In Loving Memory of Ma

I posted an update yesterday on social media about Ma’s passing, but in case you didn’t see it, I’m resharing it here. Thank you all for your kind expressions of sympathy and love in this very difficult time.

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Late this morning, on a bright and clear day that followed just after a series of heavy storms, Ma departed this world and her beloved family. We had dressed her in smart “shangshi” attire, as is customary, so she could go up to heaven properly. I stroked her beautiful hair, of which she was always so proud, still black and full despite her nearly 85 years. Her skin was soft and supple, and when we moved her limbs they felt light as silk.

She had hung on for a day, struggling against the racking in her lungs, so that we might all arrive and say our goodbyes in person. Even in those hours before death, she was sacrificing for us, and in classic Chinese mother form, she knew we would remember it. I should have come days sooner, my own guilty heart insists, but I somehow had tricked myself into believing it was not yet her time. A woman so radiant can’t be at death’s door, after all. But I arrived just in time, late last night. I stood vigil with my family in shifts, and I cupped her face this morning as she took her last breaths.

Ma was many things. A prolific writer, a risk-taker and wheeler-dealer, a rare beauty at the center of every room, a charming and startlingly disarming host. She was willful but caring, cunning yet carefree, a force of nature and yet also a gentle breeze. It seems impossible that these traits should all be contained inside one person, yet that is the woman who captured my Ba’s heart, and who gave birth to and raised all of four of us Kuo children.

Ma saved her best skills for that. Motherhood suited her perfectly, with a heart as big as her smile, and just enough dreams and hopes, and home cooked meals around a boisterous dinner table, to keep us all flourishing. Her children strived always to be the best incarnations of ourselves, not so much to please her but to fulfill our potential, as unlocked and encouraged by Ma.

In her later years, after she lost both her husband and the physical mobility that once kept her active and engaged, she still had her four children to reflect on, and she did so often. “I THINK I DOING OKAY AS MOTHER,” she would said to me. “WITH FOUR WONDERFUL CHILDREN.”

“Three,” I’d respond per usual, and she would laugh and shoot me a mischievous look, not certain if I was being self-deprecating or barbed.

There is no amount of emotional preparation that can cut through the pain of losing a mother like Ma, the person with whom, by definition, I have had the longest and most primal bond. When Ma left us, it was both beautiful and soul-crushing. In our culture, it’s customary to drop and prostrate yourself three times in honor of the departed. When I bowed down and touched my head to the ground, I felt her release me from all the worries and fears I had carried with me for months, and my tears at last flowed, with gratitude and abandon. Ma was gone. My heart was broken. My heart was full.

I am not a strictly religious person, and I don’t pretend to know the destinations of souls or life forces. But of all the billions of lives that have graced our Earth, hers was the one that graced mine, and it had made my own possible. That is how I know we are already joined and can never truly be parted.

Ma is gone. Ma is here.

Ma through the years