“You’re going on a journey and you have five animals,” Eunmi said.

“A lion.

“A horse.

“A cow.

“A monkey.

“And a lamb.”

We were seated outside on a café terrace and she was teaching me a game she’d learned from a coworker. On the journey there were four stops where you had to give up one of the animals; in the end you could only keep one.

It was the first time I’d been in Seoul since Halmoni died. I was nineteen, in between my freshman and sophomore years at Bryn Mawr, and I’d enrolled in a summer language program at Yonsei University. I was staying with Eunmi Emo for six weeks.

I’d never traveled to Korea without my mother. For the first time it was just Eunmi and me in the apartment I’d grown up visiting. Us and the obnoxious white toy poodle she’d adopted and named Leon, because when combined with the family name, Yi Leon sounds like the Korean word for come here.

I slept in Nami’s old bedroom; by then she had married Emo Boo and they’d moved to another apartment a few blocks away. Seong Young was in San Francisco pursuing a job in graphic design. Halmoni’s room remained exactly as it had been, the door kept shut. The once-bustling apartment felt empty at first, but over the course of six weeks transformed into a jubilant bachelor pad. At night Eunmi Emo would phone in orders for Korean fried chicken and a growler of Cass draft beer. We’d sink our teeth into the crackly skin, hot oil gushing triumphantly from its double-fried crust as we broke into the glistening dark meat, and finished with a cold crunch of the pickled cubes of white radish that came with every delivery.

After dinner, we’d tuck our legs under the low table in the living room and Eunmi would help me with my Korean homework. On weekends we would sit in cafés and fancy bakeries on Garosu-gil and people-watch. Young women with perfect blowouts and designer handbags passing arm in arm with equally perfect-looking men, 90 percent of whom all seemed to have the same haircut.

“Which one do you give up first?” Eunmi asked.

“Definitely the lion,” I said. “It would eat the other animals.”

Eunmi nodded in agreement. She had a baby face, rounder and fuller than her sisters’. She dressed modestly in khaki capris and a thin white cardigan.

It was July, and we’d ordered patbingsu to share to stave off the humidity. This rendition was far more elaborate than the homespun efforts of my childhood, its base a perfect soft powder of snow slathered in sweet red beans and garnished with pristinely cut strawberries, perfect squares of ripe mango, and little cushions of multicolored rice cakes. A fine web of condensed milk drizzled over the sides, and vanilla soft serve towered high on top.

“And then which one do you get rid of next?” Eunmi asked, neatly skimming her spoon along the shaved ice and sweet red bean, a thin thread of condensed milk trailing after it.

I mulled over the question, envisioning myself on the kind of journey that would involve many modes of transportation. I imagined handling the large animals with difficulty, wrestling with them to cooperate as I boarded a steamer, a train, a ferry. I thought it would be best to discard the large ones first.

“I guess the cow, and then the horse,” I said.

Deciding between the lamb and the monkey was more difficult. Both animals were small and easy to manage. The lamb felt the most comforting. I imagined myself nestled in its wool for warmth, alone on a train speeding into the unknown dark. But then the monkey felt the most human, a companion to see me through it all.

“I’d keep…the monkey,” I decided.

“Interesting,” she said. “So, each of the animals symbolizes your priorities in life. What you get rid of first is what you think is least important; what you keep for last is your highest priority. The lion represents pride, which you got rid of first.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “I was worried it’d eat the other animals, just like pride eats away at your other priorities. Like, you can’t really love someone if you have too much pride, or work your way up to a good job if you feel everything is beneath you.”

“The cow represents wealth, because you can milk it. The horse represents your career, because you can ride it through. The lamb is love, and the monkey is your baby.”

“Which one did you keep?” I asked.

“I picked the horse.”

Eunmi was the only one of her sisters to attend college, graduating at the top of her class with a major in English. She landed a job as an interpreter with KLM airlines on rotation between Holland and Korea, making her a natural translator for my father and me. In the throes of my paranoia at someday being orphaned by a freak accident, I used to beg my parents to write it into their wills that Eunmi become my legal guardian. She was not just my bachelor comrade; she was like a second mother to me.

