Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey Read Online Free

night of sleep, my sister woke me up. I could tell by the low look on her face and her tone that she didn’t have good news. Solemnly, she told me, “Mom’s not going to wake up. She went into a coma last night.”
    Walking downstairs, I entered the living room, where my mother lay, softly breathing. We all pulled up chairs from the dining table around her as my father contacted the hospice nurse and my Korean aunts.
    Aunt Annie arrived first, the hospice nurse arriving soon after. She began to check my mother’s vitals, lifting her eyelids, appraising her breathing pattern. With years of experience, she got to the point and told us all that whatever we had to say, we should say it now.
    Looking at my mother lying peacefully in a coma, we asked how much time we had. She hesitated, as though she was withholding information, and just said, “Minutes,” adding, “Maybe even less.” Great.
    The hospice nurse told us that despite being in a coma, my mother could hear us. She mentioned that she didn’t think Aunt Suki and Halmoni—our Korean grandmother, who we lovingly referred to as “Harmony” while growing up—would make it in time, as they were coming from San Mateo. My father pulled out his cell phone, called them quickly to communicate the status, and then put the cell phone up to my mother’s ear. From my seat there, I could hear a bunch of crying and Korean coming loudly through the cell phone, and since I don’t speak a word of Korean, asked Aunt Annie what was being said. She told me that Halmoni was telling my mother to hold on for her, and not to go until she got here. They were a good forty-five minutes away. We again asked the nurse if they’d make it in time, and she told us probably not.
    Defiantly, Aunt Annie told her, “She’ll still be here. You don’t know my sister, she’ll hold on for her mother, she will.”
    One by one we started talking to my mother, who at this point was just barely breathing, like a fish out of water, each breath looking as if it would be her last. We all started telling stories, sharing memories that we had of her, and out of nowhere my aunt brought up how she remembered that when my mother was pregnant with me, all she wanted was miso soup. I stood up in my seat. I never knew that, nobody had ever mentioned it. I could barely believe it.
    My father leaned over the woman he had married some thirty years earlier, put his hand on hers, and with tears slowly making their way down his face, dropping, absorbing into the fabric of the blanket covering her, said, “Honey, I love you, it’s okay to let go. I love you so much, almost too much. You put up a good fight. It’s okay to let go.”
    I was off in my own world, taking this all in, when suddenly my sister exclaimed, “Oh, my God, Mom can hear us! Look!”
    There was a single tear welling beneath her eye, which slowly rolled down her cheek. At that moment, the front door opened, and my mother’s sister, mother, and brother, who had flown all the way from South Korea, burst into the house. My mother had held on for her mother. A few minutes later, right there in the living room, in the house we had grown up in, her entire family around her, she quietly stopped breathing.
    M any times early on at the hospital, when my mother was first diagnosed, she would simply say, “Talk to me.” And I’d always be at a loss for words, never knew what to say other than, “Hi, Mom,” which would break her heart. Tears would pour from her eyes when she’d tell me that I needed to communicate with her more often, open up to her. As she became more ill, I tried my hardest to force myself to talk as much as I could, but there will forever be a part of me that hates myself for not doing so sooner.
    One of the many things I learned about my mother during this time spent with her was that her father killed himself. I arrived at the hospital one evening wearing a scarf around my neck, since it was a bit chilly. A scarf around my neck