One of Eunmi’s last requests was that my mother start attending church, but she never did. My mom was the only one in her family who didn’t practice Christianity. She believed in some higher power but didn’t like the cultishness of organized religion, even when it was what knit most of the Korean community in Eugene closely together. “How can you believe in god when something like this happens?” she said.

Her biggest takeaway from Eunmi’s death was that you could go through chemotherapy twenty-four times and still die, and that was a trial she was unwilling to endure. When she first received her diagnosis, she committed herself to two treatments, and if they were unsuccessful, she told us she did not want to continue. If it weren’t for my father and me, I’m not sure if she would have gone through it at all.

* * *

—

BY THE END OF JULY, my mother was at the tail end of her second chemotherapy. Her side effects had dwindled, and in another two weeks the oncologist would determine whether or not the size of the tumor had shrunk.

It was time for me to return to the East Coast. My band had a tour scheduled for the first week and a half of August, the last shows we planned on playing for a while. Afterward, I would pack up the belongings I’d left behind in Philadelphia and move back to Oregon for good.

My mother reassured me that she wanted me to leave, but as she stood on the front porch with Kye, waving while my father and I pulled away for the airport, I could see she was crying. Part of me wanted to bound out of the car and back to her like something out of a romantic movie, but I knew it wouldn’t resolve anything. We just had to hope now, and wait. All I could do was know in my heart that she was happy I had come to her after all.

* * *

—

PHILADELPHIA WAS MUGGY. The air so waterlogged all movement felt like swimming. It was a shock to be around so many people again, having spent the last three months holed up in a house in the woods. I could tell my friends had no idea what to say to me. They gave me looks like they had spent some thought on it, but talked themselves out of whatever they’d come up with. The group I ran with wasn’t really like that. We expressed affection by digging into one another’s insecurities, and this was uncharted territory for most of us.

Peter was starting a new job in a few weeks, teaching philosophy as an adjunct professor at a small college in the suburbs. I’d encouraged him to apply before my mom got sick, and he was hesitant to take it now because it meant another season of long distance, but I felt it was too important a career opportunity to miss out on. I suggested he at least try it on for a semester and we could reassess over winter break. Eventually, we figured we’d move to Portland when my mom recovered. We could get new jobs there and I could visit her on the weekends.

In the meantime, Peter took a week and a half off work from the restaurant to play bass on tour with Ian, Kevin, and me, since Deven was off touring with another band, getting “Jimmy Fallon big.” Our first show was at a small bar in Philadelphia aptly named The Fire, as it was next door to a fire station. From there we made our way down south through Richmond and Atlanta for a few dates in Florida, then snaked west to Birmingham and Nashville. It was sweltering everywhere. Most of the places we played were DIY spots and house shows without windows or air-conditioning. The four of us sweated through our clothes every night, and often the houses we crashed at were so squalid it seemed more hygienic to avoid the shower. The van smelled acrid, of body odor and stale beer. In the face of life and death, the open road—once so full of grit and possibility, the strangers it harbored so creative and generous, the light of the lifestyle—I had once found so glamorous began to dim.

My parents assured me I wasn’t missing much at home; she was getting her strength back and all there was to do was wait. Still, I felt guilty. I felt I should be with them in Oregon, not sitting in the back seat of a fifteen-passenger Ford somewhere outside of Fort Lauderdale, eating gas station taquitos. I gazed out at the long stretches of I-95 and I knew this was the last tour I would go on for a long time.

After our show in Nashville, we drove thirteen hours straight to Philly. The next day, I packed up the rest of my belongings. Peter was back behind the bar at the restaurant, making up for the shifts he’d missed on tour when I got the call.

“You should sit down,” my father said.

I slunk to the floor of my bedroom between half-packed cardboard boxes. I held my breath.

“It didn’t work,” he croaked. I could hear him on the other end bursting into sobs, his breath heaving.

“It didn’t shrink…at all?” I asked.

It felt like he’d pushed the length of his arm down my throat and was gripping my heart in his fist. I had spent so much time fighting back tears, attempting to be a stoic force of positivity so I could delude myself into thinking we were in line for a miracle. How could it all have been for nothing? The black veins, the clumps of hair, the nights in the hospital, my mother’s suffering, what had it all been for?

“When they told us…We just sat in the car and looked at each other. All we could say was, I guess this is it.”

I could tell my father was not ready for my mother to give up on treatment. It felt like he was waiting for me to protest, for the two of us to band together and encourage her to continue. But it was hard not to feel like the chemo had already stolen the last shreds of my mother’s dignity, and that if there was more to take, it would find it. Since receiving her diagnosis, she’d trusted us to make many of her decisions for her, to be her advocates, to plead with nurses and doctors, to question medications on her behalf. But I knew because of Eunmi that if two rounds of chemotherapy hadn’t made a dent in her cancer, it was her wish to discontinue treatment. It felt like a decision I had to honor.

My mother took the phone from my father. In a voice that was soft but resolute, she told me she wanted us all to take a trip to Korea. Her condition felt stable, and though the doctor had advised them against it, it felt like a time to choose living over dying. She wanted the chance to say goodbye to her country and to her older sister.

“There are small markets in Seoul you haven’t been to yet,” she said. “I never took you to Gwangjang Market, where ajummas have been there for years and years making bindaetteok and different types of jeon.”

I closed my eyes and let my tears flow. I tried to envision us together again in Seoul. I tried to envision the mung bean batter sizzling in grease, meat patties and oysters sopped and dripping with egg, my mother explaining everything I needed to know before it was too late, showing me all the places we’d always assumed we’d have more time to see.

“Then, after one week, Nami will book us a beautiful hotel in Jeju Island. In September, it will be the perfect weather. It will be warm but not too humid. We can relax and look out at the beach together, and you can see the fish markets where they sell all the different seafoods.”

Jeju was famous for its haenyo, female divers trained for generations to hold their breath without scuba gear, collecting abalone, sea cucumber, and other underwater delicacies.

“Maybe I can film it all on my camera. I can make a documentary or something. Of our time there,” I said. It was my instinct to document. To co-opt something so vulnerable and personal and tragic for a creative artifact. I realized it as soon as I said it out loud and became disgusted with myself. Shame blossomed and thrust me out of the dream she’d painted, and reality came rushing back with nauseating clarity.

“I just. Umma, I just can’t believe it…”