Teera winces, recalling the oncologist’s words not long ago. At this advanced stage, I’m afraid the prognosis is not good. She remembers him looking from her to Amara as he spoke, unsure who was responsible for whom. When she and her aunt first walked into his office, he’d assumed they were sisters, as Amara’s petite frame made her look more like a woman in her late thirties than midforties. I am truly sorry, he concluded decisively after what felt like mere seconds. What could you know! Teera felt the urge to scream at him, at his useless apologies, the absurdity of it all. For them to have endured indescribable inhumanity only to succumb to something as nameable as pancreatic cancer seemed a mockery of their struggle all these years to rebuild their lives. It was their shared belief that after what they had been through they’d overcome anything, that their survival had purpose and meaning—a reason. They were meant to live, damn it, she wanted to tell the smug doctor. Amara was stronger than this. She’d live. Her aunt would fight and live. You’ll see! Instead, in a tone close to threatening, Teera rasped, We’ll seek a second opinion. And to Amara, she added shakily, desperately, A third and fourth, if we need to. Amara looked at her with pity, as if Teera had been the one with cancer. They left the doctor’s office in defeated silence.
Only later, when they were back home, did Amara speak. If I’d had more time, I might’ve returned to Cambodia. Her aunt had chosen her words carefully, speaking in her precise, practiced English. But all Teera could think of was that the verb tense was all wrong. Did Amara not remember anything about the past subjunctive from all those grammar lessons Teera had helped her with? You’re not dead yet, she wanted to say. There’s still time. You have more time. You do! Instead, she burst into tears, to which Amara responded, Oh, Teera, we’ve been blessed in so many ways. I’ve had a good life. I got to see you grow up, didn’t I? I’ll always be grateful for these extra years, for all we’ve built together here. Her aunt sounded as if she believed she ought to have died with the others. Teera grew more upset.
In the following days and weeks, Amara, with her characteristic equanimity, proceeded to put her life in order. She resigned from her longtime position as the head of an organization that provided social services to Cambodian immigrants and refugees in Minnesota. She went to a lawyer and made a will to ensure that Teera, her only kin, would receive all her savings and assets, which, including a life insurance policy she’d had the foresight to buy many years earlier, amounted to a small fortune. Certainly enough to allow you to devote time to your own writing, she explained matter-of-factly, while Teera listened in stunned dismay. You must look after yourself, darling. Tend to all that’s alive in you, to what’s living. And let me tend to the dead.
Besides the inheritance she’d left for Teera, Amara had bequeathed an amount for the construction of a communal stupa at Wat Nagara, their old family temple. She told Teera she’d already written to the abbot of the temple, expressing her intentions that it serve as a kind of memorial to their family, and to those who had perished during the Khmer Rouge years. Weeks passed, then a month, then two. Amara grew visibly sick, her physical deterioration reducing her to a pale copy of herself. Then one day, sitting Teera down and handing her a small wooden box, Amara said, If you should ever return to our country, please take a bit of my ashes in this and leave it in the stupa there. Teera reeled in the midst of her aunt’s calm instructions. But you’re still alive! she wanted to shout, too confused and upset to make sense of her own words, let alone Amara’s. Divide up the ashes? She felt certain this was sacrilegious—a violation of Buddhist custom and belief, even as she was acutely aware that a divided self was something her aunt had to live with daily since their arrival in America, a reality she struggled to accept as she built her life in a country where she felt she never truly belonged.
If you should ever return . . . Those words angered Teera. They sounded like a betrayal. Why should she? Why would she want to? There would be no one for her to visit or reconnect with. Unless this was Amara’s way of saying she wanted Teera to return, to take her back and reunite her, if only in spirit, with the rest of the family. Teera couldn’t voice her objection. Amara was dying.
Every time she thinks of her inheritance, Teera can’t escape the feeling that she’s always gotten the better end of life, while her aunt bore the brunt of it, suffered. Died. Is this why she’s going back now? To purge her own guilt by fulfilling Amara’s unspoken longing for home?
Amara passed at the beginning of the year, three days short of her forty-seventh birthday. Her sudden death sent shock through the Cambodian community, and the tremendous outpouring of grief engendered a kind of collective mourning on a scale befitting a minor celebrity. Teera shouldn’t have been surprised. For many years, Amara was a constant fixture in the lives of so many. There was never a birthday, graduation, wedding, or funeral she failed to attend. If invited, which was almost always, she was there to offer her quiet support. Naturally, when news of her death got out, the whole community came to pay respects, gathering at a funeral home in Minneapolis, where the undertaker, familiar with the rites of a Cambodian funeral, arranged a row of chairs for Buddhist monks on the pulpit facing the mourners. They went on to the crematory a few blocks away, where Amara’s body was incinerated and the ashes collected in an urn with the efficiency, Teera noted with dismay, of a well-run bakery. The next day they gathered once more at Wat Minnesotaram, the temple in rural Hampton where an evening wake was held. The urn was on display atop a small table beside a photograph of Amara, accompanied by funerary chants and music meant to ease her aunt’s spirit on its journey into the otherworld.
Then, sometime at the end of June, a bit more than half a year after Amara’s death, just when Teera felt that everyone had grown accustomed to her aunt’s absence and she could begin to mourn privately, a letter arrived from Cambodia. The author of the letter offered his condolences. He had heard of Amara’s untimely passing from the abbot of Wat Nagara, the temple where he had sought shelter. To Teera’s astonishment, the stranger went on to explain that while he offered his deepest sympathies for her great loss, he was in fact writing in regard to some musical instruments belonging to her father, which he wished to give her. Teera didn’t know what to make of it, believing for a moment it might’ve been an opportunist’s vague solicitation for money. She ought to trash it. But something about the letter made her hesitate. Its tone, perhaps. A tone is the intention of a note, Amara would say in moments of unbidden remembering, quoting her father, repeating things that had struck her as mysterious or prophetic. The tone of the letter made Teera believe that the stranger’s intention was honorable. Sincere.