My father and I spent most of the time lying in silence with her body between us, watching her chest heave and struggle for breath, counting the seconds between respirations.

“Sometimes I think about holding her nose,” he said.

Between sobs he lowered his face to her chest. It was something that should have been shocking to hear, but wasn’t. I didn’t blame him. We hadn’t left the house in days, so afraid of what we might miss. I wondered how he could even sleep at night.

“I know you wish it was me. I wish it was me too.”

I put my hand on his back. “No,” I said softly, though in my ugliest heart I did.

It was supposed to be him. We had never planned for this circumstance, where she died before he did. My mother and I had even discussed it, whether she’d move to Korea or remarry, whether we’d live together. But I had never spoken with my father about what we would do if she died first because it had seemed so out of the realm of possibility. He was the former addict who shared needles in New Hope at the height of the AIDS crisis, who smoked a pack a day since he was nine, who practically bathed in banned pesticides for years as an exterminator, who drank two bottles of wine every night and drove drunk and had high cholesterol. Not my mother, who could do splits and still got carded at the liquor store.

My mother would have known what to do, and when it was all over, we’d reemerge entwined with each other, closer than ever. But my father was unabashedly panicked, openly scared in a way I wished he would keep from me. He was desperate to escape this excruciating ache by any means, and liable to leave me behind.

* * *

—

WHEN HE LEFT the house to begin making funeral arrangements, I opted to stay home. I was hoping for last words, something else. Hospice told us it could happen. That the dying can hear us. That there was a possibility she could shoot back into consciousness for one last moment, look me in the eyes, and say something conclusive, a parting word. I needed to be there in case it happened.

“Umma, are you there?” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

Tears began dribbling down my face and onto her pajamas.

“Umma, please wake up,” I yelled, as if trying to wake her. “I’m not ready. Please, Umma. I’m not ready. Umma! Umma!”

I screamed to her in her language, in my mother tongue. My first word. Hoping she’d hear her little girl calling, and like the quintessential mother who’s suddenly filled with enough otherworldly strength to lift the car and save her trapped child, she’d come back for me. She’d wake for just a moment. Open her eyes and tell me goodbye. Impart something, anything, to help me move forward, to let me know it’d all work out. Above all, I wanted so desperately for her last words not to be pain. Anything, anything at all but that.

Umma! Umma!

The same words my mother repeated when her mother died. That Korean sob, guttural and deep and primal. The same sound I’d heard in Korean movies and soap operas, the sound my mother made crying for her mother and sister. A pained vibrato that breaks apart into staccato quarter notes, descending as if it were falling off a series of small ledges.

But her eyes did not open. She didn’t move at all. She just continued to breathe, respiration lagging by the hour, the sounds of her inhalations drifting further and further apart.

* * *

—

PETER ARRIVED later that week. I picked him up from the airport and took him to a small sushi place for dinner. The two of us shared a bottle of sake and I broke down again in the restaurant, unable to eat. We returned home at nine and stood in the doorway of my parents’ room, where my father lay beside her.

“Mom, Peter is here,” I said, for some reason. “I’m going to sleep upstairs. I love you.”

We fell asleep in my childhood bed. We still hadn’t had sex since we got married and as I drifted off, I wondered how I ever could. I couldn’t fathom joy or pleasure or losing myself in a moment ever again. Maybe because it felt wrong, like a betrayal. If I really loved her, I had no right to feel those things again.

I woke to my father’s voice calling up to me from the bottom of the stairs.

“Michelle, it happened,” he whimpered. “She’s gone.”

* * *

—

I WENT DOWNSTAIRS and into the room, my heart racing. She looked the same as she had the past few days, supine and still. My father lay on his side of the bed, his back to the door, facing toward her. I walked around and lay down on the other side of her. It was five in the morning and I could hear birds beginning to chirp from the woods outside, the day threatening to begin.

“Let’s stay here for thirty minutes before we call anyone,” he said.

My mother’s body already felt cold and stiff and I wondered how long she had been like this, when my father had noticed. Had he slept at all? Had there been a sound? He was crying now, into her soft gray shirt, shaking the mattress. I could sense Peter lingering in the hall, unsure of what to do with himself.

“You can come in,” I said.

Peter squeezed in beside me on the edge of the bed; we were all quiet. I felt bad for him. I’d never seen a dead body before and I wondered if this was his first too. I thought of how cyclical it was to be sandwiched between my new husband and my deceased mother. I imagined our four bodies in aerial view. On the right side, two newlyweds beginning their first chapter, on the left, a widower and a corpse, closing the book on over thirty years of marriage. In a way it already felt like my vantage. Like I was observing all of this and not even really there at all. I wondered how long it was appropriate to lie there, what I was meant to discover in this time. Her body hadn’t really been hers for a while now, but the thought of removing it from the house was terrifying.

“Okay,” I said eventually, to no one in particular. The three of us sat up slowly and Peter left the room.

“Wait,” my father said to me, and I paused beside him as he took my mother’s left hand in his and slowly worked off her wedding ring. “Here.”

His hand trembled as he pushed it onto my right ring finger. I had forgotten all about this. It felt wrong to remove it from her, though obviously illogical to bury her with it. I held my hand out and examined it. The band was silver and filled with diamond side stones; a jeweled cushion cupped the main diamond set atop. She had picked it herself probably fifteen years into their marriage, to replace the faded gold band and its tiny dot of a diamond that he’d bought her when they were our age.

I was still getting used to the ring on my left hand, not so much to what it symbolized as to its physical occupancy, to the sensation of it. Bound around my finger, it was like adjusting to a brace or some sophisticated article I hadn’t quite grown into. With my mother’s ring on my right hand I felt like a five-year-old in a full face of makeup. I twisted it back and forth, trying to get comfortable, its facets glistened in the light of breaking dawn, oversized and out of place on my undiscerning finger. It felt heavy. A weight emblematic of loss, a tug I’d notice every time I went to lift my hand.

* * *

—