We had come to Vietnam in search of healing, to emerge closer to each other in our grief, but we returned just as damaged and separate as ever. After a twenty-hour flight, we got back to the house at eight, and I fell straight to sleep, exhausted from travel and jet lag. Around midnight I woke up to a phone call from my father.

“I got in an accident,” he said. He sounded calm. “I’m about half a mile from home. I need you to come get me. Michelle, bring mouthwash.”

Panicked, I kept interrupting him with questions, to which he just responded firmly with my name until he hung up. I pulled a coat over my pajamas, searched frantically for my mother’s car keys, grabbed a bottle of Listerine from the bathroom cabinet, and started the drive.

By the time I got there, an ambulance had already arrived. From the look of it I was certain my father was dead. The car had rolled and landed on its side between two telephone poles. All the windows were shattered.

I parked my mother’s car behind the wreckage and ran toward the scene only to discover him sitting on the edge of the ambulance, breathing in and out as the paramedics instructed. His shirt was off and a large contusion was already forming along his collarbone. Small cuts were scattered over his arms and chest like they’d been struck multiple times with a cheese grater. Police officers crowded around us, everyone just as stunned as I was that he’d survived. It was impossible to pass off the mouthwash inconspicuously.

“I was going to check in on my office,” he said. “I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.”

My father’s office was next to the Highlands, his favorite bar. “They want me to go to the hospital,” he said. “But I don’t think I need to.”

“You’re going,” I said.

“Michelle, I’m really all right.”

“Look at your fucking car,” I said, stabbing a finger toward the wreckage. “When I pulled up I figured I was an orphan! We are going.”

I followed behind the ambulance to Riverbend, the same hospital where my mother had stayed when the first chemo knocked her off her feet, the same one we returned to after our trip to Korea. Parts of it reminded me of The Shining. There was a wooden portico over the front entrance and a stone fireplace in the lobby that gave off the feeling of a haunted lodge. The long width of the building with its yellow light shining out in the night—it was a difficult image to confront again. By the time I found parking and made my way up to the room, there were already two police officers questioning my father.

“Why are you slurring your words?”

“I’m not slawring my…” My father paused. “Well now I am because I’m thinking about it,” he said with a laugh. The mouthwash was burning a hole in my coat pocket.

“Please,” I said. “My mom just died.”

I wasn’t sure if I was crying out of fear that my father would get a DUI and I’d be stuck in Eugene as his personal chauffeur, or if I was simply overwhelmed by the feeling that fate was out to destroy us.

“I’m just going to go ahead and say you fell asleep at the wheel,” the cop said, eyeing my father suspiciously. I felt my dad put a hand on my back to really sell the scene.

We were discharged within a couple of hours and I drove the two of us home. I refused to speak to him. Now that I knew he was okay, fear for his safety subsided and gave way to anger, pulsing through me.

“I’m telling you, I just fell asleep,” he repeated.

It was a miracle he hadn’t broken any bones, but he was still in a tremendous amount of pain. He was taking prescription drugs, many of them the same ones my mother had taken. They made him even more depressed. He slept most of the day. For three days my father hardly left his room. Part of me wondered if he had run himself off the road on purpose, which only made me more upset. I made little effort to check in on him. I wanted to be selfish. I didn’t want to take care of anyone anymore.

Instead, I began to cook. Mostly the kind of food you could crawl into and that required sleeping off. The kind you’d order on death row. I made chicken pot pie from scratch, rolling out buttery, homemade dough, filling it to the brim with thick, rich stock and roasted chicken, peas, and carrots, blanketing it in its flaky top crust. I barbecued steaks and served them with smooth, creamy mashed potatoes or gratin dauphinois or baked potatoes with half-inch pats of butter and heaping scoops of sour cream. I baked giant lasagnas, smothering them with homemade Bolognese and fistfuls of shredded mozzarella.

For Thanksgiving, I spent weeks researching and collecting recipes online. I stuffed and roasted a ten-pound bird from Costco and made cranberry blizzard—ice cream with Cool Whip and cranberry jelly—which Aunt Margo had taught my mother to make. I served sweet potatoes with marshmallows and gravy made from scratch.

Another night I bought lobsters, taking time to observe them in the supermarket tank, sussing out the liveliest of the bunch. I instructed the fishmonger to lift them with his plastic rake and tickle their tails like my father taught me, picking the ones that flipped violently and with gusto. I boiled them in a large pot and set out the same small bowls my mother would for the melted butter. When they were cooked through, my father made two hacks in the center of their claws and large incisions down their backs.

