My father booked me a flight from Philadelphia to Seoul. I’d meet my parents there and after two weeks in Korea, we’d all fly back to Oregon together. The morning came for Peter to drive me to the airport. It was early and the sun was just beginning to come up, casting a romantic light on our dingy block, empty cartons of Arctic Splash swept into piles of fallen leaves, the Little League field enclosed in its high chain-link fence.

“Maybe we should get married,” I said offhandedly. “So my mom can be there.”

Peter squinted. He was groggy and focused on traffic. The warm orange light of dawn flitted like an open slat across his eye line. He didn’t respond, just reached over to squeeze my hand, which was annoying. Like everyone else, he never knew the right thing to say. His method of consolation was just to lie beside me in silence until my emotions ran their course and quieted down. To his credit, that was all there really was to do anyway.

I slept for most of the eighteen-hour flight, took the bus from Incheon to Seoul, then a taxi to Nami’s apartment. It was dark by the time I got in, a little after nine. The air was cool and the breeze made a pleasing sound, purling through the leaves as I crossed the gated courtyard toward the complex. I buzzed in and took the elevator up. Leon yipped at a distance as I took my shoes off in the entryway.

Nami hugged me and rolled my suitcase into the guest room. She was dressed in a nightgown and looked uneasy. Quickly, she ushered me back to her bedroom. My parents’ flight had not gone well. My mother was in Nami’s bed, shivering uncontrollably and burning with a fever. My father lay beside her, holding her over the covers. The fever had started before they left, he admitted. Not wanting to cancel the trip, he’d pressed her body to his, willing it to stop, willing his body heat to cure her.

I stood at the foot of the bed watching her teeth chatter and her body shake. Emo Boo was crouched at my mother’s side in loose-fitting pajamas, inserting acupuncture needles into the pressure points of her legs.

“We need to get her to the hospital,” I said.

Nami was standing in the doorway, arms crossed and brow furrowed, unsure of how to move forward. Seong Young came up behind her, towering over her head by more than a foot. It was remarkable that someone so large could grow from a woman so small. My mom used to say it was the influence of American food. Nami said something in Korean and he translated.

“My mom think…if we go to the hospital. Maybe. They will not let her leave.”

“The last time we waited to go to the hospital she nearly died,” I said. “I really think we need to go.”

The room was quiet for a moment and my mom let out a moan. Nami breathed a heavy sigh, then left the room to begin gathering her things. The six of us split into two cars and drove to a hospital just across the Han River. My denial was still in full force. I was convinced that all she needed was another infusion, an IV to stabilize her. I felt we could go on like this for years, just fixing her.

We hoped that my mother could recover and fly to Jeju in a week’s time. Nami had already booked our flights and reserved the rooms. But her condition continued to worsen. A week passed and she remained bedridden, plagued by horrible fever and shaking throughout the night. We canceled our trip to Jeju. A week later, we had to cancel our return tickets to Eugene.

Again I was my mother’s companion through the night. I’d arrive in the evenings around six and stay with her through the morning until my father came at noon. Then I’d take a cab, bleary-eyed, across the Hannam Bridge to Nami’s and fall into the guest bed, where I’d try to regain the sleep I’d lost overnight.

In the hospital I woke with her at all hours, her advocate. When she gasped in pain, I would ring the call button, and when the nurses never came fast enough, I’d screech and point to our room from the fluorescent hallways, babbling desperate pleas in convoluted Korean. I exiled the nurse who failed multiple times to find a vein, leaving a smattering of track marks on my mother’s arms. I crawled into the hospital bed and held her as we waited for the painkillers to kick in, whispering in the dark, “Any second, any second, just another minute and this will all go away. Gwaenchanh-a, Umma, gwaenchanh-a.”

The onslaught of her symptoms was like something out of a disaster movie. As soon as we’d gotten a handle on one, something deadlier would emerge. Her stomach bloated though she hardly ate. Edema plagued her legs and feet. Herpes completely took over her lips and the inside of her cheeks, covering her tongue in raised white blisters. The doctor gave us two different kinds of herbal mouthwash and a cream for her lips, a thick green ointment to help soothe her sores. The two of us kept up with the regimen religiously, hopeful we could remedy at least one of her ailments. Every two hours, I brought a cup for her to spit in and water to rinse, then a tissue to wipe her lips before applying the dark-green goop. She would ask if I thought the sores were getting better, opening her mouth for me to see. Her tongue looked rotten—like a sack of aging meat, as though a spider had cast it in a thick gray web.

“Absolutely,” I would say. “It’s already so much better than yesterday!”

Because she was hardly able to eat, they hooked her up to a milky bag that supplied most of the nutrients she needed to survive. When she could no longer get up to go to the bathroom, even with assistance, they inserted a catheter, and we began using a bedpan, which fell to me to empty. When she could no longer pass food, the nurses gave her enemas. They dressed her in a large diaper and when it released, liquid gushed from the top and out of the leg holes like soft silt. There was no embarrassment left, just survival, everything action and reaction.

