A History of Scars

“Ooh, that’s a mango from back home!” she says. “That’s what real mango smells like.” We make mango lassi by mixing the pulp with Greek yogurt, drink it greedily, glad for the discovery.

We grab a quick meal in a Korean grocery store, too. You learn more of what others might like to eat by going to grocery stores than restaurants—that’s where you’ll find the ingredients of home cooking: the fruits and vegetables, the grains, the snacks. As I excitedly share foods with which I do have positive associations—yellow Korean melon, Japanese Botan candy—I realize the dishes we’ve shared before haven’t been Korean or East Asian. It’s exciting that we have more to share, more to explore.

She knows I value food—that I couldn’t date someone who doesn’t appreciate flavor, in all its manifestations. She’s the same way. She knows I can cook only a few Korean recipes I’ve taught myself. She’s able to tease me because she knows me as an individual, and because even though our cultural inheritances are separate, they’re still somehow linked. We’re able to tease each other.

9 POETRY OF THE WORLD

These days I carry with me a purple crystal necklace, handmade. The man who gave it to me reminds me of a character out of an Agnès Varda film, always foraging and collecting. He buys cashews in fifty-pound increments, fills his rusted white pickup with dumpster-dive hauls. Morels, bike frames, it’s all the same.

A world traveler told me once that he kept everything others gave him, for good luck and safe passage. I understand. I carry the black string with me as a talisman, of sorts. It was innocently given, with no expectations attached. Such generosity is rare.

* * *

“Why would I ever go back?” my mother used to say, about returning to Korea. Now she’s in a nursing home, a train ride away from Seoul. I’ve asked my oldest sister, a decade older than me, for details, so I can picture it: what sorts of food she eats, what it looks like. I learn only that it doesn’t smell of hospital stink, the way nursing homes do here.

I haven’t been to Korea in decades, since I was ten. The country is an abstraction to me. My mother’s illness has spanned nearly the same length of time. Her illness is not an abstraction to me. Its various manifestations have dominated most of my life.

“You’ll regret it,” my oldest sister told me, about not returning to my childhood home before my mother departed for Korea. “You’ll regret not seeing her.”

The truth is, I didn’t. I don’t.

Our current chain of communication is confusing, stilted. My father, returned in recent years from Korea to Colorado, speaks with my oldest sister in New York, who sends emails to my middle sister, three years older than me, and myself.

He gets updates from Gomo, his sister in Korea, with whom he’s had strained relations, but who treks to visit my mother anyway. Gomo’s kindness has been variously attributed to religiosity, genuine goodness, or Korean familial values. Any or all could be true. I met Gomo decades ago, just as I did the rest of my extended family. I can’t even remember her face.

* * *

Nearly as soon as my mother arrived, she contracted aspiration pneumonia, caused from breathing in liquids and particles of food. Pneumonia is common in Alzheimer’s patients. In the later stages, the body begins to give out. Certain symptoms are disturbing. They’re graphic. The regression mimics a return to infancy, as certain reflexes return: the sucking reflex, and the Babinksi reflex, involving the feet’s reaction to touch. Limb rigidity, when one’s arm and hand become fixed in a claw-like position, is the one I most dreaded. These are the visceral manifestations of a slow death.

The hospital treated her for pneumonia and then, to our delayed surprise, placed a feeding tube. After she was returned to her nursing home, my mother pulled out the tube herself.

This act fits with her personality, or the bits unaffected by illness, anyway. She has always been stubborn and strong-willed. It was this determination that saw her rejecting traditional gender roles of her generation and country, in favor of a career—staying up to study by candlelight; programming the first computers in Korea via 0-1 punch cards, on modules the size of a room; relocating to the cornfields of the U.S. to further her education. Later it was this same stubbornness that saw her refusing to leave her job as a tenured professor in Colorado, insisting to my father and oldest sister her mental competency was fine, even as the university that employed her forced her into retirement.

This act fits with the profile of an Alzheimer’s patient, too, who responds to medical intervention with confusion. Parsing my mother’s personality aside from her illness is similar to sorting seeds from grains. The task is nearly impossible. They overlap.

Now we face decisions anew. The hospital wants to reinsert the feeding tube. If we say no, they will feed her thickened liquids instead, but they won’t treat any further instances of pneumonia. They will withhold care.

Relocating my mother back to Korea went against her express wishes. We debated for years. I don’t even remember, anymore, what I once believed was right. My arguments ceased mattering. My father, who’d been absent for most of my life, had returned. I was no longer the decision maker. At one point, once the decision was made, I offered to relocate my mother to Korea myself. My father wasn’t ready to see her go.

This fight might be easier. My sisters and I are unified in our belief that my mother would not want her life artificially prolonged, that she would not want unnecessary medical intervention. My father will most likely feel the same. This stance is medically endorsed here in the U.S., as a way of reducing patient suffering.

Having such certainty doesn’t render the situation less painful—that we’ve arrived at this juncture, in which the decisions we make dictate how my mother will die. We’ve reached a new low of lows.

* * *

I had a child’s belief, once, that if I could make my mother smile and laugh, if I could solve some of her worries, then she would get better. She hadn’t been diagnosed t

hen.

She had her yellow sticky notes scattered everywhere, little bits of mind and memory committed to ink. She had the articles she clipped back when papers were delivered in print alone, the ones she highlighted for their information on Alzheimer’s and gathered into bundles.

“What’s wrong with me? Am I going crazy?” my mother asked me in near-constant refrain, sometimes mourning mistakes she’d made, sometimes simply expressing her angst.

Even as others often explicitly told her she was too young to have the disease, including doctors, she feared she was developing it. She never received confirmation before it was too late.

I fought for her happiness. The more I gave, the more she took. The more she required.

She had the times when, as a child, I would find her crouched in her master bedroom closet, thick brown carpet as backdrop, crying with such intensity that I wondered if she might cause herself serious harm.