twenty-three
afterlife
Nai Nai used to take us to church on Sundays, where we would learn about God and hell and what we were supposed to be doing
on this earth. Mama and Baba weren’t religious, so we didn’t go once we moved to the United States. What I remember was a
sprinkle of biblical stories, a blurry notion of Jesus and the trinity, and a general fear of judgment after we die.
So my understanding of spirituality and higher powers is a blend of Sunday school and Chinese myths about the ruler of heaven.
I don’t think too hard about it. Death is very far away. Ye Ye was long gone by the time we were born, and our other set of
grandparents had also passed away when I was one.
I remember, once, as a child coming out of church with Nai Nai, I thought that heaven was in the sky behind the clouds and hell was underground, literally.
Purgatory had been mentioned as a place in between, so I believed that’s what people did when they went on a plane—they were going to purgatory.
The idea of flying to Illinois, where Nai Nai told us we were going one day, was fantastical and terrifying.
I wondered ceaselessly what purgatory would be like.
I thought that to go from China to the United States, you had to die and then come back to life.
Your last day starts out ordinary for me. It’s a sunny and clear spring day. Unseasonably warm. A Tuesday.
I go to school. I sit through all my regular classes. I stare out the window while Mr. Karlsson monotones about Ohm’s law.
I keep thinking about how Ohm sounds like the yoga chant, which is supposedly the sound of the universe. Mr. Karlsson says Ohm enough times that it sends me into a daze, and I almost fall asleep. The sky blazes blue outside. I blink repeatedly to keep
myself from crashing into my desk.
I’m dealing with drama at the school newspaper. The features editor has dropped out. The two assistants I’m considering to
replace her do not get along at all, and the tension between them is splintering the staff. One of the assistants is clearly
better but is a graduating senior. The other is a junior and will probably be impossible to work with all next year if she’s
passed over. I worry about staffing next year.
These petty squabbles in this small place. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever escape these cornfields.
I come home at the end of the day. Mama makes jiu cai dumplings for dinner. We eat while watching TV. Our parents discuss where we might go for vacation when you come home from the school year. I don’t remember any of the options, after, because of course we don’t go anywhere that summer.
After I help clean up, I go upstairs. There’s a quietness at night that triggers a specific loneliness I mostly don’t feel
during the day, surrounded by people at school. I scroll social media for a while but don’t post anything or leave any comments.
I wish I had someone to talk to, but I can’t think of a single person I’d call.
This is my life. Steady but unremarkable. The surface of an undisturbed pond. I could never have expected the stillness to
be shattered with such force. I could never have prepared for the undulating ripples after the splash.
On the far side of the country, it’s raining steadily. It comes down soft but unrelenting, soaking everything. It gathers
in puddles along the curb and muddies the side of the path. It pools under desks in classrooms where people lay their umbrellas.
You wake up exhausted from the two hours of sleep last night. You have a quiz today too, and you’re not sure you’ll be able
to get through the day without copious amounts of caffeine, a little something else. You take one pill just to give you a
bump and get you through the morning.
You go to class as you normally do. Sit three rows back from the front—not too close to be weird, but close enough to be able to see everything on the board.
Your vision is getting worse. You make a note to set up an appointment for an eye doctor.
Another thing on a long list of to-dos that never seems to get shorter.
You’re twitchy. Your eyes don’t seem to blink unless you remind yourself to do it. They feel dry.
Tuesday is the day you have the most classes. I know this only because we recover your schedule pinned up from a corkboard
on your desk later. You have two classes in the morning and three in the afternoon. Your day concludes at five, which is a
late finish for you. The other four days of the week, you’re done by three.
At five, it is dark outside. The rain continues to fall. By the time you make it back to your dorm room, your boots are drenched.
Everything feels vaguely damp. Your bones ache from the chill. You peel everything off and change into dry sweats. You glance
out your window, where people rush past each other in the courtyard outside. A couple is kissing with abandon under an awning,
the rain pouring down from the roof in front of them. You feel strange watching them, a curious longing in your heart for—what?
