The image of you painfully exhaling your last breath still haunts every fragile fiber of my memory. Recurring nightmares—or dreams, I’m not sure how to separate the two since they both seem to blur the thresholds of corporeal and incorporeal realities when attempting to untangle a collation of your past memories. And now you’re manifesting yourself into my present—continued moving images of your face struggling to breathe has haunted—revisited—me since.
***
Several doctors and therapists claimed your oxygen level and resting heart rate, numbers that feel arbitrary to me now, were textbook perfect. But bodies are imperfect; that’s a medical anomaly that confuses me; a few nights after your 72nd birthday, you experienced respiratory failure, a day when Má, Five, and I witnessed your head forcibly falling down from a lack of a stable neck support and your breathing momentarily stopped. Within a matter of seconds, everything from that moment happened so quickly, to the point where time felt disjointed as bodies became disoriented. Emotions became elevated; we were all distraught, crying and shaking you to wake up and you weakly responded but continued struggling to breathe. Má called the new neighbor who just moved next door, who was a CNA, out of distress and the neighbor attempted to check your pulse, talking to you as she also wiped her own tears and kept calling your name, mispronouncing it. Once again, you entered the hospital, a sterilized yet harsh institution you loathed.
I still carry that vivid memory of the doctor calling Five and me out of the ER room, where you were laid vertically as you stared straight ahead with several tubes, wires, and the nasal cannula prongs connected into your nostrils, all entangled around over your body again, to talk to us. The doctor’s face was marred with anxiety; at that moment, Five and I expected the worst, but I believed we both firmly held onto that false hope we’ve held onto since you survived in this very hospital that night, just so we wouldn’t confront your mortality. After several medical false hopes induced by doctors from the year before, therapists informed us that your leg tissues and muscles still remained intact, and after you completed your medically insured mandatory two-week stay at a designated rehabilitation center located near the hospital for the second time, he quietly yet firmly informed us you were dying, your body entering respiratory failure. He rubbed his head and watched us cry in the hallway as other people passed us, staring, perhaps out of pity.
Nothing about death is sparing.
***
Three or four days after you moved from the ER to the ICU and relocated to the third floor, a floor that was either the Walker Heart Institute or a department related to cardiology. Same type of room where constant dread inhabits every space and corner. I forced myself awake, never sleeping, trying to keep myself busy to make myself present for you. Decades ago, you sat by Mr. Webb, one of your many sponsors who showed you and Má kindness as you renavigated life in the United States as a refugee, as he passed, and once told me no one should die alone in the hospital. I held onto your philosophy and sat next to you.
I was the only one present in that cold, ungenial hospital room, one of the many rooms where several people have either recovered and discharged or passed away in. You, too, were one of the many people who passed away in that room, one of the many patient rooms located on the third floor.
What felt unfair to me was that you passed away immediately a day after your room was transformed into a hospice care room. When we questioned how long you had, the doctor provided a non-answer, another medical anomaly because death directly caused by complex health complications can’t be predicted nor timed: “It could happen after a few days or maybe even weeks. We just don’t know when.” There existed another false sense of hope that you still had some time left, to comfortably pass on. But when death arrives, it comes. And it wasn’t even 24 hours after you were placed under hospice care.
The unfairness I felt was prompted after reading Bich Minh Nguyen’s novel, Pioneer Girl, a story that frames Vietnamese refugees while entwining American Midwest settler lore, shortly after you passed: “Somehow, my father’s being an immigrant made his death seem that much more tragic. To have escaped a war, to have fled his own country, to have started over, to have come such a distance, only to have his life cut short, drowned in a strange river far from home — it seemed unbearably unfair.” And perhaps my anger is misdirected because death caused by diseases and health complications are categorized as natural since the body, despite its changing elasticity, ages, fractures, and wears down until absolute depletion. Like the narrator’s father, you survived a war, escaped, recovered from your first stroke, and you died in a country that could be considered a hostile home where you resettled. And as we know and choose to ignore, death never makes sense. Nurses provided you with doses of morphine to manage multiple discomforts your body inflicted on you: ease your shortness of breath, which was increasingly becoming more labored and brutally producing cacophonous sounds. Morphine was supposed to alleviate some of your pain but was it effective? Your pain was still tangible. Even your last breath sounded painful.
