The Year Without Mom

This is the story of how studying neurology in med school ate my blog/life for a month. Sounds like an ironic continuation of the past four years, right? Post-midterm and weeks of subzero temps, I am back and ready to toss my daily uniform of puffy coat and shapeless clothing (I'm looking at you, scrubs jumpsuit). With the absence of wanting to dress up and take photos or having anywhere to go but the library, my blogger-induced self confidence has also shriveled quite a bit.

Catching you up to speed on what the heck happened in January:

[ 1 ] I went on a ski trip! It was my first time skiing ever and I even gave snowboarding a wobbly try. Needless to say my butt and knees have the bruises and bragging rights to tell the tale.
[ 2 ] Medschool: I shadowed in labor and deliver and saw a C-section surgery and natural birth. I appreciate mothers on a whole different level now. My brain feels meta about learning everything about all its own wrinkles, clusters, and highways.
[ 3 ] Food food food food food: how 'bout that Cinnamon Bun Cheesecake with a perfectly smooth caramel macchiato? Or tub-fuls of Columbus grown Jeni's gourmet ice cream? My favourite has to be sweet potato & toasted marshmallows, the epitome of holiday joy to taste buds. Featured above is a trio of riesling white pear sorbet, blackcurrant yogurt, and lavendar.

Finally, today is the anniversary of my Mom's passing. This year has stretched on for eons and a lot of it still feels like a distant nightmare, too far from reality to keep it from slipping like sand between my fingers. I have done a lot of crying, a lot of pitying, a lot of writing, but not a whole lot of sharing.

Things are not the same when I go home because there is a huge void where her joy and radiance filled our family. But her strength and spirit follow me everywhere, but it took me forever to realize it and believe it. After a year of feeling like I was leaving her behind - all of us going through a birthday without her, graduating, traveling around the world having new experiences, the day of her birthday, a painful holiday season, and now February 11th - after 365 long days I have started to let go of the heartache of her earthly memory and heal through feeling closer to her spirit. Most importantly, finally I stopped pitying myself.

It is ironic because the first couple of weeks after she passed, I felt the most strong and clear-minded, embodying my Mom's spirit and energy. I continued to study and move forward, helping others try to understand their struggles. Then the wave of other feelings inundated the brief optimism and I was sad, angry, apathetic, depressed, these words not even encapsulating what kinds of hurt spun around on a carousel and broke me down. I chose to barrel on forward and continue the daily grind - studying, working, blogging and running away from the ugly reality, only to crack when under inopportune stressful times. Med school started and it is not easy for anyone, and even more challenging with a heavy burden on my heart and not knowing how to broach the topic with the people around me. I was mad when friends didn't know how to react and help me grieve, my standards for my classmates' behavior skyrocketed, I was indignant at every person who ever joked about cancer or expressed indifference or hatred for their parents. Every word was a lance, each silent second was a stab.

In my letter to med schools across the country, I said my reasons for wanting to become a doctor stemmed from wanting to heal my mother. While everyone was in on the fact that I could not save her, I felt robbed of the chance to try. With her gone from this life, a lot of that motivation and meaning sapped away and it was easy to lose sight of why I am really here for the past five months. I know what my Mom wants out of her caretakers. I know that I did not need a didactic lecturing from the team who was trying to explain why it was time to let go. I needed someone in a white coat or scrubs to give me a deep, big hug and show some emotion. I needed them to stop talking about her death in front of her as if she could not hear them while lying comatose.

This is why I'm here. Because in every patient I see a hint of my Mom. Because I could not suppress the tears when Christmas caroling at the cancer outpatient center and saw her in each of their faces. Because I refuse to become jaded and give up my empathy to protect myself from feeling their pain. After a year of asking how God can let good people suffer, I turned around and faced Him. We are not given challenges in life that are too big to be overcome, and we are tested until we are strong and worthy. My Mom is smiling over all of us and we are given the challenge to be as amazing and kind as her.

It still sucks, and it still hurts and this pain doesn't simply evaporate with patience and sunshine. I miss her beyond what words and tears can express; there will be events in the future where I wish she could be there. I cry not because I want this to be undone, because asking her to live one more day in that broken cancer-ridden body would be cruel, the opposite of love.

