I began the year telling myself that I wasn’t going to listen to audio books because my TBR pile is the size of several book cases…however, I am weak. One particularly slow day at work I had realized that instead of listening to audio books, I had transitioned to listening to YouTube. Not all of it was riveting or informative and proof that my brain was craving spoken word. So I dusted off Time Magazine’s 100 Most read books of 2023 and systematically found all the audio books on this list available at my library. It also dawned on me that by NOT listening to audio books, I was also NOT supporting my local library. Supporting them is always high on my list. But I digress.

I chose Nicole Chung’s “A Living Remedy” only because it was the first available alphabetically. I knew nothing about her work or her. I knew it was a book I could finish in a week. These are sometimes the parameters I set for myself when listening to books. It is the way I find new authors I would have never otherwise chosen knowing nothing about them.

This book looks at grief in many ways. It is something I am familiar with and had I known this before I started listening, I probably wouldn’t have chosen it. Who needs another book on grief? I do.

Chung tells the wonderful story of being Korean American and being adopted into a white family. I have never been adopted, nor am I Korean, but I believe in the power of adoption. She grew up with a life that made her happy though she spent most of it shielding her adoptive parents from the types of things she struggled with in being an adopted child, but more so what it was like to be Korean in a small town in Oregon where no one looked like her. She was bullied. She was different. She held that all inside her not wanting to upset her parents.

I remember as a child, we moved so often that I was the new kid constantly. I found it very hard to make friends, to fit in, to find a sense of community in any place we lived. Knowing now that I am on the spectrum, this makes much more sense to me, but as a child it felt like being on an island where nothing is familiar. It was hard for me to make friends in general without having to be the new kid all the time. This was how I connected myself to Chung’s story. How I could get myself to understand her world a little bit.

The grief part of this book was the sudden loss of her father to diabetes and renal failure. He was in his 60’s. In part he died because they did not have or qualify for healthcare due to finances so his diabetes went uncontrolled until it killed him. As a nurse, I have watched this happen again and again in the patients I cared for. The fear of it lives in me strongly having just been diagnosed this year with diabetes. I knew my family history (uncle and grandfather died of diabetes complications, my grandmother had it as well) and still I watched myself stuff my body with all those delicious carbs feeling like an invincible teenager. We all know where that leads.

Later in the book, she loses her mother to cancer and she was only in her 60’s as well. Now, these parts of the book had me in tears. I lost both of my parents young, one at age 56 and one at age 66, both within a year of each other just as Chung had lost her parents. The part of the book that gripped me the hardest was her feelings of being a bad daughter. When her father was dying, they lived on opposite coasts and there was little she could do to help. She was raising her own family, she and her husband were in graduate school, and they had a special needs child. There was a guilt that she carried deep inside her she could not shake, that idea that she had failed her father.

When her mother was dying, it was the wild start of the pandemic where travel was like a death sentence in itself. It was Russian roulette with your own life and the lives inside your bubble. Hearing about the beginning of the pandemic again gave me a little anxiety. It was such an unsure, end of the world feeling that changed everything. Her mother dying without her by her side, again made her feel like a bad daughter. She internalized it all. As I was listening to this, I was at work on a break, walking in the unusually warm February sun. Tears were running down my face thinking about all the times I did not go see my parents because of my career, or school, or just plain being a single parent. It made me relive the year I bought my house around Christmas and I told my mother not to come up because the house was full of boxes and the weather terrible. She died a month later and it destroyed me for the following ten years.

But before Chung’s mother passed away, she was able to voice her feelings about being a bad daughter. It was this rock she had carried around as the truth and her mother told her she never felt that way about her, not at all. But she told her daughter she forgave her so she could forgive herself and put down that rock. Even though my own mother could not tell me this, I still needed to hear it. I had carried around a feeling of selfishness around that Christmas before she died. I saw myself as self-centered and this drove me to a state of acquiescence which then saw me failing over and over again. I was vitally unhappy.

“A Living Remedy” lifted that guilt and shame off of my chest. It was another brick removed from the wall of grief that I had been building for a decade. It gave me permission to be okay with having chosen to care for my own family and not being able to always nurture the one I came from. This is what happens when you become a parent. You spend a large part of your life teaching and raising your children to be out in the world, hopefully giving them then tools to discover who they are and how they want to live their life, how they want to raise their own families. I can only hope that I have done this well enough for my child and that the mistakes I have made and will make along the way will be small enough to keep them close as I get older. To continue to genuinely care for me.

My parents were both a source of love and tension for me my whole life, but I would do just about anything to hear their laughter again, to hug them, to know what it might have been like to understand their lives and choices better. But I have to move forward in my life, rediscover who I am when I am not full of guilt and shame at being a bad daughter. My dad would scoff at the thought and my mother would call me dramatic. Maybe, that’s all I need to know.

Be Kind to each other. Laugh. Read. Write. Paint. Enjoy this life you are in. You get this one chance. Thanks for reading.

Aleathia