Book review: ‘A Living Remedy,’ by Nicole Chung

Chung loses her father first, and from afar. Chung is a young mother of two children, living across the country when her dad declines into kidney disease and diabetes. She is unable to offer much financial or practical assistance, and he dies in his sleep with no opportunity for her to say goodbye. The pain of this abruptness is searing: “We don’t know the moment he took his last breath. … The time of death I read on the certificate is not the moment his life ended but the moment the paramedics had to give up. I will never know what really happened.” What closure Chung does receive is afforded through the ritual of the funeral, a small mercy.

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There is but a brief respite before Chung’s mother receives a cancer diagnosis. Before long, the coronavirus descends, cleaving Chung’s world in half: her husband and two young children on the East Coast; her dying mother on the West. Torn between her duties to her children and those to her mother, and assessing the risks of flying across the country in the height of the pandemic, Chung remains at home. Like her father, Chung’s mother dies before Chung has the chance to say goodbye, and it feels all too familiar: “I can’t tell you about her death, because I didn’t witness it.” This time, though, Chung cannot even attend the funeral in person. She reflects, “I had not realized that mourning in the known or expected way could also be a luxury, a privilege, one that might disappear in a moment.”

Chung’s grief is complicated by the realities of her adoption, of which she wrote poignantly in her first memoir, “All You Can Ever Know” (2018). Raised by White parents in largely White southern Oregon, Chung, who is Korean American, was accustomed to feeling different. But the loss of her parents drives home the idea that this is the end of their bloodline, because they have no biological children, and Chung’s own children are biologically connected to the birth parents who gave her up for adoption. “At some point you learn that the purpose of life, for most creatures on the planet, is to pass on their genes before they die,” she observes, “that this was the only form of immortality accessible to most of the living: we would die, but if we had children, and they had children, our genes, the essence of who we are and everything that makes us, would live on.” Then, the clincher: “Even back then, I remember thinking about how that wasn’t going to work out for my parents.”

Chung’s deeply personal story also highlights the shortcomings of health care in America. Her parents’ paychecks from myriad sequential jobs — from restaurant manager and respiratory therapist when she was growing up to, later, warehouse stocker and part-time bookkeeper — were only enough to carry them from health crisis to health crisis. Chung later finds out that they had to declare bankruptcy during her college years because of their earlier medical needs. Just before his death, Chung’s father was too sick to work, and her mother had been laid off. Out of health insurance, he was limited to medical care from under-resourced community health centers with sliding scales and long waiting lists. “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,” Chung writes.

Though terminal illness and death — like the pandemic — are often described as pat “equalizers,” Chung refuses to let society off that easily: “Sickness and grief throw wealthy and poor families alike into upheaval, but they do not transcend the gulfs between us, as some claim — if anything, they often magnify them. Who has the ability to make choices that others lack? Who is left to scramble for piecemeal solutions in an emergency?”

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Chung knows the answer all too well, and her call to action is particularly powerful because of it. The book begins and ends with chapters about Chung’s memories of her mother and their special connection. She reflects on leaving for college: “We would still belong to each other, but we would come to know one another differently in separation, in parting after parting.” This sense of belonging prevails even in the parting of death: “As long as I am here, I am still with her, keeping my vigil in the only way I can.” In this way, Chung offers comfort to the living — herself included — by reminding us that in our continued memory and love, the deceased can find a semblance of immortality even without genetic connection. In Marie Howe’s words: “I am living. I remember you.”

Qian Julie Wang is the author of the memoir “Beautiful Country” and a lawyer in New York.