A reader shared this with me a year ago, and it is a very telling piece by Mary Elizabeth Frye. She is in the sunset above the clouds at Haleakala, she is in the flowers that triumph over the ground. She is in the snow, the stars, and she has left but a white pearly shell by the salty waves that lap up to reclaim her.

This piece by Louise Gluck my poetry prof shared. It is beautiful and captures my idea of the transition into a different life. Thank you Sharon for helping me brave through these inexpressible moments. And I thank every one of you for offering me a hug, staying up late to cry with me, broaching the subject when I didn't know how to, listening even when you didn't know how to respond. Dad, Eric, and Lucky - you are strong men and even stronger family. In no way could I have gotten through this year alone, not without you, my family, and in a big way, not without Mom. 

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little. And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater. 

I Miss You, Mom

My Mom was always very supportive of this blog and kept it bookmarked in her favourite sites. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing this news with the world. Nevertheless, it's hard to capture my feelings into words.

My Mom fought multiple myeloma (a cancer of the bone marrow) for eleven years. She lived her life with so much optimism and a  big smile on her face despite having this terrible illness. She was kind to everyone: strangers, new nurses and hospital staff, people who probably didn't deserve her goodness too. On Saturday, February 11, 2012, the day we feared for so long came. The night before I got the call. Saturday morning I hopped on a plane and rushed to the hospital. She held on for 9 more hours so I could hold her hand and talk to her about anything, everything. She's been holding onto life so bravely for the past decade just for us. Then at 9:40 PM she floated up peacefully to Heaven. Just like that. My brain still can't wrap around this. It was so sudden - we still chatted and wished each other happy Chinese New Years two weeks before. But she more than deserves this peaceful rest and we are happy that she doesn't need any more chemo, medication, pain, suffering. As much as it hurts to let her go ... bittersweet.

Last week was rough and it stretched on like a year. I tried to keep this inside and not share with many people but I am so thankful for the friends that called me and patiently listened while I sobbed incoherently. Thank you guys. And if I haven't yet told in person yet, I just don't have the strength to mouth the words again and again. My Dad and brother have been so strong too and we are here for each other and even closer now. We went through the motions of starting to plan the funeral and it all came together beautifully, in the process allowing us to focus on how special and bright our Mom's life was. Looking through old photo albums was both difficult and calming. She was just 24 in these photos, and she had a rare radiance and beauty, in youth and after she became sick. The memorial service took place this past Saturday, with lots of family friends flew in from all over the country, and it meant a lot that they would come so far at short notice. My Mom touched the lives of everyone she met. If you talked with her for 5 minutes, she would change your life and you can count yourself a really lucky person. She made us strong because she was and is the best role model there can be.

This is why I've been MIA from the internet for a while. It's going to take a long time to heal and even if the world stops turning, we won't forget her. But life moves forward. I'm going to have a lot of adventures for her - go all the places she couldn't travel to because she was sick. I'm going to take care of my body and never forsake my health just to get ahead in work. Since coming back yesterday, hearing people complain around me about tests and work and not having enough time to do things they love makes me realize that the small things are not worth stressing over. A lot of things have been put into perspective and I hope that this inspires you to appreciate the time you're given instead of complaining. My Mom somehow never blamed, yelled about the pain, or tried to make us miserable with her. She did everything she could to live a normal life and to give her family happiness and spent all her remaining energy worrying about us instead of herself. She's always been an angel. I'm going to try hard to be a better person every day, to become like her and to continue doing things that make her proud. In a way, she won't be missing anything - she has the best seat in the house. 

We love you so much, Mom.

Sweet Sixteen

Photography: me

LITTLE MAN. My not-so-little brother turned sixteen on 1/3 and we went to Fish Market on Harbor Drive the night before to celebrate. A simple celebration complete with an Asian cake with fruit (very different from fruitcake connotations as this was quite tasty) from 99 Ranch, now he's all grown up *tear* Mom's a bit internet-camera-shy right now, so this silly picture of my Dad wearing the Fish Market bib should suffice :D hahaha!

