August 18, 2025

When my dad was still alive, his anger was all flame and smoke and ember—a billowing wildfire. And my mom? Despite being four foot eleven, she was the wind that tripled it in size.

Back then, it was easy to believe they were each other’s Achilles’ heel. But in those final days, when she sat by his hospital bed, you’d swear those two clashing colors made something close to art. Art is context.

In the hospital, my mom’s smile would spill out of her whole body when my dad woke. Seeing them together in the small, sterile hospital room felt like spying on two kids discovering crushes for the first time in grade school. When the sun would tuck itself away, she’d pull up a chair beside his bed and whisper to him in Vietnamese until he fell asleep. When he joked nonchalantly about dying, she’d roar back with guilt trips, accusing him of leaving her all alone. I don’t even know how to pay the bills! she’d exclaim, arms flailing. He had sailed her halfway across the world, and now her English was only half as good as his—and now he was leaving, and how did any of that feel fair? How could he argue with that?

My mom took close to a million pictures of my dad while he lay in that hospital bed. She needed a way to remember that he was real, and good—and even in a stupid, oversized hospital gown with an unbrushed mouth and hair that stuck up like alfalfa sprouts, he was the most handsome man. Even when he shouted nonsensical words into the air, high from the medication, she spoke to him with the kind of tenderness you only have when your best friend is dying and the world outside just keeps spinning.

Maybe no other man in the world was as lucky to have my mom as he was. Maybe they both felt that way about each other. My mom knew all of my dad’s nooks and crannies—understood which floorboards sang if you stepped too hard, how gently to open his doors so they wouldn’t creak. And where does that knowledge go, once death leaves us alone to fend with it?

After he passed, my mom slept in my bed beside me for two weeks, afraid of how empty hers would feel. She wept, curled into herself, and shouted like a sailor at the heavens for being so damn cruel. When my mom shrunk and wept, she turned her back to me. Because who in their right mind would let their child see them cry?

My dad’s death has never stopped feeling like our fault. Our tears could have filled up all seven oceans.

Who does she yell at now to cut the damn grass, because can’t you see with your own two eyes the neighbors probably think we’ve abandoned the house?

And why won’t you do something about that leaky faucet?

And who in their right mind manages to burn eggs?

And did you know that I’m sorry? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

On his birthdays and death anniversaries, she puts his favorite McDonald’s meal and a glass of Heineken—beads of water still fresh from the fridge—delicately next to his framed photo on the altar. We both laugh, because we both know that just one glass of Heineken wouldn’t have been enough, and we imagine him cursing us from the high heavens for being stingy even in death.

Nowadays, she continues to plant seeds in the garden out front that my dad used to care for. She sends me pictures of her work, the camera greased and foggy from the southern humidity. In the corner of the photo, her grin—with one tooth missing—peeks through, framed by bright flowers spilling like hugs onto the fresh soil she laid.

Halfway across the country now, I send back a picture to my mom—a collection of indoor pothos planted messily in terra cotta pots, arranged with the finesse of a toddler. I laugh as I send it, and she sends back a sparkly gif with a ridiculous animated thumbs up.

Here and here, I think, our roof patches are missing; some windows don’t close all the way, and sometimes the lock only turns on every other try. When the faucets leak now, we don’t try to fix it – because how lucky are we to have a house that’s still standing?