Two days after Kye left, my mother shot upright in pain of a new and terrible order. She hadn’t sat up in days, but whatever was breaking through now was something entirely different. Something in her bloated belly must have grown and shifted, pushed up against her organs, and induced a feeling so excruciating it burst through the foamy ceiling of narcotics like a bullet. Her eyes were wide with terror but focused far off, like she couldn’t see us. She held her stomach and cried out, “AH PEO! AH PEO!”

Pain.

My father and I frantically administered liquid hydrocodone under her tongue. Minutes felt like hours as we held her, reassuring her over and over that it would pass. At last she settled into a deep sleep. Sandwiching her between us, I filled with insurmountable sadness. The doctor had lied to us. He’d told us she wouldn’t feel any pain; he’d told us it was his job to make sure of it. He looked into her eyes and made a promise, and he fucking broke it. My mother’s last words were pain.

We were so terrified of it happening again, we resolved to snow her under completely. Every hour or so we’d slip the plastic dropper between her lips and dispense what seemed like enough opioids to take down a horse. Hospice nurses came twice a day to check in and deliver more medication as needed. They told us we were doing the right thing and left us with pamphlets that listed numbers to call when it happened and what to expect next. There wasn’t much for us to do except turn her occasionally, prop her body up with pillows every hour or so to avoid bedsores, pat her lips with a sponge so they wouldn’t chap. That was all we had left to offer.

Days passed and my mother never moved. With no control over her body, she kept wetting the bed. Twice a day my father and I would have to change the sheets around her, pulling off her pajama pants and underwear. We thought about moving her to the hospice bed but we just couldn’t.

With my mother incapacitated, my father and I found ourselves suddenly compelled to start clearing out the house. We opened drawers we’d never opened, frantically emptying them into black garbage bags. It was as if we were trying to get ahead of the inevitable, as if we knew the process would gain weight and bulk once she was technically dead.

The house was quiet aside from her breathing, a horrible sucking like the last sputtering of a coffeepot. Sometimes it stopped completely and my father and I would go silent for four full seconds, wondering if this was it. Then she would gasp again. The pamphlet hospice left told us the intervals would lengthen over time until eventually her breathing stopped completely.

We were waiting for her to die. The last days excruciatingly drawn out. All this time I had feared a sudden death, but now I wondered how it was even possible that my mother’s heart was still beating. It’d been days since she’d eaten or taken water. It destroyed me to think that she could just be starving to death.

My father and I spent most of the time lying in silence with her body between us, watching her chest heave and struggle for breath, counting the seconds between respirations.

“Sometimes I think about holding her nose,” he said.

Between sobs he lowered his face to her chest. It was something that should have been shocking to hear, but wasn’t. I didn’t blame him. We hadn’t left the house in days, so afraid of what we might miss. I wondered how he could even sleep at night.

“I know you wish it was me. I wish it was me too.”

I put my hand on his back. “No,” I said softly, though in my ugliest heart I did.

It was supposed to be him. We had never planned for this circumstance, where she died before he did. My mother and I had even discussed it, whether she’d move to Korea or remarry, whether we’d live together. But I had never spoken with my father about what we would do if she died first because it had seemed so out of the realm of possibility. He was the former addict who shared needles in New Hope at the height of the AIDS crisis, who smoked a pack a day since he was nine, who practically bathed in banned pesticides for years as an exterminator, who drank two bottles of wine every night and drove drunk and had high cholesterol. Not my mother, who could do splits and still got carded at the liquor store.

My mother would have known what to do, and when it was all over, we’d reemerge entwined with each other, closer than ever. But my father was unabashedly panicked, openly scared in a way I wished he would keep from me. He was desperate to escape this excruciating ache by any means, and liable to leave me behind.

When he left the house to begin making funeral arrangements, I opted to stay home. I was hoping for last words, something else. Hospice told us it could happen. That the dying can hear us. That there was a possibility she could shoot back into consciousness for one last moment, look me in the eyes, and say something conclusive, a parting word. I needed to be there in case it happened.

