Eden Onpeng

Tag: grief

  • Seeing Dead People: where one’s past bleeds into the present

    Seeing Dead People: where one’s past bleeds into the present

    As I was about to give birth to my firstborn child, I began to see dead people in the faces of the people around me.

    It started during the second night of attempted labor induction. My husband was sleeping in the couch next to my bed. I lay in my bed, fading in and out of sleep, partially dilated and waiting for my baby to come.

    The door opened. One of the assistant night nurses walked into my room to take my blood pressure. I looked at her, saw my late friend Megan’s face, and did a double-take to check my reality. From her fine-textured blond hair to her blue eyes and the freckles on her face, and even her calm, rational demeanor, this nurse was my late friend Megan’s doppelganger. Megan had passed away suddenly in 2019 from a heart attack. I had seen her a few days before she died, and she had mentioned having angina and had an appointment with her cardiologist scheduled for the following week. But then her brother reached out to me when I was at work a few days later and told me that Megan had passed away in her condo.

    Although I knew this was not Megan, seeing someone with Megan’s face, hair, and body being alive and well in the world filled me with a sense of peace. It was like peering into a parallel universe in which a version of her was alive.

    I tried not to stare too hard.

    Was I going insane, trying to find the familiar in the unfamiliar?

    Or was my transition into motherhood bringing up feelings of loneliness and memories of old faces? I would have loved for Megan and my sister to meet Baby Daniel. And although I am willfully estranged from my parents, I grieve the relationship I wish I had with them…an emotionally safe one that does not exist.

    Or was I dying? Isn’t it a thing that people see their departed loved ones right before they die?

    Ultimately, the induction failed. After reaching 7 centimeters of dilation, I burned with fever from amniocentesis and Baby Daniel’s heart rate began dipping with each contraction. The nurse and doctor spoke to me and a few minutes later, I was rolled into the operating room for a c-section. Compared to the two nights of attempted labor induction, the c-section was quick and completed after 40 or so minutes.

    After the c-section, Baby Daniel was placed in a clear plastic bassinet in our postpartum room, next to my hospital bed. I reached over the edge of the bassinet to hold his tiny, soft hands—and before my eyes flashed the memory of my mother holding my sister’s stiff, gray hands in the casket.

    I gazed at Baby Daniel and saw the baby eyes of my sister staring back at me. But perhaps all newborns look the same: freshly decompressed from being squished inside a uterus for the past several months.

    Daniel was conceived not long before or after my sister’s death. Because of the close timing of the two events, I could not think of one without remembering the other.

    I have found it is more socially acceptable to celebrate than it is to grieve. Celebrations are social, but grief is personal. One’s celebration makes others feel good. One’s loss makes others feel uncomfortable—partly because different people grieve differently and we don’t know how to comfort everyone (some want to be left alone, others don’t want to be alone). Grief has a shelf life, a socially accepted window of time in which it is okay, or even expected, to express grief, and after that window closed, I felt I was supposed to shift, at least publicly, to being excited about my pregnancy. It was easier for others to celebrate with me about the pregnancy than to grieve with me about my sister. It felt like I was supposed to be excited now since I was pregnant, even though my sister’s death was nearly as fresh as my pregnancy.

    But the thing was, although I was happy about the pregnancy, I was still dealing with the emotional fallout of my sister’s suicide, my estrangement from my parents, and the childhood trauma I had spent most of my adulthood avoiding.

    Needing the space and time to grieve, I withdrew into myself.

    And now, as I navigate new parenthood and Baby Daniel’s first days in this world, my mind straddles the past and present, grasping for connections, no matter how tenuous.

    My Mother’s Motherhood

     As a new parent, I have finally reached the same life stage I’ve only ever known my parents to be in. My mom had me when she was 20. My dad was 27. During the dark hours of the morning I wonder what it might have been for my mom, who had met my dad through a matchmaker in her village and then moved across an ocean to marry him and have a baby without any family or extended relatives in America.

    Baby knowledge was harder to come by in 1990, when I was born. Nowadays I can enter a search or question in Google or parenting forums for informal advice and parenting perspectives and anecdotes, but back then, my mom would have relied on whatever she learned while growing up or asking people, or maybe a book. Without her “village,” my mom was left to handle a newborn baby equipped with only her own knowledge and instincts. I don’t know how she treated me as a baby.

    When I was six, my brother was born, at 8.5 pounds. I pretended to sleep while my mom held and screamed at my baby brother to sleep. Her thunderous voice and the rage behind it scared me. Silently, beneath the covers of my bed, I begged to God to make my brother stop crying. But he would keep crying all night long.

