Saplings

When immigrant families are uprooted, sometimes the entire tree is transplanted. Both sides of my partner's families crossed the Pacific to escape war and genocide; the ones who escaped alive came together, a sprawl of aunties and uncles and cousins across California and beyond. 

But there are other immigrant families, where the seeds were carried off in the wind, sprouting into saplings a great distance away from the roots. 

When my mother's father died, I didn't feel sadness about his passing. Rather, I felt sad on behalf of my mother. I could count the number of times we had interacted on one hand. I had a vague recollection that A-Gong liked to travel. I remember the scent of cigarettes he used to smoke. When a heart attack eventually took him, I was in ninth grade and had only visited Taiwan twice. I can't recall a single conversation I had with him---not that I could have conveyed much to him with my grade-school Mandarin and non-existent Taiwanese.

My father's mother passed in the autumn of my first year of medical school. I hadn't learned what cirrhosis was yet. I didn't know what it meant when they had to "take out fluid" from Nai-Nai's abdomen. I didn't understand the implications of Nai-Nai going to China for a liver transplant. When she eventually succumbed to pneumonia, I felt somber but it was a more cerebral than visceral reaction. After A-Gong had died, we had visited Taiwan more frequently to make up for lost time. Even still, I wouldn't know what to tell you about Nai-Nai. She liked to watch TV. She had tattooed eyebrows. Everything else I know about her is from second-hand stories of family drama.

#

Even if I hadn't lived her for six weeks in 2012, A-Ma had always been different. A-Gong and Nai-Nai were line drawings, sketches in my head. A-Ma was already more vividly painted in my head before that summer, lines and curves shaded in by the stories my mother told.

A-Ma, like my mother and myself, was the eldest child and oldest daughter. She was a child in Taiwan under Japanese occupation during World War II. Food was scarce then. She ate so many yams during that period that as an adult, she never wanted to eat another yam again. 

Her father pulled her out of school after sixth grade. He didn't see the value in a girl getting secondary education. Her first job was at a shop that made and sold jerky. She soon discovered her business acumen and was exceptionally quick at calculating mental math. After she married A-Gong, they opened a business specialized in making fabric for children's clothes. While A-Gong was the face of the business, in reality my grandmother was the one running the show.

Before the late stages of ALS captured her voice, my grandmother was the loudest woman I knew. Her daughters seemed to have inherited this trait. When she and my aunt came to visit our family in California when I was in third grade, my brother and I grumbled about not being able to sleep from the cacophony in the kitchen from the chatter of their excited reunion with my mother.

Before ALS took away her freedom, my grandmother sped off on her moped each morning to the temple and the market. She'd clamber up and down the four-story house, with the ancestral altar on the highest floor, the kitchen on the second floor, the garage on the first floor.

She continued her bustling day-to-day routine after my grandfather died. But my mother noticed that afterwards, A-Ma had seemed prepared to die. She had already planned where her coffin would be displayed on the first floor of the house as part of the funeral rites. She reserved her cremation urn in the temple when she made arrangements for A-Gong. This was even before the disease began to slowly eat away her physical strength. Once she stopped being able to cook, stopped being able to bathe, stopped being able to walk, it was as if her greatest desire was to die. Buddhism does not condone taking one's own life. It's what they would call Passive Ideation in psychiatry. You may wish for it with all your heart, but your hand will not---or cannot---make the move.

#

In the summer of 2012, I was a rising college senior riddled with angst about my chances of being accepted to medical school. My mother came up with the idea of going to Taiwan for the summer and shadowing an emergency room physician she knew through mutual acquaintances. She accompanied me for a week to make sure I was all settled in Tainan, and once it came time for her to return to the States, it was just me and A-Ma in the four-story house. 

I quickly learned that around A-Ma, you had to be careful about any food you expressed preference for. After I commented that the pineapples were deliciously sweet, bags of fresh-cut pineapples from the market were stocked in the refrigerator every morning. After I mentioned that I loved the curry udon, she made it for me every single day.

Mandarin was neither of our first languages; she preferred Taiwanese, while I spoke English. Her Mandarin far surpassed mine, but we were able to cobble together conversations. I would return from the hospital and tell her about the funny observations I had made. The language muscle I exercised each day bulked up in tone, and by the end of summer, my Mandarin was the most fluent it had ever been. 