“Umma, are you there?” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

Tears began dribbling down my face and onto her pajamas.

“Umma, please wake up,” I yelled, as if trying to wake her. “I’m not ready. Please, Umma. I’m not ready. Umma! Umma!”

I screamed to her in her language, in my mother tongue. My first word. Hoping she’d hear her little girl calling, and like the quintessential mother who’s suddenly filled with enough otherworldly strength to lift the car and save her trapped child, she’d come back for me. She’d wake for just a moment. Open her eyes and tell me goodbye. Impart something, anything, to help me move forward, to let me know it’d all work out. Above all, I wanted so desperately for her last words not to be pain. Anything, anything at all but that.

Umma! Umma!

The same words my mother repeated when her mother died. That Korean sob, guttural and deep and primal. The same sound I’d heard in Korean movies and soap operas, the sound my mother made crying for her mother and sister. A pained vibrato that breaks apart into staccato quarter notes, descending as if it were falling off a series of small ledges.

But her eyes did not open. She didn’t move at all. She just continued to breathe, respiration lagging by the hour, the sounds of her inhalations drifting further and further apart.

Peter arrived later that week. I picked him up from the airport and took him to a small sushi place for dinner. The two of us shared a bottle of sake and I broke down again in the restaurant, unable to eat. We returned home at nine and stood in the doorway of my parents’ room, where my father lay beside her.

“Mom, Peter is here,” I said, for some reason. “I’m going to sleep upstairs. I love you.”

We fell asleep in my childhood bed. We still hadn’t had sex since we got married and as I drifted off, I wondered how I ever could. I couldn’t fathom joy or pleasure or losing myself in a moment ever again. Maybe because it felt wrong, like a betrayal. If I really loved her, I had no right to feel those things again.

I woke to my father’s voice calling up to me from the bottom of the stairs.

“Michelle, it happened,” he whimpered. “She’s gone.”

I went downstairs and into the room, my heart racing. She looked the same as she had the past few days, supine and still. My father lay on his side of the bed, his back to the door, facing toward her. I walked around and lay down on the other side of her. It was five in the morning and I could hear birds beginning to chirp from the woods outside, the day threatening to begin.

“Let’s stay here for thirty minutes before we call anyone,” he said.

My mother’s body already felt cold and stiff and I wondered how long she had been like this, when my father had noticed. Had he slept at all? Had there been a sound? He was crying now, into her soft gray shirt, shaking the mattress. I could sense Peter lingering in the hall, unsure of what to do with himself.

“You can come in,” I said.

Peter squeezed in beside me on the edge of the bed; we were all quiet. I felt bad for him. I’d never seen a dead body before and I wondered if this was his first too. I thought of how cyclical it was to be sandwiched between my new husband and my deceased mother. I imagined our four bodies in aerial view. On the right side, two newlyweds beginning their first chapter, on the left, a widower and a corpse, closing the book on over thirty years of marriage. In a way it already felt like my vantage. Like I was observing all of this and not even really there at all. I wondered how long it was appropriate to lie there, what I was meant to discover in this time. Her body hadn’t really been hers for a while now, but the thought of removing it from the house was terrifying.

“Okay,” I said eventually, to no one in particular. The three of us sat up slowly and Peter left the room.

“Wait,” my father said to me, and I paused beside him as he took my mother’s left hand in his and slowly worked off her wedding ring. “Here.”

His hand trembled as he pushed it onto my right ring finger. I had forgotten all about this. It felt wrong to remove it from her, though obviously illogical to bury her with it. I held my hand out and examined it. The band was silver and filled with diamond side stones; a jeweled cushion cupped the main diamond set atop. She had picked it herself probably fifteen years into their marriage, to replace the faded gold band and its tiny dot of a diamond that he’d bought her when they were our age.

