![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09b0f0c8-fc40-4b97-8b62-d930d8becfbd_1200x854.png)
Ocean Vuong’s words about memory, taken from his book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous continuously repeats in my head. In this fiction paired with memoir, he mentions that “memory is a second chance”. It made me think about storytelling, how I consider that to be a tool of survival when sometimes, all we have is remembrance.
A couple years back, my grandfather passed away from lung cancer. He died in a senior care facility in Akashi, a couple months after I visited him for the last time. I remember that trip to be particularly difficult, not only because I had to see him in his dying state, but to also confront the past incarnations of the parental abuse I endured throughout my childhood. My mom did a lot of things to me a mom should not have done, and she has herself admitted this (ironically on Mother’s Day of this year). For the majority of my life, I told myself that I understood why she did those things; because her father did them to her too, and his family may have done it to him too, and so on.
At the end of On Earth, Vuong expresses his hope for a second chance in the form of reincarnation. Vuong and his mother face language and cultural barriers that prevent them to communicate each other’s pasts, thereby affecting their current bond and their chance at healing together.
“I know you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know if I do but I hope it’s real. Because then maybe you’ll come back here next time around. Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. Maybe then, in that life and in this future, you’ll find this book and you’ll know what happened to us. And you’ll remember me. Maybe.”
It’s a very specific feeling to have hope for a second chance in the form of reincarnation. This quote breaks the fourth wall, in a way, because it causes us as readers to wonder if we were reincarnated as well, fated to read this book. When I read it, I felt it in my heart, that I was meant to come across this passage and look back on my past, that may even surpass my own conception. There’s a popular saying that goes: “where you are now, is where you are meant to be”. I find that saying to be grounding at times, because it challenges me to look for what I can learn from difficult situations.
Although I’d like to acknowledge that sometimes, situations can be too painful to see as “life lessons”. Was I fated to undergo all the traumatic things in my life? Is there a God, a higher being of some sort, paving my life and watching me suffer? Is there even a God at all? Are these questions the right questions to even ask, or are they more of a reaction to my environment?
Rather, I think the overarching question can be: What do we need to thrive? How do we liberate ourselves? I’m in the midst of reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and these questions are constantly spinning in my head while I read. The book begins with an incredible quote:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
I’m thinking again about the cycles of abuse within the generations of my family. During my last visit to my dying grandfather, I met up with an old teacher of mine at a cafe. She has stayed in close contact with my mom, and has remained a dear family friend. My old teacher sat with me at the counter, as I sipped on a cappucino, trying to feel older and more mature than I really was. She told me that she’s been talking to my mom through all of this, and that my mom is faced with a lot of questions about her unresolved trauma from my grandfather.
How do you confront someone who has abused you, on his deathbed? How do you reckon with an old wound, that you have now passed down to your child?
How do you forgive someone who has lost the capability to apologize for the harm he’s caused you?
My old teacher told me that my mom is learning to answer these questions for herself. She has to find closure, some form of forgiveness, because her father is slipping from her fingers. I excused myself quietly, and ran into the bathroom to cry out the tears I was trying so hard to hold back. In the mirror, I noticed I cried no different than when I was a child.
I’d like to go back to the quote from On Earth, that “memory is a second chance”. The act of remembrance can be used as a tool to see things in a different light, after it happened. Maybe my mom has used this method to an extent; retracing her memories of her father with the knowledge that he is gone, revisiting herself at a younger time, softening what was once so caged and impenetrable. Kind of like the calm whistle of the wind after a train passes by you.
I believe in an afterlife that is not particularly a sentient afterlife. A friend told me his theory of the afterlife, which I align the most with. He says that ghost sightings popularize around places where minerals accumulate, like a riverbed. He thinks that it’s because landscapes have memories — absorbing the history of their environments, and sometimes releasing that energy into our dimension of existence. Trees, plants, water, objects, all hold some level of that energy. And when those trees and objects become destroyed, those energies do not disappear. They simply become absorbed elsewhere, within the dirt they were placed in, or float up into the sky where we breathe it in.
After my grandfather passed away, my grandmother became very depressed for a while. She stopped going outside, and when my mom would try to reach out to her, she would be easily irritated and refused to communicate. But recently, she has poured her days into tending to her garden, which I’ve witnessed through the fragile internet connection of our video chats. She faithfully spends every morning outside in the sun, raising her tomatoes, cucumbers, mizuna, aloe, and eggplants. During our calls, she gives me gardening advice that sometimes I already know, but still love to hear from her voice. Now, her garden has grown to the height of a forest. When she stands in the middle of it, I forget that she’s actually right in front of her house. This morning, I picked an okra plant that I raised myself for the first time, and I thought of the saying: “nothing is lost, everything is transformed”.