There was one particular evening, where A-Ma and I sat in front of the TV after dinner. The kitchen/dining room was on the second story of the house. If you walked into the room, the first thing that would catch your eye is Keanu Reeves' brooding visage on an enormous movie poster of Speed directly above the kitchen table. The explanation I was given was that my youngest aunt had a celebrity crush on Keanu, but that didn't explain why his face was still hovering in the kitchen nearly a decade after my aunt had married and moved out of the house. As much as we were bonding, I wasn't about to ask A-Ma in bungled Mandarin if she found Keanu pleasing to the eye.

A-Ma used to watch dramas on the 'Big Love Channel' produced by a Buddhist charity foundation. Something in the show must have inspired a conversation about relationships. How we got to this point eludes me, but what I remember clearly is the story A-Ma told me about my mother, from a time before she met my father. I hesitate to use the word secret. There was nothing scandalous about it. But it was a piece of my mother's life that she never would have told me. There is a point in your life when the kaleidoscope turns, the pieces shift into new shapes and colors, and suddenly you view your parents as full-formed people who had their own life, hopes, and dreams before you ever existed. My grandmother told me not to tell anyone what she had told me. I carried that piece she gave me close to my chest. 

#

I realize I haven't mentioned Ye-Ye yet.

The yin-yang symmetry is evidence of a higher power with a sick sense of humor. My mother's mother, her brain as sharp as ever, her body whittling away as her muscles failed her. My father's father, physical health as pristine as could be, his mind wringing dry from the cruel squeeze of Alzheimer's.

What would you rather? The question has crossed all of our minds. Maybe there is something merciful in not knowing. Could you bear to live with the full knowledge that your disease has trapped you in a body that refuses to cooperate? But then I think of Ye-Ye. He was a former ship-builder who once took pride in the fact that he could speak a little German, Japanese, and English. He was already growing more forgetful when I saw him in 2012. By the time I was in medical school, he would ask me the same question every ten minutes. When I saw him the spring before I started residency, he asked me if my brother was a doctor yet. By the time my brother went to visit seven months later, he had no memory of him left.

Alzheimer's is not a blissful slide into unknowing. In reaction to his eroding ability to remember, he compensated with increasing stubbornness. In the early stages, like a toddler unable to express himself, Ye-Ye would lash out. In some ways, I find that aspect even more frightening. That sliver of consciousness, the awareness that your sense of self is disintegrating and that there is nothing you can do to stop it from slipping through your fingers.

#

A-Ma seemed to think she would die quickly. But months coalesced into years. When she began having trouble breathing in January, the family in Tainan worried about the logistical nightmare of arranging funeral arrangements around Lunar New Year. But then, February 1st came and went. A-Ma rented an oxygen tank and seemed to be sleeping better. Because Taiwan continued to require a fourteen-day quarantine for all international visitors, my mother relinquished the idea of going back to see her mother. Instead, she video-called her mother every day. 

Perhaps because there had been numerous false alarms over the years, I was caught me off guard when I received a text while at work that her wish had finally come true. But my mother later told me that this time had felt different. My grandmother, who had eaten nothing but dietary supplements for years, suddenly asked her caregiver to make her pumpkin and water spinach soup. Maybe she knew this time, the end was truly near. 

On her last day, my uncle's family had come to visit her. Four generations were under one household: my grandmother, my uncle, my cousins, and my cousin's daughter. Palliative nurses have told me that the dying often seem to wait for permission to let go. I imagine her lying in the bed, listening to the four-story house reverberate once more with noise and life. I wonder if she thought of the rest of us. Picture a forest in Tainan, a cluster in California, a lone sapling in Connecticut. The roots stretch below the ground for miles. The rain falls, but tomorrow, the leaves will stretch towards the nurturing sunlight, the flowers will bloom, and the seeds will sail aloft once more.

coda

"I believed all of your dreams are duration.
You took my heart and my keys and my patience.
You took my heart off my sleeve a decoration."