I was still getting used to the ring on my left hand, not so much to what it symbolized as to its physical occupancy, to the sensation of it. Bound around my finger, it was like adjusting to a brace or some sophisticated article I hadn’t quite grown into. With my mother’s ring on my right hand I felt like a five-year-old in a full face of makeup. I twisted it back and forth, trying to get comfortable, its facets glistened in the light of breaking dawn, oversized and out of place on my undiscerning finger. It felt heavy. A weight emblematic of loss, a tug I’d notice every time I went to lift my hand.

Not wanting to see her taken from the house in pajamas, my father asked me to choose an outfit for her to be cremated in. Alone in her closet I struggled against the hangers, two racks on either side of a small walk-in, encumbered by the weight of my mother’s many cardigans and vests, chinos and trousers, trenches, bombers, peacoats, and utility jackets. I picked a simple black skirt with lace detail that fell at the knee, and black leggings to cover legs that had gotten even scrawnier and that I knew she’d want to conceal, though from whom was no real matter. A soft gray knit beanie to cover her head, a loose blouse, and a fitted black blazer.

Rigor mortis made it extremely difficult to dress her. Her arms were so stiff I was afraid of breaking them as I pushed them through the sleeves. Her body was heavy and when I set down her weight, her head plopped onto the pillow and her eyes bounced open. I let out a wail so full of anguish, neither Peter nor my father dared to enter. I kept at it, pushing at her dead limbs, my own body collapsing beside her every other moment to writhe and cry and scream into the mattress. Overwhelmed by wretchedness, I had to pause to let it settle. I was not prepared for this. No one had prepared me for this. Why must I feel it? Why must I have this memory? They were just going to put her in a bag, like trash to be removed. They were just going to burn her.

When it was over the three of us waited together at the kitchen table. Three men arrived, covered head to toe in paper scrubs. I tried not to look when they took her from the room but caught a glimpse as they wheeled her out on a gurney, zipped into a black body bag. A half second that still haunts me.

“Why don’t you two go out for a little while,” my father said.

Where do you go after you witness death, I wondered. Peter backed my mother’s car out of the garage and for some reason I directed him to Detering Orchards, a farm on the other side of town where my dad used to take me every October when I was a kid. There were orchards, fields of different varietals. My father and I would spend the day picking apples and when we were finished, we’d return to the marketplace to weigh them and pick three pumpkins to bring home from the patch. One year, when I was seven or so, my dad threw a rotten tomato at me and every year thereafter we’d have a tomato fight at the end.

It was October 18th and that’s where I wanted to go. I wonder in retrospect if I was drawn there because it was a place to which my mother was specifically not attached. It was one of the rare places that belonged to my father and me, where if the few trees bore fruit we’d pick an Asian pear for her before heading back. Maybe I wanted to go there because it was a place where I could pretend that my mother was still alive, waiting for me at home.

It was busy when we pulled into the parking lot. Full of families tugging their children along in red wagons while the kids sucked at plastic straws filled with local flavored honey and drank from Dixie cups of cider. The weather was nice and sunny, the chill of fall still at bay. It didn’t feel like a day on which someone had died.

I squinted when the light hit my face. It felt like I was on drugs. None of these people could know what had just happened, but still I wondered if they could see it on my face. When I realized they clearly couldn’t, it somehow also felt wrong. It felt wrong to talk to anyone, to smile or laugh or eat again knowing that she was dead.

We walked out between stacks of hay bales. Near the front entrance there were Halloween-themed cutouts for photographs and a few lawn games. Further down there was a pen with goats and a little feeder where you could pay a quarter to let the animals eat from your palm. I slipped in some change and held out my hand to collect a small mound of pellets. Peter followed me over to the fence and stood behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders. Two goats rushed over as I extended my arm over the fence. I felt their lips nibbling up the feed, their wet tongues lapping against my mother’s wedding band, their gigantic slanted pupils staring out in multiple directions.