My mom is frail and dying from cancer. I am thinking about the boxes under the house. The two boxes that I left there when I moved to Beijing seven years ago. I am thinking about how I need to clean up those boxes and not leave them for anyone to take care of when my parents are gone. I make my way up under the house and open the boxes which are not really boxes but covered plastic crates. One box is full of Mimi's journals and after a quick inspection I shut the lid. Not sure what to do with those. I open the other box and it is also mostly journals. I pull it into the basement and go through this second box. A few personal things from my past life, but mostly nothing. Gone, baby, gone.
I start to think about what to do with the journals. In reality I've been thinking about what to do with them for years. I could take them with me to Beijing but what would be the point. I could give them to Mimi's sister Mary but I don't really trust them with her. I could just wait it out until their value to me drops and I could in good conscious recycle them. Then it dawns on me that maybe the Stanford eating disorder research that Mimi's mom helped fund could use them. I spend 30 minutes looking for an email contact and fire them an inquiry. The email bounces back. A find another address and they get back to me a couple of days later. They will check and get back to me.
I'm then back to the box I pulled into the basement. Besides journals there isn't much there. I have a vague memory of tossing albums and keepsakes into a dumpster seven years ago. Then I see Mimi's passport when she was a teenager. Inside of the passport is a picture of when she was a little girl and a man I assume was her grandfather is trying to feed her some food. She looks skeptical.
Also in the box is the letter that Mimi's first husband wrote her shortly before he killed himself. It was crumpled but not torn. There is a long letter she wrote to me. I cannot focus enough to read either letter. There is set of photos from the 1997 trip when Mimi was admitted into the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. I look at those pictures and wonder what was wrong with me. I just sat back and watched her die.
I haven't written about this much in the eleven years since Mimi's death. I can count on one hand the numbers of times I've said her name out loud. I can count one two hands number of times I heard her name spoken. I can't count on one finger the number of days she's been absent from my mind. And while I'm not sure what I would have changed I do have regrets. There are many reasons why I haven't written or spoken about Mimi is the past 11 years. First and formost is the love I have for Yang and my kids and how it would hurt them. So why now? I don't know. I guess I don't want to be afraid of the cycle of life. The other reasons are more internal to me. I don't talk a lot in general, so there's that. It also feels I'm simply able to now and I wasn't before.
My mom is sitting in her chair across from me as I type this. The TV volume is too loud and on an inane show. She is dying and there is nothing.