Mary H.K. Choi Instagram – CW: grief, parent loss.
I’m on my way to Texas this AM on the same flight we took the morning after my dad died. This time last year, I was at Lunar New Year dinner with my beautiful, wonderful, chosen family when I saw all the missed calls from my mom. And then my brother.
He’d been in hospital, on a ventilator, for six months due to complications from his ALS but we were told he had anywhere from 3-7 years. I’d been shuttling back to Texas from NY all through Covid and wanted a reprieve. I didn’t go home for LNY though I usually do. That night I was struck stupid with guilt, tipsy because it was the one evening in so many that I’d had cocktails. I hugged all my friends sobbing, unseeing and utterly in shock. Then I got on a plane.
I couldn’t understand that he was still dead when I arrived in San Antonio. I’d traveled as fast as I could. I hadn’t slept. It was so completely unjust and incomprehensible that I hadn’t arrived in time. I felt I was being punished.
I replayed those last moments in a recursive loop, trying to figure out where I’d fucked up.
Cut to last night: The same dinner with the same friends the night before this same flight. Because eerily that’s how schedules lined up.
But this year I’ll be in Texas with my mom and brother on the night my dad passed (on the 31st).
I’m hoping for closure. I’m hoping for peace. I’m hoping I can forgive myself.
I almost wore the same comme dress that I did last year as though invoking a spell.
But the thing is, everything is different. I’ve done a lot of work to move through grief. To try to rest because sorrow and lack is exhausting. To try and understand that of all people the person whose forgiveness I do not need to earn or ask for is my dad’s. He wanted me to have all this. The friends, the freedom, my work, my own home.
My heart hurts because he never explicitly told me this. We didn’t talk much. But this is what I have to choose to know for myself. This is faith. This is trust. But there is also evidence. My dad left his family to seek his destiny and make his life. And on some days I can believe he would want for me what he wanted for himself ❤️ | Posted on 29/Jan/2023 21:14:16