People talk about the June solstice being the longest day. Long days seem relative now but that cold dreary morning in January felt like an expected, agonizingly long day. That same night of your passing also felt like a long, endless night when time refused to move forward because sleep was too difficult to achieve. Just closing our eyes felt excruciating.
***
I stood by your bed, holding onto your cold hand after you passed, crying. Letting go, I walked out and called out to the night nurse and informed her of your death, starting the sentence with “I think.” Only I didn’t think, I knew you had passed. She entered the room and checked your pulse and performed every required protocol and released a breath, “He’s gone,” she reiterated. I knew it and still cried. She hugged me and said she needed to get a doctor to pronounce your death and left me alone with you.
I called Má shortly after the nurse left and then I translated a nearly identical sentence to her on the phone, “Ba Mất Rồi.” With quiet static interference in the background, I heard Five’s hesitant voice while Má repeated what I just told her: “Ba Mất Rồi.” And then I heard Four’s voice as Five cried in the background and told him.
Shortly after ending the call, the doctor came in and performed the same delicate procedure on the dead. She pronounced the time of your death: 7:40am, just nine days after we quietly celebrated your last birthday.
***
There are days when I dread phone calls, waiting for that person to accept the call and waiting for a callback. That day I remembered calling you, you picked up after the third or fourth ring, and you answered. Your voice sounded off but there was still that clarity, your words rang with certainty. That same evening, I called you again, repeatedly, several times because a sense of disquietude traversed across my body, which was slightly overheated from the sweltering Texas heat.
Twice I’ve received calls about your strokes as I listen to someone’s tonal shifts that raggedly form into panic and uncertain words, only to be interrupted by their own hyperventilation and cries, sounds that are too ominous to be merely white noise when you’re gasping for air to breathe out your words. Faint whispers that are just too harsh on both ends of our receiving ends.
There were days when I called you, hoping recovery could be heard through your distinct, clear voice, but all I could hear were your breathless fragments. You still wanted to speak, your mouth was constantly moving in slow, deliberate motions; you still wanted to tell stories, but that post-stroke dysphonia slowly took control of your register, muting your voice.
In fall of 2023, when I moved away for a fixed-term position in Minnesota, I received a text from Bác Gái’s daughter, asking if I could get in touch with Má and call her back. That dread never faded, it still exists, wandering somewhere in those instinctual bones to constantly caution. Bác Gái who was in home hospice for a period of time, passed away.
Má was inconsolable, in hysterics as I tried to calm her down when she called me back.
Through distance and phone calls, once connected through multiple discarded international phone cards that you and Má used to purchase at different Vietnamese markets in Fort Smith, I’m now witnessing Má question mortality in the present as the people she knew and escaped with are passing away, including you. Later, she would tell me that a generation, her generation, displaced and scattered somewhere at a distance, are dying as time catches up with them. You used to despair over the loss of singers, always commenting that a singer and songwriter is irreplaceable once they die because their vocal range and lyrics are inimitable. I remember you once shared a quote: “không ai có thể thoát khỏi thời gian?” But what about your life?
Observing you—whether understated or overstated—memory creates distance. Watching you and several others actively remember and crave those cacophonous strains of the past, returning to it. There’s always that existing nostalgic desire that was very present in you but unknown to me. The past was your present, and you remained there because that past never reached an expiry. And as Má and several first generation parents observe and witness the many changes, their stories might not age into silence but in time, only families will remember the dead’s fading memories as trauma generationally catches up with us; it’s a constant haunting. As inheritors, the remaining generations will tell and retell incomplete stories as familial roots might wither away until those remaining branches are broken off. Connections are fragmented and positioned precariously.
***
To this day, whenever Five and I lounge around the living room, spaces away where you sat at the dining room table and briefly stopped breathing, we reflect on your death. Morbid as it is, we still angrily ponder and discuss your death certificate because of the many unknowns recorded. Your father’s and mother’s names are unknown and perhaps Má should have been the designated family member who should have answered those questions, but Five was the informant that time, trying her best to accurately respond to the questions in standard English. Other sections on your death certificate that were recorded as unknown included your cause of death, whether your diastolic congestive heart failure, which your body went through shortly after you were slowly recovering from the second stroke, one that the doctors predicted that you wouldn’t survive. That, too, was documented as unknown. The stroke history category was also listed as unknown. Your first stroke, medically filed somewhere in their hierarchical system, was documented in 2007, but I’m wondering if they’ve contemplated whether your family had a history of strokes. The immediate cause of your death was heart failure, recorded six days after your birthday. What I didn’t know was that you had years’ worth of coronary artery disease. Staying and living in the rehab center and those many hospital rooms with you, I noticed your constant chest pains. On a hospital’s pain level scale, you consistently noted your pain, your chest being the critical spot, being at a seven. What does the number seven mean to them? Numbers are meant to be arbitrary, systematically generated at random to produce an existence and like people, numbers don’t remember or memorize those they categorize.
