I FINALLY finished reading Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner today. I wasn't in H Mart when I finished reading it. I was in my bed. My new bed. And in my new bed, I cried as I read the final gut-wrenching sentence (in her memoir about the complex bond between she and her dying mom) that broke me into many pieces. A final sentence that only a person who has experienced profound loss can write. The kind of sentence that requires a wisdom that can only be acquired through the throughness of it all. Until you go through the complexity and the dread and the beauty of it all. Until you sing it, weep it, scream it, convulse it, choke on it, drown in it, and come back up for air gasping on it.
I never knew I'd be sleeping in a new bed. Smaller than the bed Gerardo and I had together. Bigger than the hospital bed that had replaced our large bed for the last couple of years—the one he used before he passed. I never knew I'd ever own anything called Queen-sized. I never knew. Until now, as I know.
Crying in H Mart is the first book Gerardo and I selected for our book club for two: Jenny & Gerardo's Book Club. The club was organized in such a way that I would read it aloud to him on days when he needed a distraction from his pain ... pain so severe that he couldn't read anything on his own. Pain that only allowed reading to be done aloud to him, in small spurts.
There were eerie similarities between the suffering that Gerardo and Michelle's mom went through. There were eerie similarities about the love and tension and struggles of being a dying person and being a person with a dying person: "My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her (p. 169)." Sometimes I had to put the book down because Gerardo and I had to pause and weep together as we could see what was coming down the pike as we saw what was happening to Michelle's mother.
Our book club never moved onto a second book mainly because our club wasn't able to complete Crying in H Mart as Gerardo passed before we could finish it together.
An important and courageous facet of this book is Michelle's ability to confront some of the unfairness she bestowed onto her mom—a narrative so common that it has become an embarrassing cliche—of a child punching the lowest hanging fruit, citing imperfections of a parent as the forever reasons of the adult child's imperfections of the present. The confrontation is admirable because she is able to articulate a kind of regret that can only be summoned when faced with losing a flawed and loving parent while riding a high horse for much too long: "Sure, I had taken my upbringing for granted, I had lashed out at the ones who loved me the most, allowed myself to flounder in a depression I perhaps had no real right to (p. 176)."
The way a person goes through grief is unique to each person. And the way a person cares for oneself and becomes self-aware is unique to each person. Michelle's epiphany about therapy and self-care is something I love: "Nothing my therapist said was anything I hadn't psychoanalyzed in myself a million times already anyway. I was paying a hundred-dollar copay per session, and I began to think it would be much more fulfilling to just take myself out for a fifty-dollar lunch twice a week. I canceled the rest of my sessions and committed myself to exploring alternative forms of self-care (p. 212)."
My self-care these days includes saying yes to invitations by my trusted friends who are circling their wagons around me with their loving, watchful eyes. I have committed to never turning down an invitation from this circle so that I can remain engaged with good people and have good spaces to process what I'm going through without receiving an invoice from such interactions. My self-care also includes letting it all flow through me—where I let myself cry in H Mart if I feel like it, or Albertsons if I feel like it, or Target if I feel like it, or my Queen-sized bed if I feel like it. Or to let myself laugh with somebody or everybody or nobody at all. And mostly, to let the sensibility of Michelle guide me in not taking anything for granted and making every moment count, and letting Gerardo's sensibility guide me in finding ways to pursue new purpose and enjoy life not later, but now.