    My sister was born seven years after my brother, at 10.5 pounds. She would also cry a lot at night. While trying to rock my crying sister to sleep, my mom would get frustrated and say things like “hope your whole family dies” (sounds more succinct in Chinese) and “I wish I had aborted you,” which makes me suspect my sister was a surprise baby.

    Nowadays, a web search reveals tips and advice for dealing with a fussy baby. And a foray into parenting forums would find other parents with whom one could commiserate about baby sleep issues. My mom had none of these resources in the ‘90s. On top of that, my mom had left behind her family and friends when she moved to the United States to marry my dad.

    On one hand, my mom was making the most of what she had. But then I remember the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she inflicted on me and the rest of the family—deep harm that her lack of knowledge or trauma cannot justify, harm that eroded the confidence of her children, and harm that comes from denying the harm that she and my dad inflicted. After remembering these things, I remind myself that having a hard life does not excuse her decision to abuse us. Then I feel angry. And the cycle of thought repeats until I get tired of it and start scrolling through Amazon for a quick distraction.

    I’m filled with gratitude for the resources I do have today. My husband shares household tasks and nighttime shifts with me. I go to therapy. I have access to internet resources and forums that offer tips and anecdotes that help me feel less alone. I’m no longer in touch with my toxic parents so they cannot add to my level of stress.

    Regression & Upheaval

    Becoming a new mom has sifted old memories from the bottom of my pond into the surface. How was my mom when I was a child? How will I be as a mother to my own child? I catch myself sliding back into memories, hangups, and issues I thought I had already processed. Childhood abuse. Sexual abuse. Why are we going through this again?

    In a recent therapy session I expressed grief about the relationship I wished I’d had with my parents. But this was something I’d worked through several months ago. My therapist asked if I was reconsidering my estrangement (a hard no) or if I just wanted to express my feelings of grief (yes), and suggested that instead of using the word “regress,” I can use the word “upheaval” to reframe this resurgence of old memories amid my transition into motherhood.

    I have also been thinking about my sister’s suicide. My mind has preoccupied itself with futile exercises such as wondering how things were like for her during her last days and moments, imagining the pain she must have felt for a long time, and what abuse she suffered alone from our parents. And feeling shame by how I had let myself assume my mother had somehow softened and changed with two subsequent children, even though the likelier truth was that she had learned to hide her worst impulses from me after I moved out. I also think about how I failed my sister by playing along with our parents’ “happy family” façade.

    On the outside, I looked like I was functioning well. My sister wouldn’t have seen the anger that simmered just beneath the surface, or how growing up with my mother’s temper and my dad’s enabling had molded me into an anxious, self-hating, fearful people-pleaser. My sister must have felt so alone in her own experience. She was in so much pain but could not see it reflected in anyone but herself, because I was hiding it deep inside me all along.

    During late night feedings at 2 AM, I look at Baby Daniel and see my sister’s eyes staring back into my soul. It is too late for me to save my sister but I can still protect my baby.

    The “Shit Pie” Metaphor

    Recently I came across the “shit pie” metaphor for situations in which abuse has occurred, where things are great when they’re good, and terrible when they’re bad: If you are eating a pie, and it’s an amazing, delicious pie with fresh, luxurious ingredients, but then you find out there is also shit in that pie, do you keep eating that pie? When I feel conflicted about my decision to cut off contact with my parents, I think of the pie and how sad it is to throw away a whole delicious pie because of a piece of shit in it. It doesn’t matter how good the rest of the pie is; the shit has contaminated it and made the entire pie unsafe to eat.

  • Goodbye to Gareth: a story about a man and his orange cat (part two & the end)

    Part 1: https://edenonpeng.com/2025/08/18/saying-goodbye-to-gareth-a-short-story-about-a-man-and-his-orange-cat/

    Anthony lost his round at the cards and dice table (and fifty dollars) so he thanked the dealer and left to the slot machines, where garish LED screens, bells, and jingles clashed discordantly with each other.

    Gareth would hate it here, he thought, thinking of his late orange cat. Too loud. Too bright. Maybe I would hate it here, too.

    A middle-aged waitress with dyed auburn hair and dark red lipstick came by with a complimentary cocktail he had ordered. The casino provided complimentary drinks to gamblers on the floor, so he had ordered the first cocktail that came to his mind, a “mojito.” It sounded good from the movies he had seen. Anthony was homeschooled and received his college degree remotely, so he skipped the whole party phase of his life, not that he thinks he would have enjoyed it, anyway.

    “Thank you,” said Anthony, handing her two dollars as a tip.

    She nodded curtly, accepting the tip while balancing the tray with the remaining drinks. Her eyes were already on the next patron she needed to serve: a balding, obese man that had been parked at the same slot machine for the past five hours, no breaks. Perhaps he wore a diaper. Or perhaps he was why the carpets smelled like citrus and ammonia.

