Though my father made most of the funeral arrangements, he left it to me to pick the cemetery, headstone, and epitaph. My mother had made it clear she wanted to be cremated, but beyond that, she never mentioned anything about her service, and of course we’d never dared to ask. I didn’t believe in an afterlife, but I couldn’t help but want to do right by her, her spirit very much alive in the reproaches I imagined of the outfit I’d dressed her in, of the headstone I’d chosen. I picked what I thought to be the most tasteful, a bronze headstone with ivy embossed along the edges. On it we arranged to record her name, birth and death days, and lovely mother, wife, and best friend.

Lovely was an adjective my mother adored. She’d told me once if pressed to describe me in a single word, lovely would be the one she’d choose. She felt it encompassed an ideal beauty and ardor. It felt a fitting epitaph. To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.

I chose a cemetery between our house and town, halfway down the hill, enclosed by a long brick wall with an iron gate. My father confessed to a minor fear of burial, convinced the insects would exact karmic retribution for his years spent as an exterminator, but it was important to me that her ashes be buried in the ground. I wanted to be able to bring flowers and have somewhere to put them. I wanted a place where I could fall against the earth, collapse on the ground, and in the various seasons weep in the grass and dirt, not stand upright before display shelves as if I were visiting a bank or a library.

My father bought two plots side by side. He met with a priest to plan a Christian service, which I didn’t bother contesting though it felt somewhat disingenuous. I knew it was the easiest thing and would make other people happy, which is ultimately what she would have wanted.

At the blue wraparound desk in my childhood bedroom, where I wrote all my papers in high school, where just two weeks before I’d written my wedding vows, I struggled to write her eulogy, to find the words to encompass her in a single page.

It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well. The words were unwieldy, engorged with pretension. I wanted to uncover something special about her that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

The day before the funeral, my father picked up Nami and Seong Young at the airport. As they entered the house, Nami moved like a small, turbulent bird, her gestures unstable and chaotic. She released a guttural and wild wail, a sound I had come to know quite well.

I’d never seen her this way. Nami Emo was always so extraordinarily composed. The interior of our house, so thoroughly my mother’s and so haunted by her absence, threw her into hysterics. I tried to imagine how she must feel, to be the eldest and have watched her two baby sisters die within a few years of each other of the same disease. It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to. My aunt was one of us. She knew this kind of pain all too well.

Seong Young held his mother up like a pillar. He was stoic, despite the fact that he’d spent a year in this house when he came to the United States to study English. He would have his own grief to confront, but he swallowed it for now. When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.

I dressed for the funeral in a black dress my mother had bought me on one of the shopping trips we’d taken to “update my look” and paired it with a black blazer to cover the tattoos she hated. I put on the silver necklace she gave me after Eunmi died and brought the matching one downstairs.

“This…Eunmi’s…Mom me give…” I tried my best to explain in Korean.

In desperation I looked to Seong Young for help.

“My mom bought this for me after Eunmi died so we could have matching ones. But now that she’s gone, I want her to have the other one.”

Seong Young translated and Nami took the necklace and closed her fingers over it. She lowered her eyes with a wince and held it over her heart.

“Oh, Michelle-ah,” she said, putting it on. “Thank you.”

The funeral was weird, mostly because I hadn’t been to church in over ten years and I didn’t realize just how bizarre religious practice can appear to an atheist. An old woman clad in an elaborate robe appeared with a giant rod terminating in a large cross, which she sort of lifted up and down around the pastor as he moved through the liturgy. Then came the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, which sounded more like a Charlie Brown VHS special than an appropriate reading for a funeral.

I looked over at Nami, whose hands were clasped together. She wept, solemnly nodding along to the words she could not understand but punctually joining in for every “amen.” Christianity was a language she understood. Religion was a comfort and in that moment I was grateful it was there for her.

They called on me to read her eulogy. Peter was on standby in case I broke down. My voice shook and I was nervous, but I read through what I had written. It almost frightened me, that I was able to get through the whole thing without collapsing in tears. I hadn’t cried much during the funeral at all.

There was a small reception. Cups of pretzels and trail mix had been laid out by someone, and I felt some remorse that I hadn’t been more involved in the planning. I felt awkward, like my mother had at Eunmi’s funeral, unsure of how to behave. The pressure to perform and cater to others felt like holding in a sneeze.

When it was over I collected all the bouquets, not wanting to leave a single flower behind. I had a selfish, desperate desire for her gravesite to be so packed with blossoms and bulbs that you could see them from the road. I wanted to advertise how deeply loved my mother had been. I wanted every passerby to question if they had a love like that.

We took her remains to the gravesite. The procession was private, just two cars full of the family staying with us. Her plot was under a tree nestled high on the cemetery’s sloping hill. I looked down at the headstone.

“Dad, it says ‘loving…’ ” I whispered.

“That’s bullshit,” he said.