-- "Work" by Rihanna ft. Drake

I think back to that last day, when I looked at her. Really looked at her. Barely lucid. Cachexic. She reminded me of a sleeping animal, limbs curled up in a ball to contain warmth. I wondered, if we could see the time we had remaining imprinted on our chests like the boxy red numbers of a digital clock, whether her time would show days, weeks, or perhaps even another month. An emergency room doctor once told us we would all learn to hone and rely our "Spidey Senses" in the way that she just knew by looking at someone whether they would crash on her in any minute. I knew the girl was dying, but still it came as a surprise when I pulled up her record on Monday morning and discovered she was already gone.

If you can look at a girl like her and see that she is on the brink of death... could you do the same with someone dying from within?

I barely knew him. I knew his name and his face, but I couldn't remember which classes we had shared or if we had ever spoken to each other. I only found out he had taken his own life because a girl I knew had written about her memories of him in high school, and the post had appeared on my newsfeed this morning. Beautiful and aching. A kaleidoscope, pieces shifting into new patterns and sides of a person I never truly knew. 

W.A.Y.S.

At forty-four minutes to four
An angel walked up to my door
Opened the windows to my soul
Told me he thinks that I should know
That there's no slowing down
As the globe spins 'round and 'round
You gotta keep going, gotta keep going
Gotta keep going, you gotta keep going
Gotta keep going, you gotta keep going
You gotta keep going, you gotta keep going
You gotta keep going
--

 Time doesn't stop even when your world does.

 --

If there's one thing that I learned
While in those county lines
It's that everything takes time
You have gotta lose your pride
You have gotta lose your mind
Just to find your peace of mind
You have got to trust the signs
Everything will turn out fine
So why aren't you smiling?
Why aren't you smiling?

--

That's why you keep going.

-- "W.A.Y.S." by Jhene Aiko

termina

Last Thursday, I'd gone to bed a little early to prepare for my exam in the afternoon the next day. When I checked my phone, I saw that I'd received a message from one of my sorority little sisters.

I'd decided to gtfo of New Orleans after my hell week of exams and booked an airplane ticket to North Carolina. She was supposed to pick me up from the airport on Friday night. Her message was succinct. My sister just passed away. I have to fly out tomorrow morning. Sorry, I can't pick you up from the airport.

I'd never met her blood sister before. The girl was only a year or two older than me. I heard later that she'd died in her sleep.

I talked about it with one of my friends, who's doing clinical rotations at Duke Med. How does someone in their twenties die in their sleep? Without any previously diagnosed defects?

Earlier that same night, I'd been reading articles about the German plane crash, where the co-pilot locked the pilot out of the cockpit and proceeded to crash the airplane into the mountains, killing everyone on board. No bodies were found intact, only parts and pieces scattered across the mountain. I tried to imagine how I'd feel if I knew that my brother or parents had died in that way. I could already feel the rage coiling up inside of me.

My little had received a phone call from her mother while going back home from chapter, without suspecting a thing. Her line sisters told me that all of a sudden, she'd begun to scream. They'd seen her cry before, but nothing like this. It was like a part of her was dying.

Life is too short. Whatever is plaguing you and giving you doubts right now......

Don't hold back.

Go for it.

Life After Life

I wrote about my grandmother's passing a couple of weeks ago. My mother sent me an e-mail describing what happened. I can't really do it much more justice, so I decided to copy the story in its entirety.

------

"When Grandma was in critical condition, her eyes were open the whole time. It seemed that she still could sense what was happening in the room. But, with the oxygen mask tight on her face and the machine pumping hard constantly, it really looked painful.  

Four days later, the most difficult part was when your father's siblings had to decide whether to send her to ICU or not.  That was on Sunday.

Three days later, Grandma was moved to the hospice room.  Her lung infection got worse. She was slipping away. But, somehow her eyelids were still open, even though her eyesight was no longer focusing on anything.

Everyone had gradually accepted the reality, except Grandpa. He sat by her bedside and still kept telling her, 'Be brave, hold on...'

Finally around 5:30 pm, your uncles and aunt all had arrived the hospital room and surround the bed.  Your father's two older cousins consulted with Grandpa outside the room for quite a while. Grandpa came in, sat by the bedside, and he started saying the same phrase : '你要堅強. (Be brave, be strong.)'  One of the cousins touched his back to remind him...  

