Grief

and a message to the readers

My mom passed away on Wednesday afternoon. She entered the hospital for stomach pains on April 10, came home for a brief period and was rehospitalized and the doctors discovered after what seemed like endless tests and scans and scopes that she had stage four stomach cancer. I can’t even really talk about the course of treatment because it was all palliative as far as I can tell and there was a misdiagnosis of gastroparesis thrown in for good measure.

In the meantime, the world went on around us while my siblings and I sank into a vortex of anxiety and grief. She was pretty clear headed despite the morphine and the fentanyl patch, the only thing that gave her any kind of pain relief.

It turns out Asians are more susceptible to stomach cancer and that in Asia, people are scheduled for regular endoscopies, not colonoscopies.

Right now, writing provides some relief, but I don’t have the physical strength to write about the weight of the grief.

I didn’t have an easy relationship with my mother, but at the end, we were very, very connected. We had moments of enormous grace. We were by her side when she passed. I have to see this as a blessing.

I feel so vulnerable. Her presence, even far away was a protection for me. Her hostility to me and her love for me were so bound up together, I simply relied on our relationship as a kind of ballast in all my pursuits.

We sent these flowers with her to be cremated. Mom would have been pleased with their color and appalled at the waste and expense. I can hear her now saying, “I don’t like wasting things.” We went through her kitchen cabinets and her collection of snacks. Her appetites were very child-like. Watermelon and sunflower seeds, soft candies, crackers of all kinds.