You turn away.
You get a roll and one apple from the dining hall and eat it at your desk while you do your reading for tomorrow. Your roommate
is not there. The common room has no one in it. The rain has finally emptied the path beneath your window.
You are tired. So tired. You have not slept well for an entire week, and it’s starting to make your brain do weird, hallucinatory
things. You swear you can hear people talking in the other room, even though nobody is there.
Maybe going to bed early tonight would help.
You take a pill. You get ready for bed and lie down, the blankets tucked up to your chin against the chill.
It should feel cozy. It should induce sleep.
But as usual, it doesn’t. Eyes open. Eyes closed.
Sleep is elusive. Sleep is nowhere to be found.
Sleep is an island that has sunk beneath the waves into the ocean.
Your brain won’t stop thinking about everything for the rest of the week. And then the week after that. And soon the semester
will be over. And then you’ll come back in the fall for more. It all goes into an inescapable spiral that never ends. Your
roommate is asleep in bed at this point. You stare at him for a few moments, jealous. He sleeps easily, like a bear entering
hibernation.
If you do not sleep tonight, you won’t be able to make it through the week. You must sleep. You get up and ruthlessly dump
more pills into your palm. It’s nothing bad, you tell yourself. You can wean off them later. You will go to a real doctor
after this semester. You promise yourself. Right now, you just need a little help for the week. You need to sleep. You chase
them down with a glass of water.
You get into bed.
You never get up.
Or something like that? I don’t know. It’s impossible to know, because I’m not there. Mama and Baba aren’t there. Nobody is
there, save for your roommate, who finds you the next day after you don’t move in the morning, or at noon, or hours later.
I can only speculate, after, what your last day was like and what you were thinking.
I go through all different kinds of scenarios.
One where it is an accident. One where you did it with intention.
We look for clues in all your things. Your planner, with notes jotted in for events weeks later.
Your belongings, carefully labeled and organized for us to categorize and pack after you’re gone.
But there is no way to ask you. You are horribly, irreversibly gone. Like that. The shock of it is complete. And the guilt.
It’s so surreal that there doesn’t seem to be room for tears. We rarely cry. We mostly just move through each day, stunned,
as though permanently struck with a post-viral brain fog.
Life seems less like a miracle, more like a biological process. Materials in, energy out. You must balance the equation to
stay alive. If not, if you have a simple slip, then your time on this earth is over.
And what happens after? Will we be together again, like the pastor at Nai Nai’s church used to say? It takes more conviction
than I have to know.
Chinese people believe that the dead stick around for forty-nine days before they depart. Forty-nine is a special number.
It is always said as part of an equation.
Qi qi si shi jiu, seven times seven equals forty-nine.
In Journey to the West , the Monkey King tries to rebel against the gods and become the emperor of heaven.
The gods capture him and toss him into the great sage Laozi’s sacred furnace.
They lock him in the furnace for qi qi si shi jiu days.
At the end of that time, they check to see if he has dissolved into ashes.
To their surprise, he emerges from the furnace, triumphant, with flashing gold eyes and more powerful than ever. Reborn.
The forty-nine days after your death are a blur, except for the one thing I feel in my soul: that you are not here. I do not
feel your presence. I do not see a flicker of you in the lights at home. I do not dream of you. I look for you all over, as
your spirit is supposed to linger, but I find nothing. People always talk about how they see loved ones in cardinals, in butterflies.
I wonder, Is there something wrong with me? Am I not looking hard enough?
Or worse: Are you just not there? Is there nothing to look for?
Because you never appear to me during the seven weeks of mourning, I know you are not drifting around. Not on this earth anyway.
I know I am not speaking to you, not for real. But I think of you all the time. I tell you all the things I couldn’t say when
you were alive, when it was harder to do.
I tell you that we are the only two people in the world who have lived the same lives. The same memories growing up. The same
arc. We flew over the sea together, you and I. I think this must mean that even though you are gone, I carry the parts of
you onward.
I tell you that I will remember everything about us.
I tell you that I wish you were here.