SUN DAY

He’s crying. I stop thinking. My breath evaporates.

“I saw her last week, Hien, she was fine. Right, wasn’t she fine?”

Grandma had been moved to hospice care 10 minutes down the street where we could visit her often. I went back home last week to see everyone, including her. The nurses were so nice, but walking down the hallway still felt uncomfortable. When I was little, Grandma towered over me. Colossus, with the personality to match, a robust and loud effigy. On the hospice bed you couldn’t tell that she was any of those things. She looked toyish, a caricature of someone I loved. She stirred and her eyes fluttered open.

“Bao, you look strong– you look healthy, Con.”

“Yeah I am, Bà nội.”

“Bà nội có khỏe không?” (Grandma, how are you feeling?)

“Bà nội không có nhiều thời gian, Con.” (I don’t have much time, my child.)

“It’s alright Grandma, it’s only going to be a little bit longer; you’re just here because of your back pain.”

My brother's voice came through clearer than ever.

“She has cancer, Bao. Stage four. It started in her spine but has metastasized for a while now.”

“We found out yesterday night. Can you come home please, I need you.”

The following months were a quagmire; a plod through without a semblance of life. The weeks blended together. Classes, bed, classes again. While I slipped into a murky, senseless void, our world fell into panic. News outlets sounded more like sirens, an exasperated warning. Cases of COVID-19 started to appear in Florida. I hadn’t comprehended any of what was happening until they sent us home. That visit, when Hien asked me to come home – he never asks for anything – it was the calmest terror I have ever felt. Grandma, the person before me, the person loved was riding the last ripple of a wave, a knowing victim to her slow demise. That was the last time that I had seen Grandma. Before they sealed the hospices, the hospitals and everything stopped.

The day that Grandma died was like any other day. It had been so long since we saw her – I silently and stupidly prayed that somehow her illness could be cured, Schrödinger's cancer. We got a call on April

10th at 7:23 p.m. They had pronounced her dead five minutes prior. Dad, her dutiful son, quickly organized the funeral procession. A week from now, there would be a day-long ceremony and then a cremation.

On the day of the funeral, the sky was a gloomy cascade of gray. I learned that these clouds were called nimbostratus and we should expect continuous rain throughout the day. As my consciousness and thoughts echoed out, I could feel droplets of rain grip and wet my thin gray shirt, a gentle pitter-patter beginning. As if to say she was leaving. We, like the clouds that rolled in, began our service en masse, a drizzle of gray shirts and white headbands. There weren’t enough people there. Each row of standing sprays that lined the funeral hall represented a family that was barred from attendance because of the pandemic – including one of my uncles. Each of us wearing our own face masks, an indictment for the times we lived in. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was a clear separation. Two families. Ours, our cousins, and the singular monk. Six feet between all of us. The rounded sound of the singing bowl filled the hall followed by the rhythmic knocks of a wooden bell. The monk began to tell grandma’s story in musical prayer. She was born in Hue, Vietnam; it was both a rural nothing and everything. Even in such a small village, the war came and passed too, seemingly a life away when she was in America. Easy to forget, but it was circadian for her in Vietnam, biological. She died fighting, the same way that she lived: struggling to stay alive. Her favorite flower was the lily– she liked the way that they smelled, and her perfume smelled unmistakably like a stargazer. When the monk finished opening the ceremony, all of us joined in prayer. Me and my brother’s words slippery on the Vietnamese prayers, our efforts failing our mother tongue. It didn’t matter, it just needed to be done. Over the course of the procession we bowed, stood