“Did you tell my mom about the game? What did she pick?” I asked, hoping we’d picked the same thing, that she’d picked me.

“Your mom picked the monkey, of course.”

Two and a half years later, my mother called to tell me Eunmi had stage IV colon cancer. She had sold Halmoni’s apartment and stored her things in an officetel, a studio apartment with commercial offices on the lower floors. She was moving in with Nami and Emo Boo so they could help her while she went through chemotherapy.

The diagnosis was impossible to wrap my head around. Eunmi was so straitlaced. She was only forty-eight. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. She exercised and went to church. Aside from our occasional bachelor chicken night, she hardly ever drank. She’d never been kissed. People like this did not get cancer.

I googled adenomatous polyps, the little mushroom-shaped growths, poisonous mushrooms that had blossomed into large, malignant flowers from the pinkish-brown tissue bed of my aunt’s colon. I know now that by then the cancer had invaded her adjacent organs, metastasized to three regional lymph nodes, but in that moment, I did not understand the disease. I did not follow it clinically as I did my mother’s, the changing statistics and prognoses. I only knew that she had colon cancer and that she was doing chemo, that she was invested in beating it, and that was enough for me to really believe she would.

Twenty-four chemotherapy treatments later, Eunmi died on Valentine’s Day. A cosmically cruel fate for a woman who’d never known romantic love. Her last words were “Where are we going?”

I flew to Seoul from Philadelphia to meet my parents for the funeral. It was held over the course of three days in an old-fashioned wooden room with rice-paper sliding doors. Large floral wreaths adorned with banners lined the hallways, and inside, a framed, glossy photograph of Eunmi holding Leon was propped up on a wooden easel above a platform filled with flowers. Nami and my mother wore black hanboks and served a steady stream of guests, offering them snacks and pouring beverages while they paid their respects. It seemed unfair to me that the two of them should have to wait on anyone when their grief was undoubtedly the deepest.

“Nami is much better at this kind of thing,” my mother confided in me as we watched her older sister exchange the customary pleasantries with a new circle of visitors. It made me feel close to her, an admission of awkwardness from someone I’d always perceived as the paragon of poise and authority. It shed light on a truth I often found difficult to believe: that she was not always grace personified, that she once possessed the very same tomboyish defiance and restlessness with formality for which she’d often scolded me, and that her time away from Seoul had maybe exacerbated the estrangement she felt from certain traditions, traditions I had never learned.

On the final day, dressed in my own black hanbok and a pair of white cotton gloves, I led the procession to the crematorium. The cold was oppressive. The air felt sharp, as if a frost stung through every pore of my face, and each icy gust made my eyes water. Inside, we waited in an antechamber, then crowded around a glass window. A man in scrubs and a surgical mask stood in front of a counter where the remains arrived on a conveyer belt. The small pile of gray dust was not a consistent powder but more like rubble. I could see pieces of bone, her bone, and suddenly I felt myself losing my balance. My father caught me as I fell back. The man in the surgical mask folded her up in what looked like deli paper, neatly and nonchalantly creasing the edges around the ash as if it were a sandwich, then slipped it inside the urn.

After the funeral, Nami and my mother took me to the officetel where Eunmi had stored her belongings. There were photos of Seong Young and me on the fridge. With no children of her own, she had left everything to the two of us. My mother and I sifted through her jewelry box. I spotted a simple silver heart-shaped necklace on a plain chain and asked if I could keep it. “Actually, I bought this one for Eunmi for her birthday,” my mother said. “How about I keep it and once I get home, I’ll buy a new one for you, so we can match. When we wear them, we can think of her together.”

My father and I took the bus to Incheon Airport while my mother stayed behind, tending to the rest of Eunmi’s estate. As we drove away from the city, I found myself looking back at Seoul as if it were a stranger, something else now than the idyllic utopia of my childhood. With Halmoni and Eunmi gone, it felt like it belonged to me a little less.

