NOT WANTING to see her taken from the house in pajamas, my father asked me to choose an outfit for her to be cremated in. Alone in her closet I struggled against the hangers, two racks on either side of a small walk-in, encumbered by the weight of my mother’s many cardigans and vests, chinos and trousers, trenches, bombers, peacoats, and utility jackets. I picked a simple black skirt with lace detail that fell at the knee, and black leggings to cover legs that had gotten even scrawnier and that I knew she’d want to conceal, though from whom was no real matter. A soft gray knit beanie to cover her head, a loose blouse, and a fitted black blazer.

Rigor mortis made it extremely difficult to dress her. Her arms were so stiff I was afraid of breaking them as I pushed them through the sleeves. Her body was heavy and when I set down her weight, her head plopped onto the pillow and her eyes bounced open. I let out a wail so full of anguish, neither Peter nor my father dared to enter. I kept at it, pushing at her dead limbs, my own body collapsing beside her every other moment to writhe and cry and scream into the mattress. Overwhelmed by wretchedness, I had to pause to let it settle. I was not prepared for this. No one had prepared me for this. Why must I feel it? Why must I have this memory? They were just going to put her in a bag, like trash to be removed. They were just going to burn her.

* * *

—

WHEN IT WAS OVER the three of us waited together at the kitchen table. Three men arrived, covered head to toe in paper scrubs. I tried not to look when they took her from the room but caught a glimpse as they wheeled her out on a gurney, zipped into a black body bag. A half second that still haunts me.

“Why don’t you two go out for a little while,” my father said.

Where do you go after you witness death, I wondered. Peter backed my mother’s car out of the garage and for some reason I directed him to Detering Orchards, a farm on the other side of town where my dad used to take me every October when I was a kid. There were orchards, fields of different varietals. My father and I would spend the day picking apples and when we were finished, we’d return to the marketplace to weigh them and pick three pumpkins to bring home from the patch. One year, when I was seven or so, my dad threw a rotten tomato at me and every year thereafter we’d have a tomato fight at the end.

It was October 18th and that’s where I wanted to go. I wonder in retrospect if I was drawn there because it was a place to which my mother was specifically not attached. It was one of the rare places that belonged to my father and me, where if the few trees bore fruit we’d pick an Asian pear for her before heading back. Maybe I wanted to go there because it was a place where I could pretend that my mother was still alive, waiting for me at home.

It was busy when we pulled into the parking lot. Full of families tugging their children along in red wagons while the kids sucked at plastic straws filled with local flavored honey and drank from Dixie cups of cider. The weather was nice and sunny, the chill of fall still at bay. It didn’t feel like a day on which someone had died.

I squinted when the light hit my face. It felt like I was on drugs. None of these people could know what had just happened, but still I wondered if they could see it on my face. When I realized they clearly couldn’t, it somehow also felt wrong. It felt wrong to talk to anyone, to smile or laugh or eat again knowing that she was dead.

We walked out between stacks of hay bales. Near the front entrance there were Halloween-themed cutouts for photographs and a few lawn games. Further down there was a pen with goats and a little feeder where you could pay a quarter to let the animals eat from your palm. I slipped in some change and held out my hand to collect a small mound of pellets. Peter followed me over to the fence and stood behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders. Two goats rushed over as I extended my arm over the fence. I felt their lips nibbling up the feed, their wet tongues lapping against my mother’s wedding band, their gigantic slanted pupils staring out in multiple directions.

14

Lovely

Though my father made most of the funeral arrangements, he left it to me to pick the cemetery, headstone, and epitaph. My mother had made it clear she wanted to be cremated, but beyond that, she never mentioned anything about her service, and of course we’d never dared to ask. I didn’t believe in an afterlife, but I couldn’t help but want to do right by her, her spirit very much alive in the reproaches I imagined of the outfit I’d dressed her in, of the headstone I’d chosen. I picked what I thought to be the most tasteful, a bronze headstone with ivy embossed along the edges. On it we arranged to record her name, birth and death days, and LOVELY MOTHER, WIFE, AND BEST FRIEND.

Lovely was an adjective my mother adored. She’d told me once if pressed to describe me in a single word, lovely would be the one she’d choose. She felt it encompassed an ideal beauty and ardor. It felt a fitting epitaph. To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.

I chose a cemetery between our house and town, halfway down the hill, enclosed by a long brick wall with an iron gate. My father confessed to a minor fear of burial, convinced the insects would exact karmic retribution for his years spent as an exterminator, but it was important to me that her ashes be buried in the ground. I wanted to be able to bring flowers and have somewhere to put them. I wanted a place where I could fall against the earth, collapse on the ground, and in the various seasons weep in the grass and dirt, not stand upright before display shelves as if I were visiting a bank or a library.

My father bought two plots side by side. He met with a priest to plan a Christian service, which I didn’t bother contesting though it felt somewhat disingenuous. I knew it was the easiest thing and would make other people happy, which is ultimately what she would have wanted.

At the blue wraparound desk in my childhood bedroom, where I wrote all my papers in high school, where just two weeks before I’d written my wedding vows, I struggled to write her eulogy, to find the words to encompass her in a single page.

It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well. The words were unwieldy, engorged with pretension. I wanted to uncover something special about her that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

* * *

—

THE DAY BEFORE the funeral, my father picked up Nami and Seong Young at the airport. As they entered the house, Nami moved like a small, turbulent bird, her gestures unstable and chaotic. She released a guttural and wild wail, a sound I had come to know quite well.

I’d never seen her this way. Nami Emo was always so extraordinarily composed. The interior of our house, so thoroughly my mother’s and so haunted by her absence, threw her into hysterics. I tried to imagine how she must feel, to be the eldest and have watched her two baby sisters die within a few years of each other of the same disease. It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to. My aunt was one of us. She knew this kind of pain all too well.

Seong Young held his mother up like a pillar. He was stoic, despite the fact that he’d spent a year in this house when he came to the United States to study English. He would have his own grief to confront, but he swallowed it for now. When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.

* * *

—

I DRESSED for the funeral in a black dress my mother had bought me on one of the shopping trips we’d taken to “update my look” and paired it with a black blazer to cover the tattoos she hated. I put on the silver necklace she gave me after Eunmi died and brought the matching one downstairs.