In the morning, if my mother was still sleeping, I would slip on a pair of hospital sandals and take the elevator downstairs. Outside, I’d wander around the block in search of something to bring back to her, to remind her of where we were.

There was a Paris Baguette nearby, a Korean chain that serves French baked goods with a Korean twist. I’d return with an array of glistening pastries and colorful smoothies, hoping to spark her appetite. Soboro ppang, a soft bun with peanut crumble on top that we’d shared together on visits to Seoul. A red-bean donut, a soft sweet-potato cheesecake. Or steamed corn bought from an ajumma on the street, seated on a square of cardboard. Mom and I picked the stiff kernels off the cob one by one, meticulous as Eunmi, remembering how she used to leave behind a perfect row of clean, square, transparent membranes when she was done. I bought jjajangmyeon from a Korean-Chinese restaurant and rinsed the kimchi with water from the sink in the bathroom so the red pepper wouldn’t sting her tongue.

“What do I even have left to look forward to, Michelle?” she said, welling up as she eyed the wilted white cabbage. “I can’t even eat kimchi.”

“Your hair is really growing back,” I said, trying to change the subject. I put my hand on her head and gently ran my palm over the sparse white fuzz. “For someone who’s sick you still look very young and beautiful.”

“Do I?” she said, feigning modesty.

“It’s true,” I said. “It almost looks like…Are you wearing makeup?”

I had never realized that my mother had her eyebrows tattooed. They looked so natural it was hard to tell. I thought back to her friend Youngsoon, whose brows had been done poorly, the right one permanently quirked.

“I had it done a long time ago,” she said dismissively. She shifted in her hospital cot, pushing out her legs and shimmying her back up the pillow. “You know your dad should really be the one that’s here.”

“I like being here.”

“Yes, but he’s my husband,” she said. “Even when he’s here he doesn’t know how to take care of me at all. When I ask him to do the mouthwash he just hands it to me; he doesn’t even give me a cup.”

I leaned back on the guest bench and stared at my feet, slowly clapping my left hospital sandal back and forth against my bare heel. A couple years before this we were at an Olive Garden when she alluded to an argument they’d had, the subject of which she’d said she could never reveal. That it would ruin the way I saw my father, like a broken plate you’ve glued back together and have to keep using, but all you can see is the crack.

“Do you think he’ll get married again?”

“I think he will. Probably,” she said. She looked like she didn’t mind it, that it was something they’d discussed together before. “He’ll probably marry another Asian woman.” I cringed, particularly distressed at the thought of it being another Asian woman. It was mortifying to imagine what people might think, that he could just replace her, that he had yellow fever. It cheapened their bond. It cheapened us.

“I don’t think I could stand it,” I said. “I don’t think I could accept it. It’s disgusting.”

There was a dangerous and unspoken prospect looming, that without my mother to bond us, my father and I would drift apart. I was not essential to him in the way I knew I was to my mother, and I could see that in the aftermath, there would be a struggle to coexist. That there was a good chance we would come unmoored, that our family would dissolve entirely. I waited for my mother to scold me, to assert that he was my father, my blood. That I was selfish and spoiled for thinking that way about the man who had provided for us. Instead she rested her hand on my back, resigned to the fact that she could not help what she knew was left unsaid.

“You’ll do whatever you have to do.”

Two and a half weeks into our disastrous vacation I arrived at the hospital to find my father yelling at Seong Young and one of the nurses in the hallway, the whole hospital wing gaping at the large American man and his large American temper.

“That’s my wife!” he shouted. “Speak English!”

“What happened?” I asked.

My father was accusing Seong Young of withholding translations in an effort to spare him from the worst of the news. Seong Young was quiet and nodded his head. He held his hands behind his back as if he were about to bow and listened intently, letting my father get his anger out. The nurse looked nervous and desperate to back away. Inside, my mother was unconscious, her mouth covered by an oxygen mask hooked up to what looked like a high-tech vacuum. Nami was standing over her bed, a taut fist held to her lips. She must have known all along that this was what we were in for.

Seong Young and my father returned, our pretty young doctor filing in behind them. I was shocked by the amount of time the doctor spent with us in Korea. In Oregon, I couldn’t recall seeing a doctor for more than a minute before they rushed off to another room and left the nurses in charge. Here, our doctor seemed genuinely interested in helping us, had even held my mother’s hand when we first arrived. Though she seemed to know quite a bit of English, she was always apologizing for her inability to speak it well. She informed us that my mother had gone into septic shock. That her blood pressure was dangerously low and she would likely have to be moved to a ventilator to stay alive.

It used to be so clear to me, the difference between living and dying. My mother and I had always agreed that we’d rather end our lives than live on as vegetables. But now that we had to confront it, the shreds of physical autonomy torn more ragged every day, the divide had blurred. She was bedridden, unable to walk on her own, her bowels no longer moving. She ate through a bag dripped through her arm and now she could no longer breathe without a machine. It was getting harder every day to say that this was really living.