    Alone at the slot machine with his iced mojito, Anthony took a sip and recoiled. He wasn’t a big drinker. In fact, his main drinks at the apartment were water, Mountain Dew, and almond milk. The mojito tasted like an exquisite mixture of ice, lawn clippings, and rubbing alcohol. Its only saving grace was that it was sugary, which somewhat masked the rubbing alcohol flavor of his drink.

    A group of non-retirees, a group of eight or so college-aged kids walked out of one of the clubs on the side of the casino floor, laughing and slapping each other on the back while balancing their drinks in their hands.

    Maybe casinos are more fun with friends, Anthony thought. Or maybe most things are.

    Suddenly he felt self-conscious of being at the casino alone, or at least a relatively young person gambling by himself.

    As someone in his thirties, Anthony wasn’t as young as these college kids, but he also wasn’t about to qualify for the senior discount at Denny’s yet. Memories of eating lunch in the boy’s restroom during elementary school, middle school, and high school flashed before his eyes.

    During college, with the varied schedules of college students, eating alone during the day was considered less strange, but he did always ache to connect with someone, not just on the surface level, but on a deeper level. But with how short semesters were, classmates always changed, and he would make acquaintanceships that would fade in subsequent semesters. It didn’t help that he was so bashful and had trouble relating to the other students. He gazed enviously at students who congregated in chatty groups. He would fake it by loitering on the outer edges of groups, but he was never one of them.

    Anthony shook his head as if to shake these memories away, but they clung to him and made him feel cold. Or maybe it was the air conditioning.

    The virtual slot machine rolled with its usual jingling sounds. Then it landed on a mismatched. Dud. Anthony’s gambling money was all done and gone.

    Anthony sighed. It was time to face it: he wasn’t having fun here. Coming to Palm Casino had seemed like a good idea when the alternative was a lonely apartment without Gareth, but Anthony felt lonely here in the casino anyway, even while surrounded by people.

    He took another sip of his grass mojito and winced again. Nope. It was time to leave. He looked around at the shops, restaurants, and bars flanking the casino floor. A Rolex store gleamed across the floor. He didn’t win enough money to buy a Rolex, nor did he have any interest. After that grassy mojito, he was in the mood for a burger but he didn’t feel like sitting down and being waited on.

    There was a drive-thru fast food restaurant along the way home, he remembered, so he dropped his drink off on a tray and left the casino, feeling empty in both his pockets and his heart.

    The burger was delicious. After going through the drive-thru, he parked in the parking lot and devoured the burger, fries, and cola. He doused his burger and fries with six packets of ketchup in total. He slurped the icy cola with relief.

    As he drove further down the road from the fast-food restaurant toward his little desert town, he saw a sign for an animal shelter with cats and dogs up for adoption. That’s how I had adopted Gareth, he thought. Was it too soon to adopt another cat?

    The draw was too strong. He took the next exit.

    The animal shelter was filled with the sound of barks and not enough visitors. He went to the counter and asked where the cats for adoption were located. Henry, the man behind the counter, was eager to show him.

    The cat section was behind a glass. He looked at the posters and pictures of each cat that was hung on the wall. They had names like “Joseph Conrad” for a black cat, “Cheeto” for an orange cat, and “Snow” for a white cat. Some were described as rambunctious, and others were described as solitary cats that would prefer to be the only furry one at home.

    “Have you ever adopted from us before?” asked Henry.

    “No,” replied Anthony. He was about to explain that he had found Gareth as a kitten abandoned in a supermarket parking lot, but was quickly distracted by  

    He stood close to the glass and looked at an eight-year-old gray cat laying on a cat shelf with it tail hanging listlessly over the edge. It looked back at him with one half-opened green eye and one healed empty socket before sinking its head onto the shelf, as if it was too exhausted to socialize.

    The poster on the glass described this gray cat as “Brian.” Immediately Anthony’s heart went out to Brian, as he thought of his own late cat who’d had the human name of Gareth.

    “Ah,” said Henry. “Brian has been with us since January. That would make it…eight months that he has been here.”

    “How long does it usually take cats to be adopted?”

    Henry frowned. “It really depends. Some cats get adopted right away, even before their name tags and paperwork is finished. Sometimes the new owner will come and fall in love with the cat in the window. But other times…” He looked at the one-eyed gray tabby with sympathy. “It takes a while. And how long they stay with us depends on our capacity. Sometimes we run out of space and have to prioritize the cats that have the best chances of getting adopted.”

    From another glass room, two tuxedo kittens rolled with each other atop a felt blanket. A few inches away, an orange adult cat curled up with sleep.

    “What happens to the ones who don’t have a good chance?”

