It has been almost 2 weeks since my mom passed away. 

It's so hard to actually write out those words. Oddly, I think I thought that moms only die in movies or novels.. or someone else's life. Even with cancer, my mom was going to live forever. Even when she was barely responding to us and was on morphine, I had a mother. 

The day we went to the church with her casket, it finally felt so final. Even during the 3-day Korean funeral, I didn't cry that much. I was numb and confused. But in that church, it felt final: the music, the priest, my husband carrying my mom's portrait...  

We had an odd relationship, Mom and I. I hated her then loved her—I can’t really say how she felt about me as a person, but I must’ve been difficult for her to understand.

I found her old diary, the one that she started as a new mom. She only wrote 10 journal entries in it but it felt weird to see her as a young and new to the motherhood. I took it with me because one sentence really stood out to me: Jean, let’s talk about everything when you’re 20. Funny how the older I got, the less we talked because we only talked about things that just can’t go wrong: school, weather, Korean dramas. We just couldn’t go wrong with these topics.

In the last couple of years, we found something we bonded over: our love for creating clothes. Naturally, I have her sewing machines and notions with me now. It’s weird how people attach emotions onto objects. When the people we loved (or hated, or “it’s complicated”) are no longer in our daily lives, we have the things that evoke our memories of them, however skewed they are.

These objects may be just sewing notions to others, but to me, these are the crushed dreams and fights when I told her I wanted to learn how to make clothes; the secret life I made for myself after law school when I started taking fashion design courses and became a published knitwear designer; the noise of mom’s sewing machine that sang rhythmically while I did my homework after school.

I also see HER crushed dreams as a fashion designer; HER struggles with self esteem and body image; HER problem with never recognizing them as problems but believing in them as values. I am not mature enough to forgive and forget everything that had happened. But seeing my mom’s end of life, REALLY seeing the process of dying, forced me to objectively see her for the first time. I hope this is a closure for her, an end to her trauma and a rest for her soul. This is my closure as well—the beginning of my inner child work to heal that relationship with mom.