My mother changed a lot after Eunmi died. Once an obsessive, avid collector, she let go of the compulsion and began to take up new hobbies, to spend time with new people. She enrolled in a small art class with a few of her Korean friends. Once a week she would send me photos of whatever she was working on through Kakao messenger. At first they were really bad. One pencil sketch of Julia in which she resembled a stout sausage with extremities was particularly comical, but after a few weeks, she got better. I was thrilled my mother had finally discovered a way to express herself, depicting small objects from her daily life, knickknacks at home, a tassel, a teapot, engrossed in perfecting something so deceptively simple as the shading of an egg. For Christmas, she painted a card for me with pale yellow and lavender flowers, their stems a watery sea green. “This is a special card I made. My first made card to you,” she wrote inside.

One of Eunmi’s last requests was that my mother start attending church, but she never did. My mom was the only one in her family who didn’t practice Christianity. She believed in some higher power but didn’t like the cultishness of organized religion, even when it was what knit most of the Korean community in Eugene closely together. “How can you believe in god when something like this happens?” she said.

Her biggest takeaway from Eunmi’s death was that you could go through chemotherapy twenty-four times and still die, and that was a trial she was unwilling to endure. When she first received her diagnosis, she committed herself to two treatments, and if they were unsuccessful, she told us she did not want to continue. If it weren’t for my father and me, I’m not sure if she would have gone through it at all.

By the end of July, my mother was at the tail end of her second chemotherapy. Her side effects had dwindled, and in another two weeks the oncologist would determine whether or not the size of the tumor had shrunk.

It was time for me to return to the East Coast. My band had a tour scheduled for the first week and a half of August, the last shows we planned on playing for a while. Afterward, I would pack up the belongings I’d left behind in Philadelphia and move back to Oregon for good.

My mother reassured me that she wanted me to leave, but as she stood on the front porch with Kye, waving while my father and I pulled away for the airport, I could see she was crying. Part of me wanted to bound out of the car and back to her like something out of a romantic movie, but I knew it wouldn’t resolve anything. We just had to hope now, and wait. All I could do was know in my heart that she was happy I had come to her after all.

Philadelphia was muggy. The air so waterlogged all movement felt like swimming. It was a shock to be around so many people again, having spent the last three months holed up in a house in the woods. I could tell my friends had no idea what to say to me. They gave me looks like they had spent some thought on it, but talked themselves out of whatever they’d come up with. The group I ran with wasn’t really like that. We expressed affection by digging into one another’s insecurities, and this was uncharted territory for most of us.

Peter was starting a new job in a few weeks, teaching philosophy as an adjunct professor at a small college in the suburbs. I’d encouraged him to apply before my mom got sick, and he was hesitant to take it now because it meant another season of long distance, but I felt it was too important a career opportunity to miss out on. I suggested he at least try it on for a semester and we could reassess over winter break. Eventually, we figured we’d move to Portland when my mom recovered. We could get new jobs there and I could visit her on the weekends.

In the meantime, Peter took a week and a half off work from the restaurant to play bass on tour with Ian, Kevin, and me, since Deven was off touring with another band, getting “Jimmy Fallon big.” Our first show was at a small bar in Philadelphia aptly named The Fire, as it was next door to a fire station. From there we made our way down south through Richmond and Atlanta for a few dates in Florida, then snaked west to Birmingham and Nashville. It was sweltering everywhere. Most of the places we played were DIY spots and house shows without windows or air-conditioning. The four of us sweated through our clothes every night, and often the houses we crashed at were so squalid it seemed more hygienic to avoid the shower. The van smelled acrid, of body odor and stale beer. In the face of life and death, the open road—once so full of grit and possibility, the strangers it harbored so creative and generous, the light of the lifestyle—I had once found so glamorous began to dim.

