Loss is the price we pay for love

Have you ever heard a silence greater than a heart beating to a halt? I have, as the punctuation of breath following breath became increasingly stretched, then I watched as the person who gave me life lay lifeless. The line separating life from death is liminal. Like the faintest thought I had, that if I dived into the deepest depths with her and her closed eyes, life could go on like she was just asleep. Not dead. Never gone. Just off someplace far away, beyond my reach. Like me, when I overseas and she was home. I barely made contact because I was busy being out there in the world. She could be having a fuller life elsewhere, unbeknownst to me. She should have that.

Resounding is the recursion of regret, ringing in the reverie of reprieve.

I have a painting from her, it says “I like staying at home the most. Got my daughter keep me company. （我最喜欢呆在家里。有女儿陪我。）

But I lost her. I did lose her. And I miss her. Did I start to miss her when the doctors suggested Y-90 then sorafenib, knowing that no matter the treatment, there existed no option in which mom would be with me forever? Or perhaps earlier, at the realization before my conception, that no matter the hardship she’d face in marrying overseas against everyone’s advice, she would do exactly the same?

Just a young girl born on the 4th of July, 1962 in Hainan. Who, at my age, learned to speak in Mandarin in Singapore, flipping through Lian He Zao Bao looking for jobs that didn’t require a formal education so she could give her child opportunities she could not even dream of.

These days, I catch glimpses of how much she must have loved me as I am discovering how impossible it seems to forgive myself. How could I ever forgive myself?

Since mom passed away, I’ve never been happier, healthier, and sadder for the loss of her. Because of the education she afforded, I can calculate the similarity of texts using cosine distance yet fail to find the integral of my loss. I turn away from pain. It’s strange to constantly pronounce I, after I, when you and I - we, are all similarly insignificant in the cosmos. This I that I speak of, this I that is my only vantage point from which I think I am experiencing the world, was brought into this world by a love so boundless and infinite, I cannot begin to fathom how or why any being can harbor it toward another.

Except when I approximated it orthogonally, like when I imagine how I’d feel toward a younger self. That made me cry like a newborn baby torn from a mother’s womb; which is strange, because why would that make me cry so much when this is not sadness that I am feeling? At least not the sadness encircling my sense of loss.

Admittedly, this is pain in its purest form. A different contour of pain I’ve been keeping at bay, aside from the pain of losing mom.

Perhaps this is the pain that people speak of that is the other side of love, that to love is to be vulnerable. That love, vulnerability and pain are one and an other. I do myself no favors by denying myself this pain in its entirety. For its entirety is how much I was loved, and that I am slowly learning to carry forward.

If loss is the price we pay for love, and regret its interest, then a mother’s love must be what remains when a heartbeat becomes silence, and a child’s loss is looking for someone gone everywhere in the world:

in the space after a period,

in the interval between breaths,

and in the moment before memory.

In the light of loss, I am beginning to see myself in a new light. I turn toward pain.