I watched the arc of the elevator lights illuminate from five to three as my father and I descended, skipping a nonexistent fourth floor, which is considered bad luck because the pronunciation of the number four in Korean recalls the Chinese character for death. My father and I were silent. We’d decided to go out for some fresh air before confronting the decision of how long we’d keep her intubated if that’s what it came to. It was dark out already. Yellow streetlights mobbed by late summer bugs lit the few blocks we walked before we ducked into the nearest bar. We ordered two pints of Kloud and brought them up to the roof, which was empty. We sat at a picnic table and my father reached out for me across the table, closing his large, calloused hand around mine.

“So this is really it,” he said.

He squinted at the surface of the picnic table and with his free hand probed a knot in the wood with his index finger. Then he sniffed loudly and wiped the table with his palm, as if dusting it off. He took a sip of his beer and looked back out at the city as if he was searching for its opinion.

“Wow,” he said, and let go of my hand.

A cool breeze passed and I felt a chill. I was wearing the same cotton summer dress and hospital slides I’d worn practically every day since we’d gotten here. I could hear the whir of a bike engine passing on the street below and remembered how when I was five or so my father used to take me out on his motorcycle. He’d prop me up in front between his legs, and I’d hang on to the gas cap for support. On long drives the rumble of the engine and the warmth of the gas tank below would put me to sleep, and sometimes when I’d wake up we’d already be back in our driveway. And I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.

We had gone out on a limb, traveling to Korea against the doctor’s orders. We had tried to plan something that was worth fighting for, and yet every day had wound up worse than the last. We had tried to choose living over dying and it had turned out to be a horrible mistake. We drank another round, tried to let it wash us over.

We couldn’t have been gone more than two hours, but when we returned my mother was sitting upright. Her eyes were wide and alert, like a bewildered child who has just walked into a room and interrupted a tense discussion between adults.

“Did you guys get something to eat?” she asked.

We took it as a sign. My father began to make arrangements for a medical evacuation back to Oregon. We would have to fly with a registered nurse, and once we arrived in Eugene, immediately check back in to Riverbend. I left the room to phone Peter, hoping to return with something to look forward to.

I walked down the hall and slipped out onto the fire escape, a concrete landing enclosed by tan metal bars. I sat and rested my feet on a step. Peter was on vacation with his family for the weekend in Martha’s Vineyard, where it was early morning.

“We have to get married,” I said.

Honestly, I’d never thought too much about getting married. Since I was a teenager I’d always enjoyed dating and being in love, but most of my thoughts about the future revolved around making it in a rock band. That fantasy alone kept me occupied for a good ten years. I didn’t know the names of necklines or silhouettes, species of flowers or cuts of diamonds. In no corner of my mind was there even a vague notion of how I’d like to wear my hair or what color the linens might be. What I did know for certain was that my mom had opinions enough for both of us. In fact, the only thing I’d always known was that if I ever did get married, my mother would be the one who made sure it was perfect. If she wasn’t there, I was guaranteed to spend the day wondering what she would’ve thought. If the table settings looked cheap, if the flower arrangements were middling, if my makeup was too heavy or my dress unflattering. It’d be impossible to feel beautiful without her approval. If she wasn’t there, I knew I was destined to be a joyless bride.

“If this is something you could see yourself doing in five years and we don’t just do it now, I don’t think I will be able to forgive you,” I said.

There was a pregnant pause on the other end of the line, and it occurred to me I had no idea where Martha’s Vineyard even was. At the time I thought his family was visiting the dusty groves of an actual vineyard. It was one of those novel differences between East and West Coasters that charmed me every so often, like when he referred to the coast as the shore or his indifference to the appearance of fireflies.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I repeated.

“Okay, yeah!” he said. “Let’s do it.”

I bounded down the sterile, fluorescent hallway, my chest thumping as I passed the dark, curtained-off quarters of other patients, their heart monitors blinking, green lines zigzagging up and down. I returned to my mother’s room and told her she had to get better. She had to get home to Eugene and watch her only daughter get married.

The next day I looked up wedding planners online. Pacing outside my mother’s hospital room, I explained our situation and found one who was willing to make it work in three weeks’ time. Within the hour she emailed me a checklist of things to go over.

Seong Young took me to try on wedding dresses. I sent my mother photos of the different bodices and skirts over Kakao. We decided on a four-hundred-dollar strapless dress with a simple ankle-length tulle skirt. The tailor took my measurements and two days later they delivered it to my mother’s hospital room, where I modeled it for her in person.

I knew Nami and Seong Young thought I was crazy. What if she died the day before the wedding? Or was too sick to stand up? I knew it was risky to add even more pressure to already tumultuous circumstances, and yet it felt like the perfect way to shed light on the darkest of situations. Instead of mulling over blood thinners and Fentanyl, we could discuss Chiavari chairs and macarons and dress shoes. Instead of bedsores and catheters, it’d be color schemes and updos and shrimp cocktail. Something to fight for, a celebration to look forward to.

Six days later, my mother was finally released. As we wheeled her toward the elevator our doctor stopped us in the hall to give her a parting gift. “I saw this and thought of you,” she said, taking my mother’s hand. It was a small hand-carved wooden statue of a family—a father, mother, and daughter holding one another. They were faceless, huddled close, connected as if whittled from the same piece of wood.