    Henry sighed, his shoulders sinking. “The ones who don’t have a good chance…They’re not bad cats or kittens. Many of them are just slower to warm up. They hide from potential adopters, or hiss—but that usually just means they’re scared. If we run out of space, we send them to another shelter down the freeway…”

    “Okay…” Anthony was trying to follow.

    “…Where unlike us, they are not a kill-free shelter. Let’s face it, we are a small town out in the desert. We don’t have the budget or the funds or the advocacy like the larger shelters in bigger cities do. Our space is finite.” Henry’s voice had taken on a defensive edge. “We try to save as many as we can. But in the end, we only have so much space.” The animal shelter receptionist/adoption coordinator/advocate looked off into a corner of the room, his thoughts far away.

    Anthony thought about what daily life was like for Henry and those working and volunteering at the shelter. It reminded him of a story he had read in high school, something about “cold equations,” where a girl snuck herself aboard a spaceship to visit her brother on a faraway planet, but the spaceship only has so much fuel to get to the next stop so the astronaut on board had to eject her out of the spaceship into the cold, airless, and unpressurized space, otherwise they both die and the spaceship would be lost. There was only so much weight the spaceship could carry…

    “What happened to Brian? Was he a stray?”

    “Not at all,” replied Henry. “Brian is actually from a hoarder’s house, which had a total of 18 cats. His former owner passed away. Brian didn’t get along with the other cats—we’re guessing that’s how he lost his left eye—so he had to be placed in his own room.” He smiled sadly at the cat. “We’ve had a few potential adopters look at him, but he hid under a piece of furniture the whole time. He wouldn’t come out.”

    “May I see him?” Anthony asked.

    “Of course,” said Henry, and brought Anthony to the back entrance on the opposite side of the glass wall. Brian lifted an ear toward them but did not move. Anthony went in and approached the cat with his hand extended.

    Brian reared his head and hissed. He hopped down from the shelf and went into a cat condo, looking out at Anthony and Henry from the cave-like opening of a cat condo.

    Henry didn’t look surprised. “Don’t feel bad. He’s been like that with everyone. He hates the kids especially, too much screaming. Do you have any kids?”

    Anthony shook his head.

    “Well, why don’t you try giving him a treat.” Henry reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a small handful of cat treats.

    Anthony accepted the treats and moved to the corner where Brian had hidden. He looked away, and set the small pile of treats near the cat condo.

    The gray tabby must have been hungry because he slinked out of the cat condo cautiously and took a careful bite of the treats.

    While the tabby was distracted, Anthony touched Brian’s back and ran his palm down until it reached Brian’s tail. He repeated it and felt Brian vibrate.

    “He’s purring,” whispered Henry. “He likes you.”

     That night, Anthony came home to his apartment with Brian in a box, and opened it. Brian stepped out and darted under the desk drawers.

    “It’s going to be okay,” said Anthony softly. “You’re safe now.” He set out some water, treats, and fresh litter for Brian and sat on the couch to watch television. Next to the television, Gareth’s ashes sat in an urn. Occasionally Anthony would look at the urn and feel bittersweet emotions swirling in him. He wondered if he would ever be as close to another cat as he was with Gareth.

    Brian stayed under the desk drawer, but hours later, after Anthony had yawned, stretched, and retired to bed, Brian ventured out from his little hiding spot and gracefully jumped atop the bed to peer at this strange new human with his one eye.  He then eased himself into a gray croissant next to this human’s feet and went to sleep.

    The End

  • Goodbye to Gareth: a short story about a man and his orange cat (part one)

    Anthony rolled the dice. “Deal,” he said.

    The casino was long past its glory days. The buttons on the slot machines were sticky, the seats were worn, and there was a perpetual odor of citrus freshener and ammonia on the stained carpets.

    Three girls clad in cheap sequins and satin twitched their bodies with stiff, lackluster movements on the stage to the right of the gambling floor. They faced their catatonic eyes towards the ceiling and walls.

    The slot machines and card tables were half empty (or half full, depending on how you looked at it). Most of the people there were senior folks wearing “Swingers Club” t-shirts, with bald heads and wispy, gray and white hairs. Anthony cringed at the thought of their wrinkly, sagging bodies writhing and their toothless mouths opening and twisting with pleasure. He wondered which casino bus had taken these retirees in from the city to spend their social security checks.  

    So what brought Anthony to this air-conditioned shithole in the desert?

    Gareth, his fourteen-year-old orange tabby, a plump, twenty-pound pumpernickel of a senior cat, had passed away on Monday. He’d fallen ill over the weekend and when Anthony took him to the vet, the vet had said his cat’s organs were failing rapidly.

    Anthony held Gareth during the euthanasia. Gareth let out his final breath with a small rattle as Anthony whispered over and over again, “You’ve been a good boy.”

