Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.

If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. That someone my mother’s age could still have a mother.

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.

White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.

Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.

I was haunted by nightmares and an intense paranoia of my parents dying. I imagined robbers breaking into our house and envisioned their murders in horrible detail. If they returned home late from a night out, I was convinced they’d gotten into a car accident.

I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous.

But as a teenager newly obsessed with my own search for a calling, I found it impossible to imagine a meaningful life without a career or at least a supplemental passion, a hobby. Why did her interests and ambitions never seem to bubble up to the surface? Could she truly be content as only a homemaker?

I fantasized about dying. Every object in the world seemed to become a tool for it. The freeway a place to get pummeled, five stories high enough to jump off.

Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety.

That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place.

There wasn’t much for us to do except turn her occasionally, prop her body up with pillows every hour or so to avoid bedsores, pat her lips with a sponge so they wouldn’t chap. That was all we had left to offer.

We were waiting for her to die. The last days excruciatingly drawn out. All this time I had feared a sudden death, but now I wondered how it was even possible that my mother’s heart was still beating.

Maybe god hated us. There were other families who had fought and won. We had fought and lost—and among all the natural, heartbreaking emotions we had expected to feel, it also felt strangely embarrassing.

Grief, like depression, made it hard to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.