On Helping My Mom Move

I am home. I woke up and picked some blackberries off the hedges along my driveway for my cereal. This is the part of the summer I usually love most here in Vermont for sitting outside with friends up the hill, drinking a little gin around a fire in their yard and watching the fireflies as the moon rises. We call it the neighborhood gay bar (we are all gay). It rained too much for that Saturday night so instead we sat inside, we ate a kitchari our friends made for dinner and then celebrated the birthday of a neighbor with impromptu cheesecake another neighbor made, which we decorated with some preserved peaches my husband Dustin had canned after last year’s harvest, brought as a gift for the birthday celebrant. Our neighbors have a tremendous garden as well, it should be said, vegetables that are just incredible to see, and I may have stared in admiration at the sandwich tomato waiting on the counter.

This has been a tough year for these friends and for us, both of us away for long stretches of time caring for our parents. We spent the night being a little ridiculous and I needed that. I am just back from San Mateo, where I helped move my mother. My sister found an assisted living residence for her downtown near her house, right in walking distance, recommended by many. Her calculated bet was that our mother, who had lived for the last 30 years in a suburban house in Biddeford, Maine, could be happy and even thrive in a downtown San Mateo, California assisted living apartment. I’m happy to say it seems my sister is right. My mother is already happier, ten days in, for all she had to let go of in the last month. She has new friends she has dinner with every night, an exercise class she goes to every day, and a garden with a bird feeder like the one she had before, where she sits outside and takes a little sun in the afternoon. Her new friends include some retired teachers, like herself, and a retired woman race car driver.

I had deep misgivings about the move. Maine is such a big part of my mother’s identity and history. Was it a mistake to take her to California? But she had done this before, as a young woman, moving to California in three cars with six of her girlfriends from Portland, Connecticut, where she was teaching back then, back in the early 1960s. There’s an irony in this to me, my mother’s first job out of college was at a school across the Connecticut River from where I would go to college. But to the point: California is one of her places too. We have speculated—my siblings and I—that there are good memories for her there that might be a comfort to her now. It’s where she met my dad, and where she enjoyed life as a single home economics teacher in Azusa. She was also the one who had put this plan in motion before we’d found the place we were moving her into, deciding to sell the house and move after a phone conversation with her sister back in April. My mother and my sister, my mother and her sister, they are alike in ways I am not sure they know sometimes, but which I trust all the same. They don’t need to understand how they understand each other if they understand each other. And this was their united decision, in a way, about what my mother’s next best chapter would be.

In the weeks before this, as I ran errands, much of my work was trying to get her to make decisions about what to keep and what to bring, what to donate, and to whom, as we went through boxes and boxes of family photos, boxes of shoes, boxes of clothes, Christmas ornaments. My sister helped her winnow down a collection of 85 coats, perhaps every coat she’d ever bought. Then there was her professional executive clothes from decades earlier, and then came the clothes she’d made for herself, the hanboks she wore in the 1960s when she lived in Korea as a new mom, to me, with my dad in my grandparents’ house in Seoul. “This is perfect,” my sister said, of one of them, given to my niece. She has a Korean tailor in San Mateo who she will take it to for repairs and she could already imagine her complaints to her about the condition of the garment. It at times seemed impossible we’d ever finish and all the while, my mother told a few people she felt herself without a home, before we’d left. But her life in Biddeford was unsustainable, requiring home care that cost 26,000 a month. And she was very alone there, seeing almost no one besides her neighbors and the care professionals. But the day came when we were all packed at last and I got into a car for the airport with her and we were gone.

My mother carrying me home from the hospital after my birth. Photo by my father.

I was her travel companion for the flight out. I held her hand at times as we flew. I will admit I felt a little or a lot desperate, unequal to the task, an elaboration of how I had felt for much of the year after her stroke last fall. As I sat on the flight I was aware of having stuffed a pearl tie pin she’d given me that belonged to my father into my carry-on, as well as some cufflinks. The pearl on the tie-pin matches the ring on my mother’s finger, a ring she was wearing again after a long time of having it in her safe deposit box. “It’s the first gift your father ever gave me,” she said, when she saw me notice it. I pay attention to my mother’s jewelry, as I have since I was a child and thought of it as the most beautiful treasure imaginable. And as she flew she would twist it back and forth. I imagined she was bringing him with her.