After the funeral, I invited Corey and Nicole along for dinner with my family at a French restaurant that my father complained was overpriced. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu. A perfect little circle of rare beef tenderloin, glistening with a bone marrow jus, sitting atop a small pool of sunchoke puree. I severed slice after slice of the savory meat, devouring it, piling in spoonfuls of the buttery mash. It felt like I hadn’t eaten in years.

As my father paid the bill, I sat quietly, full of food and wine, and finally let all my emotions take me. I had held in so much. I had starved myself, not just of food, but of a reckoning. I had tried to be stoic. I had tried to conceal my tears from my family and at last they were all funneling out. I could feel the entire restaurant staring as I sobbed and shook, but I didn’t care. It felt so good to release it.

We stood to make our way to the car and I felt my legs give out beneath me. I let myself fall into the arms of my two best friends as they rushed to support my weight. I cried all the way home, big, comically fat tears, and then I cried hot, small ones alone in my bedroom until I fell asleep.

I woke up in the early morning feeling like my face had absorbed half a swimming pool. My eyes were puffy and swollen. I was exhausted but restless. I thought of Nami and Seong Young sleeping in the guest room two doors over. I envied the two of them together, bound to each other, while my father and I struggled to connect. I wanted to do something for them, to make them feel comfortable as my mother would have. I was the woman of the house now.

I racked my brain for something I could make them for breakfast and landed on doenjang jjigae, the ultimate Korean comfort food. My mother often served it alongside our Korean meals, a rich, hearty stew filled with vegetables and tofu. I had never made the dish myself, but I knew its basic components and what it should taste like. Still in bed, I turned onto my side and googled how to make Korean fermented soybean soup.

The first link led me to a website run by a woman named Maangchi. There was a YouTube player at the top of the page and a recipe on the bottom. The video was shaky and pixelated. A Korean woman who appeared to be about my mother’s age stood over the sink of a dimly lit kitchen. She wore a green tank top with a sequin decal around the collar and had her hair up in a loose ponytail, tucked back into a decorative orange-and-yellow handkerchief revealing long, dangly earrings. “It’s Koreans’ everyday house food. We eat it with other side dishes and rice,” she addressed the camera. Her accent was comforting; her words were reassuring. I’d had the right instinct.

I scanned the ingredient list. One medium potato, one cup of chopped zucchini, five cloves of garlic, one green chile pepper, seven dried anchovies with the heads and intestines removed, two and a half cups of water, one stalk of green onion, tofu, five tablespoons of fermented soybean paste, four large shrimp. Nothing too intimidating.

I washed up and went to the laundry room to look inside my mother’s kimchi fridge, an appliance specifically designed to keep fermented foods at the ideal temperature. Supposedly, it mimicked the soil of the Korean winter, where women would bury their earthenware jars, storing their kimchi for the spring. Inside there was already a large container of soybean paste. I could get the other ingredients at Sunrise Market.

I slipped on a pair of my mother’s sandals and a light jacket and drove into town. The market was opening just as I arrived. I bought the vegetables I needed and a block of firm tofu. I decided to skip the seafood and picked up some marinated short rib instead, remembering that my mother used beef for her recipe.

I drove home and cooked the rice in my mother’s Cuckoo. I peeled a potato and chopped it along with a zucchini and onion, minced some garlic and cut the marinated short rib into bite-sized pieces, then rooted around my mother’s cabinets to find her ttukbaegi.

Over medium heat, I put the ttukbaegi straight onto the burner, heated some oil, and tossed in the vegetables and meat. I added a spoonful of doenjang paste and gochugaru, then poured water on top. Every few minutes I checked the broth, adding more paste and sesame oil until it tasted as close as I could get to the memory of my mother’s stew. Once I was satisfied, I added squares of tofu, heating them through for a minute before finishing it off with finely sliced green onion. I placed little banchan I found in the kimchi fridge on small ceramic plates—sliced baechu kimchi, braised black soybeans, and crisp soybean sprouts marinated with sesame oil, garlic, and scallions. I set the table with spoons and chopsticks, and opened small packages of seaweed, channeling the movements of my mother as I zipped around the kitchen where I had watched her prepare so many of my favorite dishes.

Seong Young and Nami woke at ten, and I scooped up two bowls of fluffy white rice just as they came down the stairs. I ushered them over to the table and placed the jjigae on a hot plate before them.

“You made this one?” Nami said in disbelief.

“I’m not sure if it’s any good,” I said.

I took a seat beside them at the table and watched them spoon the broth over their rice, breaking up the tofu with the edges of their spoons, steam wisping from their mouths. For a moment I felt useful, happy that after all the years the two of them had looked after me, I could do this one small thing for them.