    Up until then, it had been Anthony and Gareth, living in their one-bedroom apartment in a shitty desert town not too far from this casino. The town was one that rich and adventurous folks from Southern California drove through on their way to Vegas, the home of much more luxurious and well-kept casinos.

    But no, the desert he lived in also had its own casino—the Palm Casino. Anthony couldn’t afford the prices of the Strip, with their add-on fees and upscale dining costs. Besides, he wasn’t looking for a posh experience.

    He just wanted to get away from his town, a town he had lived in for most of his adulthood. It was sufficient when he had Gareth. He worked from home as a computer tech support guy for a small company in California. He wasn’t required to, and thus never attended any work holiday events, and he was paid well for someone who lived outside of California.

    Anthony’s little apartment was kept at a cool 72 degrees during the summer, where temperatures would soar to the high 90s or 110s. From 2015 to 2025, every day, he would wake up to Gareth’s loud meowing, feed Gareth, brush his teeth, scoop the litterbox, shower, heat a bagel and slather with cream cheese, make a cup of coffee from the Keurig, and log in to his computer for work. He would break for lunch in the middle of the day, microwave some lunch, and watch a daytime show while Gareth cuddled with him on the couch. Depending on his workload, he would clock out at some point in the evening and fix himself and Gareth their respective suppers.

    Once the evening was sufficiently cool outside, he would pull on some sweatpants and take a walk along Dune Avenue, a long stretch of street with the desert brush and cactuses in the background, one liquor store at which he would occasionally buy chips and soda (his guilty pleasure was tortilla chips, nacho cheese, and Mountain Dew), and one gas station that overcharged because there weren’t any other gas stations nearby for miles. Anthony seldom saw any other pedestrians on the streets during his walks, and he preferred it that way. His walks would take half an hour, and then he would return to take another shower and sit on the couch with Gareth while watching a movie or playing a video game on his Xbox. After that, he would brush his teeth, retreat to the bedroom as Gareth pounced on the bed, and go to sleep.

    This was good. He enjoyed this life. But it was tragic, a great injustice, Anthony felt, that cats’ lifespans were only a fraction of a typical human’s.

    And now, with Gareth gone, the silence in his apartment and the empty streets around his building, were too much.

    He needed a distraction. And to see people. How long had it been since he intentionally sought the company of humans? As he drove home from the crematorium with Gareth’s ashes in a box on the passenger seat, he saw a billboard on the side of the road.

    25 miles until Palm Casino.

    Yes. This was it. He drove past his apartment and kept going, towards Palm Casino.

    Continued in part two: https://edenonpeng.com/2025/09/02/goodbye-to-gareth-a-story-about-a-man-and-his-orange-cat-part-two-the-end/.

  • Not a Cat

    The cat clawed at the door. But there was no door, and the cat was not a cat, only a memory of a sweet cat that once was.

  • Life Is for the Living: healing from grief & the fear of forgetting

    Life Is for the Living: healing from grief & the fear of forgetting

    I’ve been grieving my sister’s death for about four months and I feel guilty because it seems I’ve somewhat adapted to this reality—a world without Victoria, or at least, a world in which she once lived but is now dead. Her first hundred days postmortem was around her birthday, so based on Buddhist beliefs, her soul has peaced out into the next stage of the cycle.

    If somehow her soul had been lingering on earth, then at this point she is probably gone now. But to me, she has been gone for a long time already.

    Although I addressed her body directly during the eulogy, I didn’t feel her presence at the funeral even when I saw her oddly flattened and reshaped (perhaps from the brain autopsy), grayish face in her coffin. She was long gone by that point. I didn’t feel her. All I felt was the presence of Presbyterians who were all too eager to use Vic’s death to denounce Islam, Buddhism, and individualism and freedom in favor of “conservative family values.”

    She is dead now. And life goes on. It hurts to think that. I guess if I were dead I would want my loved ones to honor my memory but then I would want them to go back to thriving in their lives. I wouldn’t want them to be super hung up over my death. It would be really lame to watch them mope for like twenty years from the afterlife.

    Beaches still make me sad. Because they remind me of losing her.

    I’m tired of my face hurting from crying so much. I don’t want to cry over her anymore. I don’t mean this with anger. Just in the sense that I love, loved, and will love her. But she is dead now. Her own story ended and is now only filtered through the lenses of the people who knew her.

    Perhaps the very act of writing this means I am not just throwing away her existence or the fact that she once existed.

    Maybe writing this is both an act of remembering and an act of moving on.

    Maybe writing this is an act of love, both for the Victoria that once breathed and lived, and for the Victoria that is dead and gone.

  • Finite in the Desert: a vignette about stargazing in isolation

    Finite in the Desert: a vignette about stargazing in isolation

    Paul’s car convulsed and died in the desert. Climbing out and waving away the fumes, he looked at the bright stars blazing over the hills.