You were a smoker for what felt like five decades to me. Growing up, I saw you smoking, blowing beautifully wavy yet poisonous swirls of smoke in whatever space you occupied, smoking your unspoken years of stress away while the nicotine invaded your lungs. Four once told us that X-rays revealed black tar lungs. But the department determined that it’s unknown to them whether a history of prolonged nicotine use contributed to your death.
Only numbers recorded with certainty are known as your time of death, date of death, your social security number, address, and zip code. Numbers identify a person, the DOB and social security numbers being the primary codes for someone’s identifiable living existence. Your death certificate is a bitter reminder that I can’t even count the number of times doctors and nurses ask about your family medical history. A lot about you remains unknown to me. Má can’t even provide an answer because she also doesn’t know. Just like any other unknown fringes of our history, our family history is fragmented into several unknowns.
Your death may be documented and filed by the state’s department of health, categorized as a vital record, but your life remains undocumented. Like the diverse histories and many tremendous lives of refugees like yourself enter an unnavigable American pathway where assimilation is unforgiving and perceived as an unindividuated monolith.
Your past existence in Việt Nam is a reminder that history selects what and who gets retained in the edges of history while everything and everyone else exist in forced obscurity awaiting permanent deletion. After your resettlement here, you were documented and registered as an unknown everywhere in a present that remembers you except the secures of your home.
You and Má met and married sometime between 1972 to 1973, something I never knew and never inquired about while you were alive. But as Má notes, people born and living in the country didn’t have an official marriage certificate.
***
As Five and I hold onto your filed death certificate, distant images overflow of you sitting on an old, dated sofa marred by careless rips and tears from your children who tore and lineated it during our fake TVB and ATV wuxia fights, our hands firmly seizing the wire metal handles of the green or blue fly swatters, substituting them for warrior swords as we pretended to be agile and acrobatically flew or cartwheeled onto the sofa, only for a metallic odor to ferment onto our hands for hours. We initiated an exact chaos that felt destructive. On those dented cushions molded by six different bodies, you and Má spoke in hushed tones, as if worried that your preserved secrets would spill out and drown the entire house.
Sometimes you and Má would speak, both of your voices tinged with either resentment or nostalgic fondness. Sometimes you laughed, other times you two released a sigh to exhale whatever inner anger or resignation you held onto. None of us dared to interrupt or insert ourselves during your long conversations. Were those conversations a way for you two to unearth those buried and forgotten past with a few secrets that followed and haunted you two from there to here? Or maybe because your friends didn’t live in Fayetteville and you two sought comfort by speaking Vietnamese without having to explain context, define words, or explain any emotional shifts during those shared exchanges as you two reminisce about any moment that felt momentous to the granular. Fluency became a tonal medley during those days.
These questions don’t require a response because it’s too rhetorical. But it was a question I used to hold onto each time I witnessed you and Má conversing. These conversations stalled, decreasing over the years as grievances unraveled and clashing words felt antagonistic and diverged into disconnection.
***
Incorporeally, I haven’t allowed myself to let you become another vestige, lost in familial obscurity. Six years after your death, I still hold onto that grief along with those memories associated with your stories. Grief and memories seem very interchangeable after death, yes? And a lot of stories are constantly told and retold about your life after your death. Your obituary doesn’t even encapsulate the entirety of your life. All those historical moments you witnessed, experienced, and survived disappeared after your death. As Má once said, there aren’t many valuable material assets to inherit so we’re preserving every memory of you we can remember as a form of inheritance. That’s how it is, isn’t it? Stories, some untold and undocumented, are sustained by the memories and inherited by the deceased’s surviving family are being retold after your death.