When we ate lobster, my mother used to boil one for each of us and content herself with a side of corn or a baked potato or a small bowl of rice with banchan and a can of saury, an oily fish she braised in soy sauce. But if we were lucky enough to find some, she’d eat the roe, giddily scooping the plump orange eggs onto her plate.

We sat down to eat and twisted the tails to separate them from their bodies. We flipped them over and cracked the shells in half.

“No eggs,” he said with a sigh as he continued disembodying the rest of the carcass, sucking the gray goop from inside.

“Me neither,” I said, splitting a claw with a nutcracker.

By Christmas Peter’s classes were finally finished and he moved in with us. The two of us picked out a Christmas tree from the nursery down the road. Without my mother it felt like we were playing house. Peter took my father’s role, lying beneath the tree, rotating the screws on the stand as I tried to see it through my mother’s eyes and stop him where it looked the fullest. My mother kept our Christmas decorations upstairs in a hallway closet, padded in newspaper and divided into three matching hat boxes. The lights were wrapped around old copies of Time magazine that had been rolled into cylinders.

This closet was just one of the many depots my mother counted on to house what had become, over the course of her lifetime in Eugene, an unfathomable quantity of high-quality junk. A decorative wooden birdcage, bowls full of colorful glass cylinders and bulbs, a collection of candles still wrapped in cellophane. Every alcove and cubby was filled to the brim with QVC, dozens of unused eye creams and serums, chopstick holders and napkin rings.

Hadn’t Eunmi’s death taught her anything? I wondered. Why had she held on to the warranties for every appliance in the house? Routine car maintenance receipts from more than twenty years ago?

In the recess of the hallway closet, I was confronted by the teeming reliquary of my childhood souvenirs. Every single report card I ever received was stored away in a manila envelope. She saved the poster board from my third-grade science fair. There were diaries she forced me to keep when I was learning to write. “Today mommy and I went to the park to feed birds.”

I was just beginning to resent her for the hoarding she’d left me to deal with when I found them: two pairs of baby shoes. They were perfectly preserved, one a pair of sandals made of three pinched white leather ribbons that clasped together at the ankle, one a pair of pink canvas slip-on sneakers with a colorful plaid interior. They were so small I could fit them in the palm of my hand. I held one of the sandals and started to cry. I thought of the foresight a mother must have to preserve this kind of thing, the shoes of her baby, for her baby’s baby someday. A baby she’d never get to meet.

My mother kept a great many things for my future child. I found it strangely therapeutic to organize them. I spent at least a week sorting my Playmobil collection into complete sets. In my father’s largely unused office, I emptied out the mismatched kits and sorted them into piles. I counted out eight teal teacups the size of corn kernels and reunited them with the other elements of the hot dog stand. I found two rings of fire and put them back into the circus. I spread out the articles of the Victorian mansion on the beige carpet and ran my hands over the tiny pieces of plastic, searching for the miniature blue cap that belonged to the blond boy who lived there with the brown-bobbed girl in the pink shirt and white pants.

My mother would have killed me if she saw the things I was getting rid of. School essays and old insurance cards, VHS tapes of my cameo on a children’s show in Korea and the cartoons my aunt dubbed. I sold the Beanie Babies we had been duped into buying, the Princess Diana bear still in its plastic case and tag protector. Samantha, the American Girl doll with long brown hair I had begged for, Craigslisted along with the clothes she came with and the extra ones my mother commissioned at a bargain. It was something like being possessed, the rampant disposal akin to a house fire. The taming of this mountain of chattel into a reasonable collection of possessions took on the proportions of penal labor, its completion looming like a deserved exit, a sentence’s end.

All these objects seemed orphaned by her loss, or just devolved into objects, matter, impedimenta. What once had a purpose transformed into a blockade. The bowls once reserved for their own specific meals were now just dishes to be sorted, obstacles in my path to leave. The candleholder I used to pretend was a magical urn as a child, a key plot point in my imaginary narratives, now just another thing to throw away.

I filled a roll of contractor bags with her clothing, staging it all upstairs in piles, so my father wouldn’t have to confront the weeklong process. One for donations, one for things I might keep, one for things I knew I wanted. With her clothing spread out on the floor, it looked as if multiple versions of her had deflated and disappeared.

I tried on all her coats, beautiful leather jackets, all heartbreakingly an inch too big in the shoulders. I kept the shoes that suited me, though I promptly disposed of her platform sneakers. I lined her handbags up on the table. Soft orange leather, shiny red snakeskin, small precious clutches that hardly had room for a cell phone. A perfect circle of soft black fur with a thin silver clasp and a black satin interior. All of them looked pristine, like they’d never been used. There was one high-quality fake Chanel purse with the classic black quilting and one real one, still in the box.

