we would really be together, that the next time my brother flew the thousands of miles to New York I would be within days or hours of death. Mau and I kept peppering my sister with instructions on how to be a surrogate mother, but it was what was unsaid that resonated in that room. The phones and cameras came out as we silently acknowledged to one another how precious and fleeting these moments were. For forty-one years, it had been the five of us. This was my family, even though we kids had grown up and gone on to have our own lives and families. This was still my family, our family. And I knew that going forward, in future family photographs, there would be a glaring absence, a heartbreaking hole that could never be filled. My parents will never have another daughter, and my siblings will never have another sister. Forty-one years together finished in that room on that night.
I spent my summer planning. I bought a new mattress for Mia because the old one was lumpy, and if I didn’t do it, it might never get done and Mia would be stuck sleeping on an uncomfortable bed for God knows how long. I found the girls a child psychologist. I found a chef to prepare meals for the girls and Josh. I started the process of finding the girls a high school or college student who will attend music lessons with them and oversee their practices. I will soon check this off my list. I wouldn’t be a true Chinese tiger mom if I didn’t safeguard their musical progress.
I bought my burial plot. I will be buried at Green-Wood, a historic and unexpectedly beautiful cemetery in the heart of Brooklyn, where some pretty famous people are buried. I’m told a plot is hard to come by, but I got lucky. For four years I had planned on cremation. I used to tell Josh that I wanted my body to burn, that I wanted the cancer to burn, that it deserved nothing less. But then when the time came to make the final arrangements, I realized that I could not abide the idea of burning my own body, that the desire to burn my body and eviscerate the cancer came from a place of such hatred and rage that I could not allow that to be the final message of my body. As much as I hate the cancer, for thirty-seven years my body served me well. It took me all over the world and gave me two beautiful little girls. I could not let the cancer destroy all the goodness that had once been. Then there’s the fact that I’ve always hated fire. I don’t even like to light a match. The idea of my body being taken to a cold and institutional crematorium seemed even more repulsive. Plus, Josh wants to have a place to go to visit me. He wants to have a place to bring the girls to visit me. He wants to be able to lie at rest next to me. As it turned out, I want what Josh wants.
But mostly, I spent the summer thinking about how I want to live and spend my remaining months in this life.
I went to the Galápagos Islands two summers ago. It was Josh and me and thirty other passengers on a boat that went from island to island to see all kinds of crazy birds with blue webbed feet and red balloon chests that puffed out like gigantic hearts, and meandering hundred-year-old giant tortoises, and sea lions that swam right alongside as you snorkeled (the ocean’s version of puppy dogs). On one island we saw the skeleton of a long-dead seal that had no doubt been picked away by scavengers, not a hundred feet away from a very much alive mother seal and her cubs. It was the kind of remote place where you knew you were witnessing life’s primordial roots, Mother Nature at its most primal, millions of years of untamed life undisturbed by human activity; after all, this was where Charles Darwin first gave breath to his theories of survival of the fittest and evolution.
One night after dinner on the boat, someone spotted a shark gliding through the waters. The boat came to a standstill so we could observe the shark. The lights from the boat cast a faint glint on the shark’s slippery body. Soon, we realized that the shark