Má once resisted allowing the words death and dying to roll off her tongue. Her speech is now filled with direct strains either to offer cautions or to retell those same stories as a way to respond to my questions.
I never knew how to verbally console you and still don’t know how to console Má. Silence was a compliant form of comfort in our family that was forever instilled and never disrupted.
One of the many remarkable lines from Sakinu Ahronglong’s novel Hunter School is “The older she gets the more worried I am that she might leave the world before her story has been told.” The narrator is trying to reconnect with his own Paiwan indigenous identity as he listens to the lore behind his family’s stories. Aren’t most of us like the narrator, attempting to tell the stories that were lost during displacement and alienation?
But what inheritance rights do I have to retell with the possible chance of mistranslating your stories for you? Selfish as it may be, I think I want to cling to your stories because of how I perceive our family lineage, which remains unknown, distant, unfamiliar, and incomplete to me; they’re like separate family ties that will never thread and connect with the histories I’ve associated with your life as well as Má’s history. Both of your stories and shared histories are my referential point, as incomplete and equally vague as they may be. Some will remain undocumented, and misplaced into perpetuity until someone else in the family or another person from elsewhere mines those buried memories from the historical margins somewhere where many faceless unknowns remain displaced.
History doesn’t have a uniform rhythm. As we all know, history is incomplete as the unknown becomes obscured footnotes, because who reads those? But I remembered the steady, calm modulation of your voice, something that your friends always seem to mention when they remember you. Your calm yet subdued tempo voice clashed with Má’s energetic and raucous voice. Adjacently listening in a room, I could always hear Má over you. And so, here I am, still trying to redocument what I can through Má and her inherited and shared stories of your life and hers, simmering nostalgic desire that was very present in you at one point but unknown to me.
I acknowledge that I’ve failed to capture the chronological linearity of both of your histories and how they’re influenced by the many stories you and Má nonlinearly retold, as if simmering eruptions of memories emotionally compelled you both to tell or retell certain stories and to recapture those lost and distant moments of nostalgia and survival again. There is no complete linear way to retell your story since contentious chasms exist in history. I have yet a complete story about you and Má; what I’ve retained and remembered are echoic repetitions with certain familiar words and your utterances refusing to be extracted, instead, they choose to remain as unknown and undiscoverable memories.
Perhaps like everyone else who desires to redocument their refugee parents’ lives, I only have memories of you, a few years after your resettlement here, what I define as your present life after I was born. When a family dies, undocumented stories, too, become unarchived and extinct over time. Another regret and time I can’t return to. Your past and history, both interchangeable to me at this point, are absent to me because I didn’t carefully listen to you, holding onto your words, when you were still able to speak. When I elected myself as your caretaker after your first stroke, you would tell me stories when the house was devoid of others except us, eating our lunch together. And now, I associate a certain romanticized image of you, which most likely conflicts with Má’s image of you since you survived a contentious war and its aftermath that displaced you together. Parents lose their history sometimes when their second generation citizen children disregard certain fragments in favor of other parts that fulfill them.
And I hope you can forgive me for that and for those lost times when I didn’t closely pay attention to your stories until now, particularly when you could no longer speak and when translated words don’t carry the same metrical and historical weight as they did when you told and retold them. I’m hoping that I’m not telling your stories, and Má’s for you, but documenting some of the unknown fragments that are historical threads patched and yet formed multiple points of dissonances from both of your lives in Việt Nam, post Việt Nam, and some of the stories you retold after you survived the first stroke.
Translators aren’t to be trusted sometimes because I frequently mistranslate without realizing it, until it might be too late. Translators are like narrators, both aren’t reliable since memories float in and out of our consciousness, changing and moving away from direct linearity and accuracy to a patchwork of fragments.
How can I write or give a eulogy dedicated to you, in your memory, where there isn’t enough time to document your many unknowns that our family might have indirectly inherited from our immediate family as I’m witnessing the first generation still aging, still displaced while I’m here, also displaced by years of not knowing our own matrilineal and patrilineal histories?
And here I am, still telling the stories you once retold and the very ones that Má still retells as I observe the fractures and lesions on your body. Your stories retold in staccato lingo, perhaps even a limbo, forever mistranslating them.
Kathy Nguyen received her doctorate in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University. She is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Gender Studies at Metro State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her first chapbook is forthcoming.