My parents assured me I wasn’t missing much at home; she was getting her strength back and all there was to do was wait. Still, I felt guilty. I felt I should be with them in Oregon, not sitting in the back seat of a fifteen-passenger Ford somewhere outside of Fort Lauderdale, eating gas station taquitos. I gazed out at the long stretches of I-95 and I knew this was the last tour I would go on for a long time.

After our show in Nashville, we drove thirteen hours straight to Philly. The next day, I packed up the rest of my belongings. Peter was back behind the bar at the restaurant, making up for the shifts he’d missed on tour when I got the call.

“You should sit down,” my father said.

I slunk to the floor of my bedroom between half-packed cardboard boxes. I held my breath.

“It didn’t work,” he croaked. I could hear him on the other end bursting into sobs, his breath heaving.

“It didn’t shrink…at all?” I asked.

It felt like he’d pushed the length of his arm down my throat and was gripping my heart in his fist. I had spent so much time fighting back tears, attempting to be a stoic force of positivity so I could delude myself into thinking we were in line for a miracle. How could it all have been for nothing? The black veins, the clumps of hair, the nights in the hospital, my mother’s suffering, what had it all been for?

“When they told us…We just sat in the car and looked at each other. All we could say was, I guess this is it.”

I could tell my father was not ready for my mother to give up on treatment. It felt like he was waiting for me to protest, for the two of us to band together and encourage her to continue. But it was hard not to feel like the chemo had already stolen the last shreds of my mother’s dignity, and that if there was more to take, it would find it. Since receiving her diagnosis, she’d trusted us to make many of her decisions for her, to be her advocates, to plead with nurses and doctors, to question medications on her behalf. But I knew because of Eunmi that if two rounds of chemotherapy hadn’t made a dent in her cancer, it was her wish to discontinue treatment. It felt like a decision I had to honor.

My mother took the phone from my father. In a voice that was soft but resolute, she told me she wanted us all to take a trip to Korea. Her condition felt stable, and though the doctor had advised them against it, it felt like a time to choose living over dying. She wanted the chance to say goodbye to her country and to her older sister.

“There are small markets in Seoul you haven’t been to yet,” she said. “I never took you to Gwangjang Market, where ajummas have been there for years and years making bindaetteok and different types of jeon.”

I closed my eyes and let my tears flow. I tried to envision us together again in Seoul. I tried to envision the mung bean batter sizzling in grease, meat patties and oysters sopped and dripping with egg, my mother explaining everything I needed to know before it was too late, showing me all the places we’d always assumed we’d have more time to see.

“Then, after one week, Nami will book us a beautiful hotel in Jeju Island. In September, it will be the perfect weather. It will be warm but not too humid. We can relax and look out at the beach together, and you can see the fish markets where they sell all the different seafoods.”

Jeju was famous for its haenyo, female divers trained for generations to hold their breath without scuba gear, collecting abalone, sea cucumber, and other underwater delicacies.

“Maybe I can film it all on my camera. I can make a documentary or something. Of our time there,” I said. It was my instinct to document. To co-opt something so vulnerable and personal and tragic for a creative artifact. I realized it as soon as I said it out loud and became disgusted with myself. Shame blossomed and thrust me out of the dream she’d painted, and reality came rushing back with nauseating clarity.

“I just. Umma, I just can’t believe it…”

I tucked my knees to my chest and blubbered loudly, hiccuping rapid, shallow breaths, my face red with agony. I rocked back and forth on the wooden floor of my bedroom, feeling as if my whole being would just give out. For the first time, she didn’t scold me. Perhaps because she could no longer fall back on her staple phrase. Because here they were, the tears I’d been saving.

“Gwaenchanh-a, gwaenchanh-a,” she said. It’s okay, it’s okay. Korean words so familiar, the gentle coo I’d heard my whole life that assured me whatever ache was at hand would pass. Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden. She was the only person in the world who could tell me that things would all work out somehow. The eye of the storm, a calm witness to the wreckage spinning out into its end.