Taking pictures in raw and actually editing them was a pain. The process for editing photos 5000x3000 pixels or so took 3x as long to get through my usual process. I need to figure out a workflow or some trick to make this go by faster or I'll never get off the computer. My old Lightroom presets also seem to have different effects on jpeg versus raw files and they're not as cool. If the photos don't look that much better after an outfit post, I'm going back to nooby jpeg for the sake of simplicity xD Is it just me, or do the photos actually look grainier? o_o If any of you photography buffs are reading this, halp!

Click to see more pictures → → →

Ke Qin Ke Jian

Sometimes it's more relaxing to write up a post in Word and post it later, when it feels right. Right now I'm panicking and I'm panicking hard. I have something like 26 days left before the MCAT, before the exam that is the gatekeeper to determine if I'm worthy to continue on the long tortuous path that is the life of medicine.

I have to be honest with myself. I work better under pressure. Of course it's nice to work at something bit by bit and never feel rushed or stressed, but I live for epinephrine flowing through my veins (and arteries I suppose?). Arteries go away from the heart, veins go towards the heart. A for away. This has become my life. Every mention of a word and I will immediately begin to draw out maps. Wonderful, but my Physics is still suffering. I really tend to avoid my problems until the last minute and choose something more comfortable, something easier to do while I'm busy avoiding. That's how I became so good at anthropology, psychology, languages, and now biology. Ack.

I have Animal by Neon Trees looping indefinitely on iTunes. I really need to listen to all the random crap on my iPod more. I'm so anal retentive, typing that appropriately with the capitalized P. It does bother me when my MCAT prep books misspell things. You would think with all that money they're robbing students of, they could afford spell check and a cooler mascot than a crazed saltine named "Salty." Upbeat music drives me. Without it, I'd move at the pace of the earth rotating through our lives, wearing us down so that before we know it, no anti-aging cream will fill the cracks on our faces.

"Writing in a pressure cooker" is how my Power of the Pen coach describes creative writing. I really miss those days when I thought I was a hotshot writer. For 8th grade, it wasn't bad. As I reviewed my pieces in high school though, I laughed at my childish syntax and floundering between stylistic decisions. Now I'm comfortable writing. It's soothing. It's the stability that glues the pages of my life down into one cohesive entity.

My hands are sore from writing up notes. I have this bad habit of taking notes, taking notes, taking notes until my ink runs dry but never reading them again. Of course the few times I manage to, I can cram in an hour before the test and get 98%. In anthropology, that is. I'm not trying to be an arrogant braggart, but I do have a nice photographic memory. What I lack are application skills. Thus, I suck at chemistry, physics, math and rock languages, humanities, artsy things. But I can't let that bog me down. Flipping to the back of the book to only discover you're wrong makes a huge dent in your ego, especially if you've been at this since May. There goes my summer. Sometimes I want to push back my test date from August 5th but that would mean I really won't have a summer. I've been depending on those two weeks before school to keep me afloat in this self-torture. I've made my hopeful list already. It's all I have to look forward to.

I hate standardized tests. And I can't stand people being nice to me, including myself. One minute I pat myself in the back and the next, this whole week is gone. From watching the Office to I have no clue what I've been doing this week (killing my future on the internet probs), each day slips through my fingers like sand. I've always wanted to just grab a handful of sand and keep it there. Physics is always kicking my dreams down with a force of mg.

I kind of like thinking nerdy things like this. And writing about them. Of course at school whenever I make a joke like that people give me disgusted looks and walk away. I hang my head defeated. But I am a nerd, not a genius, but a quirky geek who doesn't get worked up on the difference between nerds and geeks. Heck I'm a dork too.

I have to beat myself up mentally. I have to panic. I diesel on stress. I work best in a high pressure cooker. I have to say mean things in my head to motivate myself. It comes from growing up with Chinese parents who always expected too much. Only when I started thinking did I realize that grades were pish-posh, all these achievements disappear when we die, and there's nothing worth living for except life itself. If you wait for something cool to happen, you've wasted your only chance. I may be bleak, I may be a born pessimist, I may just be honest. I know on my blog I pose as a nice, cheerful girl who wants to cater to everyone, but I'm pretty selfish. Blogging is my guilty pleasure. People won't say mean things to you here. It's my own little corner of the universe. It's not like Youtube, where people pride themselves on how hateful they can be. I admit, sometimes I want to say something nasty, like "Wtf MP, you're promoting panda eyes? You look like you either got beat up or took over the title of Miss Pandaphilia." I also remember the time that I made the mistake of posting a review on a Facebook fan page for some product and a bunch of people wrote things like "She's so ugly" and "She needs more than that product to fix what's wrong with her face." Thanks creeps. Btw, now I know where to find you, where you live, and your name. Smartass.