That evening my father took Seong Young and Nami back to the airport. Alone in the kitchen, I heard a knock at the front door, but by the time I opened it there was no one there. Left behind on the mat was a small paper shopping bag. Inside, wrapped carefully in tissue, was a jade-colored ceramic teapot, two cranes in flight painted on the side. I recognized it vaguely, a gift someone had given my mother that sat unused on the top shelf of the glassware cabinet. There was also a letter, written in English and printed on two sheets of paper. I put the teapot back in the bag and brought it inside, sat down at the kitchen island, and read.

To my lovely friend and student, Chongmi.

I still hear your laugh surround me when I am sitting and painting in my studio. One day, you walked into my studio for the first day of art class wearing a stylish dress and fancy sunglasses. Then, I thought to myself, Oh, that rich lady is going to stay in the class for about two months at best. However, you surprised me and you never missed a class for a year. I could see that not only were you so engaged in painting, you enjoyed it.

You, two ladies, and I had such a great and joyful time when we had a class. It was more like a Middle Age club than an art class. We had many things in common because we were all in the same age group. We drank coffee with a sweet loaf of bread that you always brought to class. We laughed at so many funny stories that we all told.

This went on for a year until you called absent to class. You said it was just a digestion problem, not a big deal. I said, “Just take it easy, sister.”

I still cannot believe that that was the last time you would hold a brush to paint. I prayed for you, keeping your Korean teapot which you had started drawing just before you got sick.

I had started to believe in a miracle. I could have returned the teapot to you right after you stopped coming to class, but I thought if I held on to it you would get better and be the happy lady you had always been.

The time came where I could not hold on to it anymore. I know that you are no longer suffering from pain, and are at peace in heaven. You are walking to my studio with a bright and cheerful laugh in my imagination when I am in there. But I have to see you are no longer sitting and painting in your favorite spot.

Chongmi, you are a beautiful, kind, and favorable lady and I love you so much.

From your friend Yunie.

November 2014.

Why hadn’t she waited for me to answer the door? Clearly, my mother’s art teacher knew she had passed, yet she kept this letter addressed to her. And if it was for my mother, I wondered, why hadn’t she written it in Korean? Had she translated it specifically for me? There was a part of me that felt, or maybe hoped, that after my mother died, I had absorbed her in some way, that she was a part of me now. I wondered if her art teacher felt this way, too, that I was the closest she could get to being heard.

I riffled through the bag where my mom kept her art supplies, a canvas tote with a black handle and a pattern of little Eiffel Towers. I thumbed through her sketch pads. In the smaller one were her early drawings. On the second page was the pencil sketch of Julia. The one where she looked like a tubular sausage with a face. I remembered her texting me a photo of it when she first started the classes, how proud of her I’d been, despite the rudimentary likeness, that she was trying something new.

I noted her progress from page to page. The smaller book was filled with pencil drawings of various objects from around the house, artifacts from her world. A pinecone plucked outside on the acreage. A decorative, miniature wooden clog Eunmi sent as a souvenir from her time in the Netherlands working for KLM. One of the short-stemmed glasses with the textured daisy motif from which she drank her white wine. Porcelain ballerinas, one in fifth position, one in third, my accidental maiming left unrendered. One of her Mary Engelbreit teapots that even without color I recognized as the first in her collection, its yellow base and purple paisley lid conjured instantly from the design I knew so well in pencil. On the last pages were three perfectly shaded eggs. I remembered a conversation we had on the phone about them, years before this whole nightmare started, when her main concern had been conquering their curvature.

In the larger sketchbook, the artwork became more impressive as my mother began to work with watercolors. Her use of color was vibrant and beautiful. She’d always been good at making things beautiful. Her subject matter progressed from household objects to more traditional themes like flowers and fruit. She began to sign and date her work, experimenting with different signatures as if each one were its own nom de plume. On a series of three charcoal drawings of bread and lemons done in May and June of 2013, she signed just her first name, Chongmi. In August 2013, on a painting of three green pears scattered flat beside a vase of coral chrysanthemums, she shortened it to Chong. In February 2014, on a pencil drawing of a bunch of bananas, she signed her name in Korean, but added a Z to the end. In March 2014, just two months before she discovered the cancer, on a watercolor of a whole green bell pepper and its halved orange cousin, she signed Chong Z in blue ballpoint pen.

Though I knew my mother had been taking art classes for the past year and I had even seen photos of a few sketches via text, I’d never seen the bulk of her work. The various signatures revealed something so endearingly dilettante. Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.

It was comforting to hold her work in my hands, to envision my mother prior to pain and suffering, relaxing with a paintbrush in hand, surrounded by close friends. I wondered if making art had been therapeutic for her, helped her navigate the existential dread that came with Eunmi’s death. I wondered if the late bloom of her creative interests had shed light on my own artistic impulses. If my own creativity had come from her in the first place. If in another life, if circumstances had been different, she might have been an artist, too.

“Isn’t it nice how we actually enjoy talking to each other now?” I said to her once on a trip home from college, after the bulk of the damage done in my teenage years had been allayed.

“It is,” she said. “You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.”

I’ve just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.