Happy Birthday, Ma!

Today is a very important day for my family.  My mother would have turned 80.  She would have had a big birthday party with most of her children and grandchildren getting together to celebrate it with her.  Instead, we took my father and two brothers and their families to dinner tonight to think of our mom.

 For years, I had thought it’s a “strange” part of the American culture to celebrate birthdays of the deceased loved ones.  I see it all the time on the obituary pages, when people write poems and letters to their parents, spouses or children.  Some carry on the conversations as if they are giving family news to the one who has died.  I thought it was strange to talk about president Kennedy when he would have turned 70, or John Lennon when he would have turned 60.  Their photos were prominent on the newspapers, the photos taken of the year they died, young, handsome, famous and powerful.

“Wait a minute, are they kidding me, these men would not have looked the same now” I said to myself, imagining how they would  have looked in their sixties or seventies.  

I so unwisely thought we, as a society, should learn to “let go” of our loved ones who died.  Let the last chapter of their lives end, as it has ended, and stop celebrating their birthday since they no longer have a birthday. 

I now understand how beautiful is this part of our culture, to think and celebrate my mom’s birthday as she would have turned 80.  I woke up this morning and walked around the house looking at all her photos with my family.  I went to the kitchen and looked for the recipes she wrote in Vietnamese to show me how to make Vietnamese egg rolls or Indian Curry.  My mom was a fabulous cook, a true chef without formal training.  She could take out a few items from any refrigerator and, within minutes, think of some wonderful tasty dishes that she could make.  How many teaspoons of salt or soy sauce? How many cloves of garlic or what size of onion? 

“I don’t know, it’s up to your taste!”  She would tell me while she sprinkled the spices into the pot.  I wondered if she even thought how her dish probably tasted a little different every time she made it, depending how big or small the “dash” was.  All I remember is her dash of curry or hot pepper powder was never small.  Like my son, her taste for spicy food was so strong it often made our guests run to the faucets for water.  It gave our friends the joyful hot flashes the minute they took the first bite of her curry.

This past week, my family members sent each other emails about our mom.  My father, a very good poet, emailed us a poem he wrote for my mom, complete with attachments of her photo and a bench in a park full of autumn leaves.  I was so impressed by the beauty of his poem and could feel his nostalgia for the days my mom was still with us.  I was also impressed with his computer skill.  At 90, he mastered the technique of pairing his poems with sentimental Vietnamese music and sceneries of peaceful, beautiful places around the world.  I am so glad he has kept his mind very active since he has stopped playing tennis for several months now with his weak knees.  He still drives, cleans, cooks and takes care of himself.  If there is an afterlife, I am sure my mom was happy to see that all of us are doing well.  She also would know how important she is still to us.  As typical Asians, we don’t often tell our parents how much we love or care for them.  Our love might be unspoken but palpable, a meaningful love.

This past week, NPR had a series of interviews with religious leaders and a philosopher on the topic of life after death.  I was fortunate to listen to most of these interviews by Robert Siegel, ranging from Reverend Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical coalition, to Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and NewYork University philosophy professor Samuel Scheffler.  It was fascinated to hear different views on the “Afterlife” from these intelligent people.  I found my view somewhere between that of Dr. Scheffler who presented the secular view of the afterlife, and Dr. Gary Hall, the Dean of National Cathedral who beautifully recited a poem from Emily Dickinson stating that heaven might be there, but we don’t really know for sure and nobody should boast with authority that he knows the facts about the afterlife.  He can only hope and not promise that heaven will be there for us and our loved ones.  Dr. Hall, like a Zen master, advised us to “live the moment”.  As Dr. Scheffler, author of “Death and the Afterlife”, explained, just because we do not think that heaven exists should not diminish our intention of living a full life or lessen the purpose of our meaningful existence.

All that speculation aside, I know my mom would have been glad that I had a full day today, starting this morning with Dr. Marsha Seidelman at a Corcoran Gallery brunch hosted by Washington Post journalist Joe Yonan.  The delicious and beautiful vegan dishes were prepared by Todd Gray, whose wonderful cookbook “The New Jewish Table” was featured in several of my recipe blogs.  Dr. Seidelman will blog on our trip to the Corcoran later.  We walked out of our brunch to a beautiful autumn day, so beautiful that I had to put on my hot pink running shirt and shoes to do a 5 mile run shortly after I got home.  I got plenty of vitamin D, as I used to urge my mom to sit outside on a sunny day.

I can no longer “communicate” with my mom, but feel so connected to her on a beautiful day like today.  The cloudless, sunny blue sky and the golden hue of autumn was her kind of weather.  In the middle of my run, “Ruby Tuesday”, one of my favorite Rolling Stones’ songs, came on.  Ruby Tuesday, as I once told my friend Dr. Linda Yau, is not just a name of a chain restaurant; it’s a famous and meaningful song of the Rolling Stones from the sixties and seventies.  It reminds us to live for today, to inhale the world around us with every deep breath. 

“Yesterday don’t matter when it’s gone…

There’s no time to lose, I heard her say

Catch your dreams before they slip away

Dying all the time

Lose your dreams

And you will lose your mind. Ain’t life unkind”

Last night, I must have thought about my mom so much that I had the same dream I have had many times since my mother died.  My mom and I were in a bungalow somewhere where the sea was very calm.  We sat in the breakfast room, with her in a white shirt and sunglasses by her side.  We were chatting about all these mundane things about our lives as we looked out to the water.  We were peaceful and very happy.

This evening, at the Hong Kong Pearl restaurant in Falls Church,my father, my older brother Quan, younger brother Dat and his family, my next door neighbors Kelley and John’s three children, and my family were seated together around a big table.  We ordered all the items my mother used to love.  So much for the 5 mile run and the vegan brunch, I ate shrimp dumpling soup, special house fried rice, deep fried pork chops, lobster with ginger and scallions, roasted chicken Hong Kong style, Cantonese pan-fried seafood noodles, black pepper steak with green pepper, mushroom and mustard green in brown sauce, crab claws wrapped with shrimp balls, and of course, fried shrimp in batter with the heads on.  We drank Chrysanthemum tea and had yellow bean and tapioca pudding for dessert.  I don’t know which religious leader was right about heaven, but my mom would have been pleased with our selection of food.  The children were discussing how, scientifically, Lobster could be the only “immortal” species, as they only shed their shells but do not die.  My mom would have laughed at them, as they were eating lobsters and talking about lobster immortality. 

Like my mom, I ate most of the “bony” pieces of lobsters, saving the best ones for the children and other adults.  Like my mom, I am the “official left over” consumer in our family.  We think our children never listen to our preaching or never watch how we live our lives, but they do.  Today, while the musicians were singing, Marsha and I watched the wise quotes flashing on the screen behind them.  One of the quotes was “ Mothers should not make so many sacrifices”.  That would be a hard task for mothers to follow! 

As we drove home, the almost full moon was shining at us from the dark sky and David pointed it out to the children, as he and I were talking about how much fun my mom would have had tonight.  I suddenly understood the meaning of the word “immortality”.  David was right, for us humans and mothers, immortality doesn’t have to be like a lobster.  Immortality is what we leave behind, our essence and not our existence.  We exist as long as someone, somewhere, is thinking about us.  It’s a more meaningful way of understanding immortality.  When we listen to John Lennon singing “Imagine”, he is, in essence, immortal. 

Happy Birthday, Ma!