    These stars are fucking bright, he thought enviously.

    They were out there, waltzing with each other, dying, merging, rebirthing, all in gargantuan proportions over cosmic scales of time.

    And here he was, a lonely sack of flesh with a dead car out in the desert on a rocky planet, breathing air.

    Beneath the starlight, shadows oozed out from beneath the towering cacti. His final argument with his brother was a mite in the face of the ancient paths of the celestial bodies that carried on, heedless of all the bullshit that happened here on Earth.

    So much had come before him. And so much will come after. His brother’s life was not even a blip on the universe’s radar, and neither was his.

    His hand twitched. His instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket to memorialize this moment but instead, he dropped his hand to his thigh instead. No photos would do this justice. The cold desert air caressed his face. He let his mind wander.

    A pang of loneliness sliced through him. If only his brother were here to see this too. James was no longer here. And while his big brother’s life didn’t matter on the cosmic scale, it meant the universe to Paul.

    With his car broken, Paul could go nowhere until the tow truck arrived in the morning.

    That night, he fell asleep beneath a bright blanket of stars and dreamt of his dead brother.

  • You Beautiful Dumbass: A Frank Letter from a Grieving Sister

    Hey Victoria, you beautiful dumbass. You were two months away from graduation. You were almost free. But whenever I talked to you about moving into your own place, you would respond with, “Mom and dad won’t let me.”

    I get it. You were scared. Mom and dad are controlling as fuck. And Mom is scary as fuck. Things would have gotten better, but you will never know now. You must have been in so much pain to make that decision. The future must have seemed so bleak, that the only way out was in an urn.

    And now you’ve been pulverized into ash, and are likely sitting in our parents’ dark living room. I’m sure Mom cries over you a lot. I wonder if your ash form enjoys being at home, or if you would rather be elsewhere, free in the wind. I wonder if your fat cat Smokey recognizes that the box of ashes is really what’s left of her favorite human, or if she is still waiting for you to come home from college, so that she can snuggle with you on the couch again.

    There is so much beauty in the world. From the gold of a sunrise to birds chirping among the trees, I remember you and all the beauty you can’t experience anymore, not because your time was up, but because you chose to end your time on earth.

    I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I didn’t know at the time that Mom told you not to hang out with me, but I could have reached out to you more often. I should have been more frank with you about what she did. You must have felt so alone in your own experience. Our family was run by secrets and control and fear and guilt. And I abandoned you to deal with it on your own. I am so sorry.

    I hope that wherever you are, you will have found peace.

    I love you, and happy 22nd birthday, my sweet sister.

  • We Would Be Sand Dollar Rich: a memoir

    Work was far from my thoughts as I wandered along the sand on a Wednesday morning, a week after my sister had killed herself. Waves curled and flattened against the shore as I ambled forth, my eyes cast downward in search of calcium-rich remains of mollusks. This morning, the beach—not the city named after the beach, but the actual beach—was deliciously lonely, with only one or two people out on the southern shore, and a few people fishing on the pier.

    Then I saw it—a round disc, face-down in the wet sand. I picked it up and groaned with disappointment.

    The front center of the sand dollar was broken like a sinkhole, exposing its hollow heart to the world, as dark, watery sand gushed out.

    So close to perfection. And yet…

    I wanted something whole.

    I dropped it back to the ground and continued down the shoreline, between the water and row of tidy rental properties. At some point I found another sand dollar with the five-point grooved star intact on its front center. And then I found more sand dollars, broken and whole ones alike. I kept the whole ones in my linen blazer pocket for safekeeping.

    Where were all the people on this sunny Wednesday morning? The kids were probably at school. The adults were at work, or pretending to be. And with the signs telling visitors to KEEP OUT OF THE WATER due to sewage contamination, others were avoiding this beach.

    As for me, I was here to say goodbye to my sister.

    Victoria died in her dorm room at college after taking a toxic substance. It wasn’t even a fun drug so I couldn’t say that at least she died having fun, or doing what she loved. It wasn’t fentanyl mixed into cocaine. There was only one reason to take it.

    I later learned she had spent lots of time scouring forums for information on how to do it. Did it matter if it was the pain that began her journey to find the end, or the pain that led her to finish it?

    I researched online to learn what my sister might have felt during her last moments.

    As it took effect, she might have felt short of breath, panting for air but without relief. Perhaps she started to vomit in her body’s effort to reject the substance, or developed a throbbing headache. Then the dizziness and lightheadedness set in. At some point she lost consciousness. Her organs began to fail, and finally, her brain, starved of oxygen, died. By the time they found her, her blood had turned chocolate-brown and her skin and nail beds had turned blue due to the oxygen deprivation.