Suddenly, Grandpa said: 'I really don't want to let you go, but now I have to. Let's get together again in our next life.' After he was saying these words, Grandma closed her eyes and the heart beat stopped.  

Even though we all have seen their quarrels over the years, at the end, the last scene made it a love story."

5:50

I barely felt it when I saw the words on the computer screen. But slowly it started trickling. It seeped into the crevices, coating my insides until I felt as if my intestines were made of lead, growing heavier and heavier with each passing minute.

Eight years ago, when my mother's father passed away from a heart attack, I'd woken up in the night with a gushing nosebleed. As I read my mother's e-mail, I tried to think of what I'd been doing when it was 5:50 PM in Taiwan.

4:50 AM in New Orleans. I'd been sound asleep. A dreamless night.

I didn't cry for my mother's father then. This time, I didn't cry for my father's mother either. When you are the child of immigrant parents whose families still live in their homeland, there's a distance you can't cross even when you're physically by their side. They've seen all your other cousins grow up before their eyes, but they can count the number of times you've flown to visit on one hand. You, with your muscled athletic frame and tanned skin, so unlike your Taiwanese cousins with their slender limbs and snow-white skin, can only communicate with them in simple sentences and blank stares.

I was never close to my father's mother. In personality, she was the complete opposite of the women in my mother's family. Given how my mother raised me, I couldn't relate to my father's mother much either. I'd heard my mother complain about her mother-in-law before, but it'd been especially frequent a few years ago when my grandmother required a liver transplant. Long story short, family drama had ensued. From that point on, my grandmother wasn't just a kindly faraway entity who always made toast with sunny-side-up eggs and ham in the morning or whose days revolved around preparing dinner. In the aftermath of the drama surrounding the liver transplant, I saw her as a human being unable to confront her own mortality, to nearly irrational ends.

Unlike the suddenness of my mother's father, I knew my father's mother was fading away. The first e-mail from my mother came over the weekend, reporting that she was in critical condition from a lung infection. The second e-mail came a day later, saying she'd been placed on a ventilator. I was in a strange place emotionally through all this. I went to my classes, I studied in my room, I lived life as normal, wondering when the next e-mail would come.

I recognize the heaviness as sadness. But I wonder about that trace of guilt nestled within it -- and why I feel as if I should have loved her in spite of her faults.

Lament

"Everyone cares when it's too late."

The above is a quote I found yesterday on the Tumblr page of someone who killed himself weeks after publishing that post.

Before I go any further, I should probably backtrack and explain how I got there.

Yesterday afternoon, I'd just about snapped. I had sat through four consecutive lectures on spinal cords and radiographic anatomy, and as I drove myself home from school, I was overcome with a severe case of DGAF -- Done Giving a Fuck.

When I got home, I indulged on two snack-sized bags of Flaming Hot Cheetos, which temporarily made me happier but quickly sent me spiraling downward in fatty-guilt. I decided to browse the Internet, and somehow, I ended up on a forum site about Nana. There was no news about Ai Yazawa's health status, and I read some threads with people discussing how much they'd cried when Ren was killed off, or deliberating whether or not Nana and Ren were ideal for each other. It brought back memories of how Ren's death affected me in high school (yes, a fictional character can do that to you), and I played Anna Tsuchiya's "Kuroi Namida" to indulge in my somber mood. While on this forum site, I somehow stumbled across the name "FrankWolf" and looked him up on Google.

That's how I came across that Tumblr. That's how I learned about the young man who was known for his androgynous beauty in cosplay. That's how I read in a Yahoo Answers response that he had endured constant cyberbullying from people who spewed vitriol about his feminine looks and his cosplay hobby, until he could bear it no longer and took his own life.

Later that evening, I was at the gym with a friend, quizzing each other on anatomy while on the elliptical machines. While we were talking, I happened to glance up at the TVs on the wall and was shocked to see the same headline on CNN, Fox News, and ABC News. Robin Williams was found dead, presumably by suicide.

