Eric Budding’s Reviews > Crying in H Mart > Status Update

“She would have been so tickled to have seen the past few years. And though it felt contrary to my beliefs, I had to believe that she could.”

“The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”

“If dreams were hidden wishes, why couldn’t I dream of my mother the way I wanted? Why was it that whenever she appeared she was still sick, as if I could not remember her the way she’d been before? I wondered if my memory was stunted, if my dreams were consigned to the epoch of trauma, the image of my mother stuck where we had left off. Had I forgotten her when she was beautiful?”

“Let me feel this, I wanted to scream. Hold me, and let me wallow in it. I thought to myself that if I ever had children, I’d never tell them to save their tears. That anyone who’d been hardened with those words would grow to hate them just as much as I did.”

“I could feel my heart hardening—crusting over, growing a husk, a callus.”

“She leaned in closer and stared into my eyes, like she was certain this would solve all my problems. It was how I’d felt about music once, back before everything happened. A pure, childlike belief that songs could heal. I had believed that with such conviction before I’d confronted a loss so consuming it had rattled my clearest passions, made my ambitions appear frivolous and egomaniacal.”

“My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations.”

“Christianity was a language she understood. Religion was a comfort and in that moment I was grateful it was there for her.”

“The house was quiet aside from her breathing, a horrible sucking like the last sputtering of a coffeepot. Sometimes it stopped completely and my father and I would go silent for four full seconds, wondering if this was it. Then she would gasp again. The pamphlet hospice left told us the intervals would lengthen over time until eventually her breathing stopped completely.”