I invited Nicole and Corey to look over the rest. I brought them into the room and encouraged them to try on a few of her things and take whatever they wanted. It was awkward at first, but after much insisting they finally gave in. Afterward I invited a few of my mother’s friends to do the same, then divided the remainder into carloads and made trips to donation centers in town.

I could feel my heart hardening—crusting over, growing a husk, a callus. I deleted the photographs from the hospital of my mother and me in her bed wearing matching pajamas. I deleted the photo she sent me the day she got her hair cut like Mia Farrow, shyly posing as if the hardest part was over. As I organized the cupboards by the kitchen phone, consolidating loose batteries, tossing old photographs of blurry landscapes, setting aside old undeveloped rolls of film, I came across the green spiral notebook where I had logged all her medications and calorie counts. Those desperate sums, that hopeful inventory, recording every coaxed sip and peck in some sad effort to keep pushing through. I ripped the pages and pulled the metal spiral apart, screaming as I shredded my stupid, useless calculations into innumerable pieces.

Perhaps I was haunted by the destruction of so many entries of jatjuk but later I found myself with an inexplicable craving for the porridge. The meal Kye most often prepared for my mother, one of the few things she’d been able to stomach.

I googled to see if Maangchi, whose recipe I’d followed for soybean stew, had one for pine nut porridge. I was doubtful, since it was a far less popular dish than doenjang jjigae, but sure enough, there it was.

The description read: “I can say that pine nut porridge is the queen of all the porridges!…It looks soupy, but I recommend spooning it instead of drinking it, because I want you to enjoy the aftertaste. 1 spoon after, pause! And close your eyes just as I did in the video, to savor the taste. oh yummy oh yummy, then start another spoon! lol.”

Her writing reminded me of my mother’s texts, down to the way she would micromanage every eating experience.

I propped my laptop up on the kitchen counter and started the video. Maangchi was wearing a brown three-quarter-sleeve shirt with a lace decal on the collar. Her black hair was neat and straight, falling below her shoulders. She stood before her cutting board next to a blender. The video was more recent than the last one and the production quality had improved. Her kitchen was different, more modern and brightly lit.

“Hi, everybody!” she chirped. “Today we are going to learn how to make jatjuk!”

The recipe was simple—pine nuts, rice, salt, and water, all ingredients we already had on hand. Per Maangchi’s instructions, I soaked a third of a cup of rice and set it aside for two hours. I measured out two tablespoons of pine nuts and began removing the tips, then tossed the soft, picked kernels into the blender. When the rice was finished soaking, I rinsed it under the faucet and added it to the pine nuts with two cups of water. I closed the lid and ran the blender on high, then emptied the liquid into a small pot on the stove.

“You don’t need many ingredients, but as you can see it takes time. That’s why jatjuk is very precious. Like, for example, one of your family members is sick, nothing much you can do. When we visit the hospital we usually make this jatjuk because patients can’t eat like normal food. Pine nuts has protein and good fat for body so this is perfect food for patients who are recovering from their illness,” Maangchi explained.

The mixture was a beautiful milky-white color. On medium heat I stirred it with a wooden spoon. At first, impatient for it to thicken, I was afraid I’d used too much water. Then, as its consistency turned from skim milk to peanut butter, I was afraid I hadn’t added enough. I lowered the heat and continued to stir, hoping it would thin as Maangchi’s had. When the pot began to sizzle, I took it off the heat and added salt, then poured it into a small bowl.

I cut chonggak kimchi into small disks and ladled some of the brine over the radish pieces. The soup was creamy and nutty, and felt soft and soothing as I swallowed. I ate a few more spoonfuls before crunching into some kimchi to break up the rich flavor with something spicy and tart. That wasn’t so hard, I thought to myself, happy to have conquered the dish Kye had mystified.

This was all I wanted, I realized, after so many days of decadent filets and pricey crustaceans, potatoes slathered in the many glorious permutations that ratios of butter, cheese, and cream can take. This plain porridge was the first dish to make me feel full. Maangchi supplied the secrets to its composition step by step, like a digital guardian I could always turn to, delivering the knowledge that had been withheld from me, that was my birthright. I closed my eyes and spooned the last of the soup into my mouth, picturing the soft mixture coating my mother’s blistered tongue, the warm liquid traveling slowly into my stomach as I tried to savor the aftertaste.