I can't remember how many of Robin Williams' movies I've seen. I recall him most clearly as the Genie in Aladdin and the English teacher in Dead Poets Society (O Captain, my Captain), but I can't claim that he had a significant impact on my life. Still, I was stunned to learned that he had been battling depression. It had never crossed my mind that someone like him could be struggling with depression, but then again, I should have already known that what people show on the outside often doesn't correlate with what's going on inside.

Today, I read an article with anecdotes about people's own battles with addiction and depression. Pieces of those stories reminded me of myself. I don't consider myself clinically depressed, but there are those moments when I lose complete motivation and feel as if I'm staring down into an abyss. That's how I felt yesterday afternoon. I'd already been feeling lonely about my lack of close friendships here, and as I sat in that lecture room and saw a whole year of memorizing body parts ahead of me, it all suddenly became too much for me to handle.

Today, I tried to turn things around. I let myself work on EP for an hour and a half after class before starting my studying. I studied for an hour at a time before giving myself a short break. I found this video during one of those breaks. It gave me some perspective and a much-needed kick in the rear. Whoever's out there, I hope it helps you too.

Carcassonne (but mainly other thoughts)

Finally found a computer, but given that I have less than a week left before I return home, I figured it would be easier to just write a monster recap of everything when I go back to the States. Should be fun to write... haha. I'm in Carcassonne right now -- the walled city that the board game is named after. Detail shall follow eventually.

Found out today that one of the victims in the Santa Barbara shooting massacre was my brother's classmate in high school. I looked him up on Facebook and showed his photo to my mother. She recognized him. My mother was heavily involved with this one parent group at our high school that holds an annual fundraiser each year (she was even the Chief once... received a plaque from the city during her term, as a matter of fact... lol). He volunteered at this event, so my mother knew the boy and his mother. One of the traditions at the annual event is that for the last performance of the evening, all of the student volunteers go onstage and perform a coordinated dance. My mother told me that the boy was naturally shy and more withdrawn, but he still went up to perform with everyone. After the show, his mother told my mom that she really appreciated that her son had a chance to go onstage and open up a bit more. Supposedly after that, he gradually came out of his shell more.

I know that life isn't fair. But really, I have no words to describe just how much this... sucks -- and even this word doesn't do justice to the mixture of anger and sadness I feel when I think about this. This boy was nineteen years old. He died, just because he happened to be living with someone with violent tendencies who may very well have been mentally insane. I was researching housing options in New Orleans before I went on this trip... and really, how will I know if a future roommate is going to be okay or not? Even a cursory meeting in person or via Skype might not be enough to detect trouble.

And I guess what makes me sad more than anything is... nineteen was fours years ago for me, which doesn't seem like much but really... nineteen is still so young. I didn't know the boy personally, and based on what my mother has told me, I wasn't as withdrawn as he was... but I think anyone who has been uncomfortable with his/her own shyness can relate to those little breakthroughs when you shed the wallflower for a moment and slowly come out of your shell. I can look back on these four years and trace those little moments, those little cracks when the walls started coming down. And perhaps I'm just blindly speculating at this point... but I feel like this boy was getting there, only to be cut down too soon. And by someone who, from the accounts I've read, harbored irrational hatred towards everyone, but especially women. (There are a bunch of articles on the killer and the culture of misogyny in the US, but I'll leave that topic aside for another day.)

You can't rationalize this sort of thing. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time, living with the wrong housemate. I would hazard a guess that I'm more conscious of my mortality than most people my own age. My mother and I had a conversation about this recently. She tackles her art projects obsessively, while I try to write as much as possible -- because our biggest fears are that we could die at any moment before the prized idea in our heads can materialize into the physical world. And that's what scares me the most.

cyclic

"Be my friend
Hold me, wrap me up
Unfold me
I am small
I'm needy
Warm me up
And breathe me"

 -- "Breathe Me" by Sia

I had vaguely heard about her in the past few days, and so this morning I began reading about the story of Amanda Todd. I also watched the Youtube she made weeks before she took her own life. I still have a horrible habit of reading user comments, and frankly they almost always leave a sour taste in my mouth. Yes, she made some unwise decisions, but nobody should be ostracized to the same extent that she experienced.

