Finding a way to cope with loss
In February, my cousin, Tou Fue, passed away from organ failure caused by a MRSA infection. My tij laug (a term for older brother in Hmong) was a good man with a contagious laugh, bad farmer’s tan, and chevron mustache. His sudden death was an unfathomable loss for my family.
I was away at school and studying for a midterm when my sister called to break the news. I remember her voice cracking over the phone as she told me he was gone. I couldn’t think of anything to say back to her. My tears just kept falling, soaking and blurring the ink on my study notes. When she hung up, I was alone and the loss felt dissonant: no one and nothing stopped to acknowledge his death — it was midnight and I still had to wake up early the next morning to sit for my exam.
Hmong funerals are busy, physically exhausting affairs that take place over three days. Hundreds of guests stream in, bringing “tshav ntuj” or sunshine money to help the family. During the three days, the male family members slaughter cows for the funeral meals, play the drums and qeej (a pipe instrument made out of bamboo), and recite funeral poems. Female family members prepare meals throughout the day for guests and often attend to the dressing and care of the loved one’s body. Even the children are employed to fold hundreds of paper money boats (yaj kuam yeej kuam), which will be burned at the burial site. Throughout the night, family members kneel at the feet of the casket to keep the loved one company as he prepares for his next journey alone.
I missed my tij laug’s funeral because of school. Part of me was relieved. I thought missing the funeral meant I could avoid the perfunctory rituals and, most of all, the terrible sadness.
Grief, however, has no expiration date and has often shown up when I least expected it. Several months after his passing, I was in Safeway buying food for a Yosemite trip. Without thinking, I typed his old landline into the PIN pad for the rewards. My tij laug gave my mom and me a copy of his rewards card decades ago. He had wanted to save my mom the trouble of filling out an application since she can’t read or write well. I eventually lost the card he gave us, but I kept on using his number at Safeway anyway. Walking back to the car with the groceries, I could see his name and point balance printed on my receipt. The sadness I had kept at bay rushed over me then. I realized he would never again use his points.
I found myself going into stores almost every day after that moment in Safeway. I would buy something cheap like a bag of chips and type in his phone number when prompted about a rewards card. I felt connected to my tij laug when his number worked — like I had found a digital remnant of him. In these moments, I tried to imagine what he might have bought at that particular store or what the new life he’d been reborn into was like.
I was afraid to tell anyone what I was doing for fear that it would come off as an odd, unhealthy attachment. This past week though, I ate dinner with a friend who lost her baby around the same time my tij laug passed. As we cried in the restaurant, I realized that we carry the burden of grief long after our lives have taken on a sense of normalcy again. The tshav ntuj money, the kneeling, and all of the religious customs I’d found perfunctory and avoided were meant to help structure the sadness. I had become lost without them. I hadn’t given myself a real moment to just cry or to talk about the loss of my tij laug without feeling apologetic. In that light, continuing to use my tij laub’s rewards card didn’t seem strange after all. On grief, we all have to find the rituals that allow us to remember the ones we’ve lost and to acknowledge the gaping ache that remains.