    Did her life flash before her eyes during her last moments, before she sank into oblivion?

    She was two months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

    My sister was quiet and kept a very light online footprint. But in the wake of her sudden death, people came forth to remember her: her fiance and his family, our family and its broken dynamics, our extended family, our friends, and her club mates at school. There are probably others whom I will never know, people who cared about her.

    The funeral was open casket. I looked at my dear, sweet sister, and realized: this is no longer her. Victoria, wherever she was, was no longer here, in this gloomy funeral home filled with grief, love, pain, and religious people who used her death to criticize today’s young people for suffering under “modern values” of freedom and independence, and to talk about sin, heaven, and hell. I found none of the sermons comforting.

    For several nights after the funeral, I had trouble falling asleep, because I kept envisioning her casket face: face gray, powdery, and flattened; her closed eyes and lips stretched out; eyes sunken in their sockets; and lips too swollen.

    She must have been so blue when they found her.

    The last times my sister and I hung out were last summer, right after I had stopped talking to my parents. I had realized my parents would never change, and that the same abuses would be covered up again, just like they were two decades ago. I couldn’t trust my parents to not repeat the old patterns with their grandchildren.

    To celebrate my sister’s twenty-first birthday, my husband and I took her out to a local brewery along the beach. We ate tacos and drank beers. “You can drink legally now,” I joked.

    Little did I know, she had been drinking heavily for years, possibly self-medicating for the pain she must have carried.

    Victoria didn’t talk much when we hung out. We would make little playful sounds, like “meow,” to fill in the silence. With all the stuff I had gone through with my parents, I still held out hope that maybe I had borne the brunt of the abuse, that maybe they had mellowed out with age, and were less cruel with her than they had been with me. They had me when they were much younger. They were just figuring it out. They beat my sister less, but beating is not the only form of abuse.

    But I had learned to play along. In order to function in the family, I had swallowed my hurts and denied the sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse our parents had wrought upon me—because otherwise my rage and pain would bubble over with each meal, each visit.

    I buried my memories and pretended my parents were just stern Asian tiger parents who had meant well but didn’t know how to love. I pretended that only the kind and non-abusive ones existed.

    In essence, I had two sets of parents in my mind: the abusive ones, and the safe, non-abusive ones from whom I yearned for approval. I could not reconcile the two. But even then, bitterness would simmer over at times. To preserve the peace within the family, especially while both my grandmother and siblings were living there, I kept shoving those feelings down. Because they were my parents, and it was safer to treat them as the parents I wished they were.

    I went through the motions of being family to my parents: Christmases, birthdays, parent holidays, weekend visits, etc. I hugged my mom who had made the entire household walk on eggshells with her violent rages, who had made me drink from her lactating breasts at the age of thirteen. I shook hands with my dad who had groped and slapped my ass all the way until I was sixteen or seventeen. I tried not to think about that. I would smile and make small talk with my sister who sat in the corner on her phone, who did not enjoy hugs, and who was probably suffering her own version of hell in that family but remained quiet because she did not trust me enough because I had played my role too well—

    What if, by being too scared to rock the boat, and by playing along for so long, I had normalized the dysfunction in my family? What if, by pretending everything was normal…I had made my sister feel alone in her pain?

    In pretending to accept what was broken, I had become part of the very dysfunction that bound the family together. All Victoria could see was what I was pretending to be—a loyal daughter, a peacekeeper, someone who could live with it. She didn’t know I was suffocating too.

    And now, in death, she felt nothing. But what did nothing feel like, when there was no more of you to feel or perceive anything? My brain went in circles trying to comprehend the concept of nothingness. Deep down I also hoped there was some sort of an afterlife, where an echo of her essence hung around, hopefully at peace. And maybe one day I would see her again. Or maybe we would both rest in oblivion while existing in the little trail of mementos we left from our lives, and in the memories of the people who loved us.

    I made it to the end of the beach, where the strip of sand narrowed until it disappeared beneath some rocks and water. Here, the waves rushed forward erratically. I jumped atop a large rock, narrowly missing a wave as it slammed against the face of a rock wall.

    During the last few weeks of my sister’s life, she had written that “my mom kept talking shit about my sister…Trying to pit me against her…Says that my sister should have no reason to hangout with me if she doesn’t hangout with my parents…My mom also told me to not introduce you to my sis lol.” I wondered what my mom had said about me to her over the years.

    It must have been hard for my sister to meet with me that last summer at the beach. Our sisterhood and friendship was a secret. We both knew my mom would be unhappy with her hanging out with me on her own. We were supposed to hang out again but she canceled, saying something had come up. We made other plans, but none of them worked out.

    A bird competed with me for shells, but it was looking for a quick meal rather than a keepsake. I found a few empty ones and stashed them into my straw bag.