The truth is, this happens all the time. I still remember when a girl I was somewhat friends with in middle school was cyberbullied on Myspace. To this day, I have no freaking clue why they targeted her. She was fortunate that she had a group of friends who came to her defense and stuck by her side. But to this day, all I can think of regarding middle school is a teeming cesspool of brutish behavior.

How long will people remember Amanda Todd before next news cycle flushes her story away? I still remember the story of Phoebe Prince, but I wonder how many people still do.

Leonardo

About seven years ago, my brother and I finished tennis practice and went to the parking lot to find our mother. When she greeted us at the car, she told us she had a surprise. In a box, there were two tiny turtles -- a brother and a sister, each about the size of my palm. One with a red mark on his head, and one without. This red mark became his defining feature -- it was how we could tell them apart.

My mom had been hoping that the two turtles would be enough to dissuade the collective begging from my brother, my father, and me asking for a puppy. Unfortunately, the novelty in having a legitimate pet died away when it soon became clear that the turtles did very little but eat, sleep, and sunbathe. Within less than a year, Matisse came into our lives and promptly peed on our kitchen floor.

At the time, the turtles lived in a clear plastic box next to the dishwasher by the bay window. My mother would let them wander around the kitchen counter while she cleaned out their box, refilling it with clean water. As the years passed, they grew bigger and bigger. The plastic log/cave we'd bought from the pet store became too small, and we had to buy bigger and bigger logs until there were no more sizes left that could top the others. In the end, only one turtle could hide under the log or sunbathe on the top at a time. This would become important later.

For years, they had no name. We referred to them as "boy" and "girl" for the longest time, until one day, I arbitrarily decided to give them names. We still usually referred to them as "boy" and "girl", but officially their names were Leonardo and Mona Lisa. Nevertheless, the turtles drifted readily out of my consciousness -- they didn't do much, and it was typically my mother's job to change their water and feed them. Many times, I forgot they even existed.

Leonardo was always the more adventurous one. Whenever my mother let him out to explore, he would immediately scurry off across the kitchen counter, as far away from the box as he could get. We'd find him burrowed behind a vase near the toaster or beneath a stack of envelopes by the telephone. A couple of times, he even fell off the counter, to the great surprise of our dog. Mona Lisa, on the other hand, was much less aggressive. She tended to stay near the bay window and never wandered too far. Whereas Leonardo would aggressively fight his way for a bite of turtle food, she tended to get knocked aside.

Eventually, the clear box by the bay window was too small for the two of them. My mother bought one of those plastic tubs Chinese newborns are usually bathed in and placed the two turtles outside. At the time, the walls of the tub were high enough to keep them inside. They would take turns sunbathing on the log and sleeping underneath it. Then one day, my mother noticed that there were strange scars on Mona Lisa's skin. Thinking maybe it was too cold to leave them outside overnight, my mother would hoist the tub in and out of the house each night and morning.

The answer to the mystery of Mona Lisa's scars finally came months later. After my father bought her a new camcorder, my mother had the brief hobby of videotaping everything -- including what was going on in the backyard. By chance, she was filming the two turtles one morning -- Mona Lisa was sunbathing on the top of the log, when Leonardo suddenly popped his head out of the water, yanked her by the leg and threw her off of the log, and then situated himself where she had once been lounging. Yes, there was a case of domestic abuse happening right under our noses. From then on, the two siblings were kept in separate tubs outside, isolated from each other.

During November of last year, I called my mother while I was at school. We talked for a little bit about who-knows-what, and at some point she relayed to me that Leonardo had escaped. He had gotten big enough that at some point, he managed to climb out of the tub and had scurried off somewhere in the backyard. We were upset, but not distraught -- we hoped for the best, thinking that perhaps he'd be able to survive on his own. I discussed the news with my brother on Facebook, and my cousin cracked a light-hearted joke about Leonardo running off to join the Ninja Turtles.

As fate would have it, Leonardo appeared in our lives again. About two months ago, my mother was washing the dishes when she noticed something moving on the patio near the bushes. Leonardo had survived the winter and was alive. My mother recorded a short video and uploaded it on Facebook, and then she decided that, since he had managed to take care of himself for five months in our backyard, she would let him enjoy his freedom.

Then this morning happens.