Now I've got myself all down. There's the fine line between saying mean things to keep you going, keep you writing, keep you learning and outright defeatist thoughts. I often find myself slipping, with no one to talk to, no place to go. Yes, I am whining but my family and my life weren't built for excitement. I'm the caged bird but I don't sing. Sorry Maya Angelou. I want to travel everywhere but I don't want to move. It's the great paradox of my existence.

Today I learned something cool about my family's history. I was talking to my Dad about something after watching the Jay Leno Show (which was outright brilliant jabbing at Lebron and featuring finally a Vice President who has a sense of humour). He was talking about the origin of family names and said we're lucky to have the last name Chen because it's quite common and Americans can pronounce it most of the time. I would rather have a cool eccentric last name but I think I would be bashing heads together too if people mispronounced my identity all the time. My Chinese name means "Pretty Jade" and it sounds almost exactly like my English name. My parents were all prepared when I was born for my transition to the United States. How thoughtful of them. 'Cept it's a hugely popular Asian girl name here. I'm going to name my kids something crazy. They might hate me but someday they'll be cool and unique and glad they're not like every Sarah and Emily out there (don't worry, I have lots of friends with both names and I love them). I hate it when my cool idea was also everyone else's cool idea. That's why when I wear something weird 5 years ago and it JUST becomes hot, I want to say, "Hey, I had dibs on that trend. Suck it losers!" That is the catty world of fashion.

Anyhow, I found out that one of my dad's ancestors was one of the top civil service bureaucrats during the Qing Dynasty. He was pretty rich and had lots of land, but some relative of the Manchu Emperor wanted to take it and there was a long lawsuit that drained a lot of our ancestor's money. So when the Commies took power, they kicked my dad's family out of the countryside into Beijing. Isn't that odd … in most places that's like being promoted. They were left with nothing and they're still pretty poor.

We saw something on CCTV and my Dad suddenly pointed and said, "Hey look! 克勤克俭 ! (ke qin ke jian)" That's his name and his brother's name. The phrase means, "Be hardworking and frugal." I guess my Dad was stuck with "Be frugal" and he is. He never wastes. He doesn't waste food, he doesn't waste money, he doesn't waste much time. He is also hardworking but he claims his brother is more hardworking. I don't know. My Dad managed to work as a farmer for two years during the Cultural Revolution and study for only two weeks before getting into the top medical school in the nation. That was at 21 or 22. I feel like everything's been handed to me in my life on a silver platter. I haven't had to haul my butt around and work like that one day in my whole existence. I admire who my Dad is and where he came from. He's really lived up to his name. So can I live up to mine? I'm not really pretty and I'm not sure what to think of Jade. If I were a piece of jade I'd probably be one with little black dots that decrease the value anyway. I'm not exceptional. Maybe that's what my name really means. I'm not special to begin with, I'm no genius, so I've got to make a name for myself. I've got to defy limits, prove the universe wrong. I get emotional now because I have no idea how I haven't thought of this before. It's like my life purpose fell out of the sky and hit me. It sounds so simple but the flow of logic makes it all come together.

This revelation makes me happy. My boyfriend's Chinese name has a character that means "middle, or medium." He says that he would have rather his Mom named him with the character "dragon." I think he's spent a lot of his life trying to push his boundaries, trying to become much more than average. And he his so brilliant, so motivated, and pretty much unstoppable. I guess we're just two people that somehow bumped into each other on Planet Earth and ended up compatible. I guess this could be why. We're different in so many ways, yet similar in others. Now I'm just being cheesy and speculative.

So this is a look inside my head, the evolution of my thoughts. Uncensored.

[written at 4:37 AM]