envisioning myself on the kind of journey that would involve many modes of transportation. I imagined handling the large animals with difficulty, wrestling with them to cooperate as I boarded a steamer, a train, a ferry. I thought it would be best to discard the large ones first.

“I guess the cow, and then the horse,” I said.

Deciding between the lamb and the monkey was more difficult. Both animals were small and easy to manage. The lamb felt the most comforting. I imagined myself nestled in its wool for warmth, alone on a train speeding into the unknown dark. But then the monkey felt the most human, a companion to see me through it all.

“I’d keep…the monkey,” I decided.

“Interesting,” she said. “So, each of the animals symbolizes your priorities in life. What you get rid of first is what you think is least important; what you keep for last is your highest priority. The lion represents pride, which you got rid of first.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “I was worried it’d eat the other animals, just like pride eats away at your other priorities. Like, you can’t really love someone if you have too much pride, or work your way up to a good job if you feel everything is beneath you.”

“The cow represents wealth, because you can milk it. The horse represents your career, because you can ride it through. The lamb is love, and the monkey is your baby.”

“Which one did you keep?” I asked.

“I picked the horse.”

Eunmi was the only one of her sisters to attend college, graduating at the top of her class with a major in English. She landed a job as an interpreter with KLM airlines on rotation between Holland and Korea, making her a natural translator for my father and me. In the throes of my paranoia at someday being orphaned by a freak accident, I used to beg my parents to write it into their wills that Eunmi become my legal guardian. She was not just my bachelor comrade; she was like a second mother to me.

“Did you tell my mom about the game? What did she pick?” I asked, hoping we’d picked the same thing, that she’d picked me.

“Your mom picked the monkey, of course.”

* * *

—

TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER, my mother called to tell me Eunmi had stage IV colon cancer. She had sold Halmoni’s apartment and stored her things in an officetel, a studio apartment with commercial offices on the lower floors. She was moving in with Nami and Emo Boo so they could help her while she went through chemotherapy.

The diagnosis was impossible to wrap my head around. Eunmi was so straitlaced. She was only forty-eight. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. She exercised and went to church. Aside from our occasional bachelor chicken night, she hardly ever drank. She’d never been kissed. People like this did not get cancer.

I googled adenomatous polyps, the little mushroom-shaped growths, poisonous mushrooms that had blossomed into large, malignant flowers from the pinkish-brown tissue bed of my aunt’s colon. I know now that by then the cancer had invaded her adjacent organs, metastasized to three regional lymph nodes, but in that moment, I did not understand the disease. I did not follow it clinically as I did my mother’s, the changing statistics and prognoses. I only knew that she had colon cancer and that she was doing chemo, that she was invested in beating it, and that was enough for me to really believe she would.

Twenty-four chemotherapy treatments later, Eunmi died on Valentine’s Day. A cosmically cruel fate for a woman who’d never known romantic love. Her last words were “Where are we going?”

* * *

—

I FLEW TO SEOUL from Philadelphia to meet my parents for the funeral. It was held over the course of three days in an old-fashioned wooden room with rice-paper sliding doors. Large floral wreaths adorned with banners lined the hallways, and inside, a framed, glossy photograph of Eunmi holding Leon was propped up on a wooden easel above a platform filled with flowers. Nami and my mother wore black hanboks and served a steady stream of guests, offering them snacks and pouring beverages while they paid their respects. It seemed unfair to me that the two of them should have to wait on anyone when their grief was undoubtedly the deepest.

“Nami is much better at this kind of thing,” my mother confided in me as we watched her older sister exchange the customary pleasantries with a new circle of visitors. It made me feel close to her, an admission of awkwardness from someone I’d always perceived as the paragon of poise and authority. It shed light on a truth I often found difficult to believe: that she was not always grace personified, that she once possessed the very same tomboyish defiance and restlessness with formality for which she’d often scolded me, and that her time away from Seoul had maybe exacerbated the estrangement she felt from certain traditions, traditions I had never learned.

On the final day, dressed in my own black hanbok and a pair of white cotton gloves, I led the procession to the crematorium. The cold was oppressive. The air felt sharp, as if a frost stung through every pore of my face, and each icy gust made my eyes water. Inside, we waited in an antechamber, then crowded around a glass window. A man in scrubs and a surgical mask stood in front of a counter where the remains arrived on a conveyer belt. The small pile of gray dust was not a consistent powder but more like rubble. I could see pieces of bone, her bone, and suddenly I felt myself losing my balance. My father caught me as I fell back. The man in the surgical mask folded her up in what looked like deli paper, neatly and nonchalantly creasing the edges around the ash as if it were a sandwich, then slipped it inside the urn.

After the funeral, Nami and my mother took me to the officetel where Eunmi had stored her belongings. There were photos of Seong Young and me on the fridge. With no children of her own, she had left everything to the two of us. My mother and I sifted through her jewelry box. I spotted a simple silver heart-shaped necklace on a plain chain and asked if I could keep it. “Actually, I bought this one for Eunmi for her birthday,” my mother said. “How about I keep it and once I get home, I’ll buy a new one for you, so we can match. When we wear them, we can think of her together.”

My father and I took the bus to Incheon Airport while my mother stayed behind, tending to the rest of Eunmi’s estate. As we drove away from the city, I found myself looking back at Seoul as if it were a stranger, something else now than the idyllic utopia of my childhood. With Halmoni and Eunmi gone, it felt like it belonged to me a little less.

* * *

—

MY MOTHER CHANGED a lot after Eunmi died. Once an obsessive, avid collector, she let go of the compulsion and began to take up new hobbies, to spend time with new people. She enrolled in a small art class with a few of her Korean friends. Once a week she would send me photos of whatever she was working on through Kakao messenger. At first they were really bad. One pencil sketch of Julia in which she resembled a stout sausage with extremities was particularly comical, but after a few weeks, she got better. I was thrilled my mother had finally discovered a way to express herself, depicting small objects from her daily life, knickknacks at home, a tassel, a teapot, engrossed in perfecting something so deceptively simple as the shading of an egg. For Christmas, she painted a card for me with pale yellow and lavender flowers, their stems a watery sea green. “This is a special card I made. My first made card to you,” she wrote inside.