We just finished watching the final of the French Open, when my father goes outside to get the Sunday newspaper. When he comes back in, he yells out, "Hey, it's the turtle!" Sure enough, we see Leonardo burrowed by the camellia plant right next to the black metal gate that leads to our house.

We are happy to see him. But the rejoicing begins to dissipate when my brother asks, "Is he dead?" My mother puts on a pair of rubber gloves and pokes him a little. He doesn't move. She picks him up. He does not squirm like he once did. We put him in one of the water-filled tubs my mom left out for him, in case he ever decided to come back. He floats.

My brother goes back into the house. My mother asks my father to get a shovel. My mother picks a spot behind the bushes where she saw him walk past just two months ago. At the same time, I walk over to the red tub where Leonardo floats and crouch down to look at him. I am still holding the camera my mom handed to me -- back when we treated the discovery like a family reunion. Whatever doubts I have about my mother's judgment that Leonardo is dead vanish when I see the way his closed eyes are sunken in.

I barely listen as I hear my mom say something out loud. She says something like, "Well, that's life." Then I hear these gasping noises, and for a second I think she's laughing but then I realize that my mother is crying.

By then, I can't even see anymore. The steam has fogged up my eyes, and I sense the way my body automatically shuts down to prevent my emotions from spilling over whenever I find myself getting emotional. It's how I have managed to almost never cry when I watch or read tragedies. Except this time, I let myself go.

One of our neighbors opens the gate. I don't know why he's here. I don't even know his name. My father and mother say some words to him. My head is locked in place. I can't see, it's all a blur, and yet I can't keep my eyes off of Leonardo. I vaguely sense my mother and the neighbor standing behind me. I don't turn around to look at them. I don't want them to see my telltale face. When the neighbor offers to say a prayer, I move out of the way for him and, ashamed of my tears, I run back into the house. I pass by my brother, who sits emotionlessly at the kitchen table.

Later my mother calls out that they are about to bury him. The four of us stand around the grave. My mother places him inside. We take turns filling the grave with the shovel. My mother pats the dirt and places a large stone next to it -- a marker of his grave. This time, my brother starts crying.

A melancholy permeates our house. The lingering question remains suspended in the air -- should we have captured him again when we saw him two months ago? Leonardo might still be alive if we had. But is that what he would have wanted? Or were those last seven months of freedom the most blissful months of his life?

Seeing him floating in that red tub made things so clear to me. I hardly cared about him when he was alive. Maybe when he was still a baby, and he would eagerly eat all the food I threw into the box. After Matisse entered our lives, the two turtles were mainly forgotten. They don't beg for attention like a dog. They cower inside their shells when you come close and startle them.

Leonardo won't be the last. From time to time, I am haunted by dreams of when Matisse's time will come. Mona Lisa's life expectancy is between 25-50 years, but look what happened to Leonardo. My parents are getting older too. My father has had more health problems in the last year than I can remember.

Someday, my time will come too.

My mother thinks Leonardo purposely chose to rest so conspicuously by the front gate, where anybody could see him. She thinks he knew.

Joplin

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/26/severe.weather.child.dead/index.html?hpt=C2

I didn't think twice about the Joplin tornadoes. Until I read some of the stories. The boy with the popular Youtube channel is still missing. There's the grieving woman whose husband sacrificed himself to save her -- "You know, people kept saying he wouldn't have wanted it any other way, but if I could have taken twice as much damage just to have him alive, I would have." And when I saw that video, the one with the father who lost both of his boys...

Once you put faces on a tragedy, that's when it hits you in the gut.

R.I.P.

One thing that struck me about Elizabeth Edwards was that she gave up her law career to support her husband's. She was always by his side whenever he ran his political campaigns, even when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer.

And then it turned out that John Edwards had been having an affair (and tried to excuse it by saying it had happened when her cancer was in remission), and that he had fathered a child with another woman. And that this would essentially ruin his political career indefinitely.

And here I am, stressing and freaking out about the approaching finals week. With all the pressure to score well and get into good graduate/professional schools, it's so difficult to grasp the idea of giving up all of that work, all of that effort for that one person... who happened to be a complete jerk wad. I can't even imagine how I would have felt, but she lived through it.

Rest in peace.

Alexander McQueen

One of my favorites

RIP