    I had reached the end. It was time to return now.

    On my way back along the shore, I found more whole sand dollars and thought back again to that last summer with my sister at the beach, how we had combed the beach for shells and sand dollars but had found nothing intact and only broken pieces.

    I thought of her and her sun hat, her quiet smile, and all the things we knew but didn’t say to each other. My linen pockets were full and sand dollars stacked atop my hands like wide coins. If she were here, we would be sand dollar rich.

  • emerging from the grief cocoon and into springtime

    On the surface I seem to be getting by all right—I go to work, chitchat with my coworkers, wring my hands at meetings, and get things done. Then I come home, I make supper, I hang out and laugh with my husband and cat, and occasionally hang out with friends. The litter box is still changed, the laundry is still run, and the world goes on.

    But if you look closer, you will see that the grief has worn its mark on my face and body—my expression feels heavier, more solemn. I stopped wearing my false lashes. I grew my blond out and cut the colored ends. I stopped styling my hair in the mornings. I’ve pretty much stripped down my morning routine to the essentials. I gained a few pounds. I’ve grown white hairs but I attribute this to regular aging since my dad had a salt-and-pepper head of hair by his mid-thirties.

    During the late night, whenever I get a quiet moment to myself—usually after my husband has fallen asleep…I look into the mirror and see my parents—all the sacrifices, all the guilt, and the feeling of never living up to the ideal, overachieving, pure and chaste, and obedient daughter. Never enough.

    In the beginning I listened to a lot of YouTubers who talk about the dynamics of growing up with narcissistic abuse, such as Dr. Ramani Durvasula and Dr. Jerry Wise. Their videos were immensely helpful to me when I was in the throes of deep guilt and doubt—I kept asking myself, Am I the difficult one for feeling this way? Am I being unreasonable in my decision? Maybe it wasn’t that bad…I mean, it’s not like they left scars on my back from whipping, or broke any bones… Maybe it’s actually quite normal for parents to do those things to their children and demand their secrecy afterward, so maybe it’s actually quite common, but people just don’t talk about it… My brain was playing happy montages of normal moments I had experienced with my parents, as if telling me, See? It wasn’t ALL bad…I had to write down a list of all the things I experienced—Dr. Ramani calls it the “ick” list. Once I looked at the paper, the collection of all the things they did to me, I realized, absolutely not. It was not normal. And even if it were, it was wrong and very fucked up, and they must understand that to some extent if they demand so much secrecy.Subscribed

    A part of me was also scared that I would cave and return to the previous status quo, especially around Christmas. I kept getting nightmares of them showing up at my work, or in our house, demanding to speak to me, telling me about all the sacrifices they had made for me and how ungrateful I am, and downplaying all the things they did to me.

    I feared I wasn’t strong enough to maintain this unnatural decision to divorce myself from my parents. Maybe it would just be easier to go back to pretending we’re a happy family because family is so important to my mom and dad, and family was what they’d used to justify the secrecy. You keep secrets to protect your family, and to do otherwise is to be a homewrecker who is trying to tear the family apart. Other people wouldn’t understand. Only your family can…even though we do not talk about what happened. These were the rules of the house I grew up in.

    Winter was normal in a way, with the usual lovely festivities at the end of the year. But underneath the surface, my mind fell to doom and gloom amid the shorter days. My joy and energy, while present enough to participate and share the experiences with my husband, were stunted by the weight of the estrangement and the resulting loneliness. I withdrew from my outer social circles.

    I am also surprised by how everyday life seems to go on in spite of this inner turmoil. Perhaps I was alone even before the estrangement. I’ve been enjoying my weekends more—spending time with my husband and cat, writing, visiting the library, etc.

    So even though the grief continues beneath the surface, it has not wiped me out the way I feared it would.

    As the days get longer and the sun gets sunnier, I am ready for a change. I called up my hair stylist and I am going to get my hair colored again—I hadn’t done it in two years, and you know what? I think it’s time to move on from Sad Eden Era hair.

    While Dr. Ramani and Dr. Jerry’s videos were crucial in the beginning in helping me understand my feelings and why they were valid, after a while I found that the videos were pulling me back into that place of rage and bad memories, so I started watching other types of videos—writing videos, lifestyle videos, etc.

    Over time I have settled into this new normalcy. The waves are there but they lap quietly at my ankles instead of pushing me off my feet and twirling me in the water.

    I will not forget what happened to me, but I am focusing on my new life: everyday shenanigans with my husband and cat, my novel in progress, my day career, our friends, and all the things in between—soaking in the sunlight during my afternoon lunch breaks, hearing the sounds of the ocean and feeling the grains of sand between my toes, laughing at a silly joke with my loved ones… and maybe one day, I will look into the mirror late at night and see myself and feel enough.