My mother’s death wasn't sudden, but it was still a surprise. She started complaining one day about how she couldn’t keep up with the younger coworkers at one of her jobs; a month later, she couldn't do that job reliably anymore. They kept her on payroll as long as they could, but when winter came, they were forced to let her go. She kept her other job as long as she could, but she kept getting frailer and losing pounds. I heard her up in the early hours of the morning dry heaving, even though she hadn't had anything to eat the night before. By the time they had her stomach scanned, and the cancer had shown its horrific face, it was too late to change the outcome, only the end date.

  I managed to stay in school with the help of grants given for my exceptional behavior and well-rounded performance, which took a load off of my mother's mind. I took a small pride in this, as if I could ease whatever hurricane must be storming within her at all times. All her money went to the rent and a meager amount of food, simple enough for a child to manage. It was quiet in those days; I thought loneliness would kill me. I remembered lying awake at night, afraid the door would burst in and some mythological being or sadistic killer would come in, and I would be defenseless as they ruined the home my mother left me and stole me from the life that I knew, either through kidnapping or death. I wondered if all the other children were so terribly afraid of dying, or of having everything taken away from them so suddenly. It made me nervous, as being different was not something I wanted to be accustomed to. The class bridge couldn't afford to be an odd owl, after all.

  But soon, my status began to slip away from me, as people became friendlier and more accustomed to each other, and needed me less and less. There was nothing I could do to force myself back into relevancy, and even if I could, I was too far down the rabbit hole to manage anything so brazen, and so I simply faded into the background, a ghost of my former self. I supplemented this by studying extremely hard, and so I kept my grants through academic achievement, but it wasn't the same; no longer did I get the peaceful vignette of other’s lives, only the unbearable suffering of my own. I could feel myself losing pounds too, but I didn't really care at this point, as long as I got to see my mother that weekend.

  Many of the fears and worries that came with being a child were stolen from me the day my mother died. I was seven years old at the time. My grandfather, an older Korean man who had flown in in her final days, left me into the room, holding my small trembling hands in his warm, cracked electrician’s fingers. He had never really spoken to me much, apart from a few birthday phone calls, and so seeing him in the flesh was as seeing a stranger. I was accustomed to introducing myself to strangers politely, but when he pulled me in for a hug, I could feel my chest tightening, and a small resistance in the back of my mind. A Headless nurse tended my mother's vitals as we entered the room; she respectfully bowed before giving us the space to say our goodbyes. For my mother and grandfather, the words flowed like water: they spoke of all they had missed, and all they had remembered, all they had wished for, and all they had gotten. Seeing them speak like that made me wonder if my father would've loved me the same way; a small pang shot through my heart as I missed a man I had never met before and would never be able to meet.

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  When my mother and I spoke, it was stifled and awkward. We hadn't spoken normally in a while; she would ask me about school, and I would tell her it was okay, even on days when it wasn't. I think I wasn't a good liar though, because she would stop asking things after that. But as she had more time, she began to open up about something dear to her heart.

  “Su-jin, please come here,” she whispered to me softly from her hospital bed, barely louder than the beeps from the monitors. I hesitantly stepped forward. “I… I came to this land to make a new start for myself. But when I met your father, and I met you, I knew…”

  She turned away from me. I wondered why, but time has told me it was to keep tears from her eyes. “I knew that you were the reason I was here. You bring me so much joy, and make every day so fun and new and exciting. I want you to have the world, and I wanted to be there when you got it.” She couldn’t help it at this point, as tears began to flow down her cheeks.

  “I'm sorry that I have to go. I don't want to leave you, but sometimes we don’t get to choose.” She proposed a small smile and took my hands in hers. “You’ll be moving to South Korea to live with your grandfather. I know it's scary to leave everything you know behind, but you are such a strong boy, and I know you can do this. He has the resources to take care of you, so you'll be okay.”

  As if that is what I was worried about right now, watching my mother dying in front of me, trying to put on a brave face for her child when I knew she was terrified. She had to be terrified; facing down mortality, leaving everything behind… No wonder my grandfather offered to take care of me just to ease her burden. It couldn't be easy on him either, but he was old, and death was a well-known acquaintance of his by now. My mother was Christian, and so she had this belief that maybe her husband was waiting for her somewhere out beyond the stars. I clung to that idea like a lifeboat, even if the concept of religion didn’t relate to me much given the cruelty of the current situation.

  And then she said something to me that would set the course of my life for over a decade, something that would sew itself into my soul and leave me tethered to oblivion for so long that it will never leave me.

  “You are just like your father,” she said so kindly, with a softness to her voice. “Please never change.”