She knew the story behind nearly every object we brought before her to decide on. Who had given it to her. And now I knew at least some of them too.

When have I last worn a tie-pin? Maybe my graduation from high school. I would have to find the tie for it. A whole look really. I remember my brother telling me he’d brought a message from our father back after a session with a shaman. This was in 2023. He says you’ll be happier if you dress better. And dad was a snappy dresser. This gift to me like another style prompt from the other side.

*

Our flight landed, my brother-in-law met us, and we got my mother to the residence, unpacking her in her new suite: two rooms with a garden view in a quiet corner of the building. I saw her luggage was a little full of things I thought she wasn’t going to need, but we will know soon enough. She wanted to bring five different purses, for example, and I decided why not? What if she had those kinds of plans? Only one was a little worn-in. The others all looked to be waiting for some new life they hadn’t had yet, like those notebooks writers buy and then put away. But now I’m projecting.

I took my own luggage over to my sister’s, made a drink and sat in her backyard under her lemon tree, listening to my brother-in-law tell me some stories about his work, how he’d caught someone he was interviewing using AI to get the answers to his questions, and I was thinking about how beautifully full the tree was with gleaming, rounded lemons. And thus I began the process of letting my mother find her way into the rhythm of her new life there, as I found my way back to my own. My good friend R. O. Kwon 권오경 took me to dinner the next night and then out to Karaoke with friends, and I fell into their arms singing. I spent four more days there, each day filling up with the unfinished business of a move. Who would her new doctor be, her new dentist, and so on. What was her new pharmacy? Her local bank? I took her for walks in the park at the center of town, pushing her wheel chair. My mother and I love a garden and the roses there were booming, a midsummer flourish.

Now I am home with a mix of things that once belonged to me when I was a child, things that she gave me and then things left behind that I took so as not to let them go to waste. It feels almost like she moved in with me. Some of it my mom chose, some I chose, and some of it was chosen by my husband, who went to clean up the house with my sister, her daughter, our cousin and our cousin’s husband, and he put a few “surprises” in the car I’d left in the garage to drive home a week later on my return.

There’s a dark blue ceramic lamp printed with the white silhouettes of cherry blossoms, a sentinel on my mom’s bedside table in Maine since the 1970s, now on my office floor, awaiting a new home. A few of her many Pyrex pie plates, some of them with her name written on tape across the bottom, will go into my kitchen, a few will go to a colleague who loves pie. Under the sofa now, a wooden dog, carved in Guam, and which I love for that association with my childhood there alone, apart from how it looks. My mother’s wedding portrait, of her in the dress she made for herself—I don’t know where I’ll hang it but it is remarkable. The set of metal bookends in the shape of a clipper ship as seen from the front, which held my books in my bedroom as a kid. Dustin found my pantsless Star Trek and Batman dolls, Batman still masked but unclothed, Kirk and Spock with no pants, and set them in the car. We hung her squirrel-proof bird feeder, which a bear took last night up the hill from our porch and which he tried in vain to empty, leaving it there in frustration. Dustin found it and hung it back up, and then he brought it in, on the advice of a friend who does the same to protect hers.

My mother laughed as I told her this story about the feeder and the bear over the phone today. I was sitting on a chair at a table that was in my front yard, and which only last week had been in her basement. I had been thinking how no one teaches you how to do this for your parents, and they should. Is this home economics also? Maybe it should be. Instead I said, “I learned so much helping you move.”

“Thank you,” she said, as if I was the one who had given something to her.

Tonight as of this writing, August 10, at 7pm, I will be in conversation online with the delightful Joseph Trinidad, author of “Lucky Creatures,” a mesmerizing and funny debut essay collection. Joseph is a young queer Filipino writer who now lives in New Zealand. I chose it for the Sarabande Books competition back in 2024 and now it is a Leap of Faith pick for the Loyalty Bookstore subscription box. Come jump in with us.

Last week and a few weeks previous I put up Part One and Part Two of my 2014 Tin House short story “Single Gay Uncle” here. It has never had a life online and I thought I’d bring it to the internets, as we used to say.

If you don’t want to eat food picked by prisoners or you are hoping to avoid food that has been identified as at the center of the cyclosporiasis outbreak or that is now also connected to a salmonella recall of its guacamole and salsa, here is an app for you.

When I write to you next, I’ll be at Bread Loaf.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee