A Living Remedy Quotes

“How do you learn to cherish yourself, your life, when grief has made it unrecognizable? I am starting to feel that we do so not by trying to fill a void that can never be filled but by living as best as we can in this strange, yawning terrain our loved ones have left behind, exploring its jagged boundaries and learning to see it as something new.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“He said he always felt that Dad loved people beyond their merits, a sentiment to which I could relate; while Dad and I sometimes disappointed each other, our love was never in question, and he usually thought better of me than I thought of myself.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“For me, grief is like waking up every day in a different house. I feel as though I ought to know my way around by now. I have been grieving for my father for more than 2 years but find that I am continually losing my bearings, struggling to learn the layout anew. I will walk through a door in my mind that I didn't even notice the day before, trip over a memory I've relived a thousand times, and it's as if I were seeing the space around me, breathing in this hushed loneliness, for the first time.

I try to talk to my husband and children about my mother but soon stop. It's too much of an effort. It feels forced. I have to explain so much before they can understand, and even then, there's no way for them to join me in the past. It's the same when I bring up my father or my grandmother. The three people who saw me through my childhood, who remember best what I was like as a baby and a little girl, are gone, and now I carry these stories and memories alone. Three deaths. One composite lump of grief.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“All the while, I keep daydreaming about walking into traffic. From the moment the thought pushes its way into my grief-muddled brain, I know that I could never act on it. It’s not that I want to hurt myself—it’s that I cannot seem to work up any remorse when I think about no longer being alive. Nor does the thought frighten me, as it always did before. What if you didn’t have to feel this way anymore? my mind proposes, in moments that are deceptively calm, moments when I am not sobbing in the shower or screaming in my car because I cannot scream at home. What if the pain could just end?”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“I am often reminded that this, too, is part of mourning: trying to find new joy where we can.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“I rarely stopped to think about what it meant that I was now far more comfortable in the rarefied air of campus than I had ever been in my hometown. Then I would fly back home and it would hit me anew, that cold prickle of awareness somewhere between my shoulder blades. I felt small and somehow trapped whenever I returned, as though I wouldn’t be allowed to leave, even though I was only a visitor now, the interloper I’d always looked like.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“I soon realized that being with Dan, whether we were talking or working in silence, was as effortless as being alone, if considerably more fun. I felt more like myself in his company, which was of course partly why I had been seeking it out so often.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“Beside my chair, our dog’s paws drag at the sand; these are the first holes she has ever dug, and now digging is her vocation. My kids giggle at her industriousness, though it’s clear that they are ready to no longer be sandy, to return to the house for showers and games and ice cream. As they begin rolling up their towels, folding up their chairs, I pull my phone out of my pocket and search for a poem I saved long ago: “What the Living Do,” by Marie Howe. I first encountered it when I was twenty-two, an age when I’d barely known grief, and was so moved by Howe’s words that I kept the poem to reread and eventually bought all of her books. Addressed to her brother John, who died of complications from AIDS, “What the Living Do” has always seemed to me a perfect expression of love, and loss, and what it means to survive. It’s been a few years since I last thought of it, but now that I need it, it’s waiting for me, as the best poems do.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“A country that first abandons and then condemns people without money who have the temerity to get sick, accusing them of causing their own deaths. It is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him. With”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“I think of those late-afternoon talks with her now that I have my own children, knowing that the days of both of them falling asleep in their rooms down the hall from mine are dwindling; that a time will come when something trivial or life changing will happen to them—they will be hurt, or caught by surprise, or find that they are happier than they have ever been—and I will not be the first person they tell. That might be why I sometimes let them stay up past bedtime chatting with me or getting silly with each other, why even the brightest moments on the best of days can crack my heart wide open.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“He needed access to quality health care in order to manage and treat his illnesses. He”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“He needed access to quality health care in order to manage and treat his illnesses. He needed it throughout his life, not only in his final years, when it was granted as a crisis response only after his kidneys had failed.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“Though my mother’s cancer was her trauma first and foremost, its aftershocks reverberated through my life as well. Her illness almost loomed larger in hindsight, because the initial jolt had faded, and in its place was a new awareness of my family’s vulnerability. I remember feeling less sure, less safe, as if anything could befall us now. I found it harder to relax, struggled to fall asleep at night. My greatest fear was losing my mother, my father, or both—to illness, fire, a car accident—and her cancer seemed to justify every anxiety I’d ever harbored.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“Perhaps it's no surprise that when they let me go, it was not with the grudging wonder of my father's family when they left Ohio, nor the secret shame of the birth parents who gave me up as a baby--they encouraged me because their priority was my happiness, even if the pursuit of it took me away from them. That they frequently saw promise where others might have seen only risk is something I cannot help but admire. Sometimes I wonder if being their child, a product of their choices and their faith if not their genes, is what made me believe that another life might be within my reach.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“Then I would fly back home and it would hit me anew, that could prickle of awareness somewhere between my shoulder blades. I felt small and somehow trapped whenever I returned, as though I wouldn't be allowed to leave, even though I was only a visitor now, the interloper I'd always looked like. My visits got shorter and shorter, and it was impossible to ignore the mingled guilt and relief I felt every time I boarded a flight headed east. Campus was where I had a life, a purpose, new ideas to absorb--where things were always changing, where no one stared at me when I entered a room, where I no longer questioned the fact that I belonged.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

“I have no doubt that my parents would have relished having more time as my primary family, the people I thought of as *home.* They could have chosen to disapprove of or resent me when I made choices that they did not anticipate, choices that kept me far away form them. But their love for me was never about ownership, or control, or whether I followed the path they expected. They were grateful that Dan and I had found each other, and they weren't afraid that we would struggle, because they themselves had not experienced a life free from struggle. *We're lucky,* my father said in his wedding toast, *to get to witness your love and commitment. We can't wait to see the life you'll build together.* They never saw me as choosing one kind of family over another, one dream or one life over another. They could not imagine a future in which I did not pursue everything I wanted.”
― Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir