The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

If only I could rewind, go back in time and ask my mother every question about every tiny thing. How crucial those little fragments are now; how great their absence. I should have saved them up, gathered them like drops of water in a desert. I’d always counted on having an oasis.

The ache for my mother is still there. It’s never going to leave. But it’s tucked deep inside layers and layers of remembering. Some of it good, some of it bad. All of it important.

It was the final gift the bird could give us: the remembering. The pieces of my family history glued back together, so that I finally know and understand. And a reminder of the love that we’ve always had, even in the times when it was stormy, when it was hard to see. I want you to remember I will. I’ll remember.

There’s no way to speed through the grief. There’s still a mother-shaped hole inside me. It’ll always be there. But maybe it doesn’t have to be a deep, dark pit, waiting for me to trip and fall. Maybe it can be a vessel. Something to hold memories and colors, and to hold space for Dad and Waipo and Waigong. And Feng, even though she’s gone.

Memories that tell a story, if you look hard enough. Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.

there wasn’t a reason to explain her having depression. She, like so many people all over the world, simply fell victim to a terrible disease. It’s a disease we are still learning to fight. Depression manifests differently in every person; the symptoms can vary. Not every depressed person will act the way Leigh’s mother does. Treatment can help so much—it can lower or even eliminate the risk of suicide.